I remember this was a holy war amongst programmers (even myself!) - readability OR performance.
With tools like ChatGPT - we can have both readability AND performance, right??
Or am I missing something?
With tools like ChatGPT - we can have both readability AND performance, right??
Or am I missing something?
While I'll cop to being more skeptical than the average HN denizen about ChatGPT, this isn't actually cynicism about ChatGPT, but about human cognition. If we do have something that produced large swathes of mostly correct code, it won't be long before the humans using it aren't even checking it anymore. Same reason that cars can do a little bit of assisting, and if they could do 100% of the driving that might be safe, but 98% of the driving is not a very good idea at all.
In 20 years, someone will ask CodeGPT 8.3 to explain what some code does, and it'll give a perfectly understandable explanation back, except the human still won't understand it because the human doesn't actually understand how computers work anymore. They'll think they understand it, though.
The problem is that they've chosen a micro benchmark for this argument. The toy-est of toy problems. Yes, you have to make tradeoffs in these cases, but toy problems aren't really a good communication medium. If you want to process a thousand records of data in a decent amount of time, there are lots of strategies that move you toward achieving both.
I've not seen anyone seriously attempting to benchmark chatgpt output, without heavily cherry picking it first.