Hacker News Reader

Compare to what happened to Python. That will cheer you up!

Hey, at least python is now extremely consistent: it's an unpleasant tarpit regardless of whether it's human or AI generated. Ruby, too, rip my native programming language.

I remember in the pre-AI era I was doing a quick sample contract employment with a company that had >200 columns in their user table and was manually enumerating them in every query, multiple times. They were using SELECT $1,$2,...$184,$185 from tablename with an enormous list of columns referenced only by offset. That's not python's fault, but I've weirdly seen it more often in python codebases.

That's a different tarpit. That's the problem with object-relation mapping, which is trying to deal with the mismatch between structs in languages and rows in SQL. There are a huge number of such schemes, and they range from somewhat annoying to awful. They're bad across a broad range of programming languages.

This is an area where LLMs might actually help. Or make things worse. We'll have to see.

I think the difference I see is with things like Prisma, where there's a type system to lean on and proper nomenclature, or Rails which, despite all the magic, more or less maps columns straightforwardly based on the labels instead of having to $123 and later in the file ensure that $123 is what you think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com