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Comment by CGMthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

I'm picturing COBOL developers in the 80s saying the same thing about modern developers today (without even bringing in AI).

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Higher level abstractions are built on rational foundations, that is the distinction. I may not understand byte code generated by a compiler, but I could research the compiler and understand how it is generated. No matter how much I study a language model I will never understand how it chose to generate any particular output.

COBOL developers may have claimed that higher-level language developers didn't understand what was happening under the hood. However, they never suggested those developers couldn't understand the high-level code itself (what's going on here)—only what lay beneath it.

But COBOL developers resisted modern tooling. A coworker of mine tells the story of when he was working alongside an old mainframe hand more than 25 years ago, and was trying to explain to him how modern IDEs work. The mainframe guy gave him a disdainful look and said "That ain't how computing is done, kid."

Now what the guys above the programmers' paygrade knew was that the aim of software development wasn't really code, it was value delivered to customer. If 300k lines if AI slop deliver that value quickly, they can be worth much more than the 20k lines of beautiful human-written code.

I would wager that using a fully fledged IDE has limited to no correlation with developer productivity across the entire industry

I'd suspect folk with a terminal first approach probably have much stronger understandings of what is going on under the hood which makes approaching new repositories a lot easier if nothing else.

Alternatively, maybe folk who're exposed to more codebases are the best off.

Or combine the two for wizard.

By "modern IDE" I meant something like Turbo Pascal, as compared with the (at best) ISPF-based editor the mainframe guy was using. This took place in the early 90s.

COBOL guy has a point. Novel writers didn't get any better when they switched from the typewriter to ms word.

https://www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html

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