I used chat gpt to explain what a complex line in a bash script was doing. Though to be fair if I'd spent a day in man pages and Google I'd probably have learned a lot more than just being given the answer.
Which makes think in the long run gpt may result in worse programmers.
In the same way as Stack Overflow has resulted in worse programmers, at least in some senses.
I don’t mean to bash on SO, it’s really valuable sometimes. But corporate culture (faster is always better) and a new breed of programmers that don’t really care, have left us with a big part of the profession that are unable to produce anything new, or solve any unique problems.
And a generation before that, it was VB and (early) PHP programmers that earned that critique.
It does feel like the proportions might be changing and the quality of software is trending downward, but I think you have it right that the risk of programmers being too "GPT-reliant" is the continuation of a long, intergenerational pattern.
this is one of my BIGGEST frustrations learning to program. i do...not...want....to go online to work out hooow to do something. I want a "manual" - written well...that i can study and find the write tools to use...which for example (Pythons docs...are not...at least for beginners) - i then want to use the tools in said manual....to create. With the syntax, and the words you've defined oh so well in said manual. But...as the language grows...we'll just have to live with this never happening :)
this is something i get jealous of older programmers who grew up on old computers, with printed manuals...when languages were smaller, and the scope of programs were also smaller...and didnt require external libraries.
Books are still written, and there are quite a few online courses, and some of them aren't bad. I've learned that to be productive in a new language or framework I really need to dive into some of those resources. The manuals you find online are rarely good enough to learn from, and all the tutorials and "getting started" just scratches enough on the surface to make me frustrated.
Programs were smaller with less expectations on them. Users were few and forcily clustered near the computer system. Attackers were limited and computer security was physical access control security.
Now, it is kinda expected that programs support "text" - non-lgc alphabets, context-sensitive collations, ligatures and cursive text, mixed bidirectional text, combining characters, input method support, locale-dependent string interpolation logic.
And one doen't simply handle all of that, not without bolting something else in your program that is probably larger that your program.
And that isn't even instants in time; those are much harder to handle correctly all the time.
I’d say that we are programming on a higher level of abstraction today, so the programs do in some senses do more, but the size of the code we wrote then and now, and the complexities are of the same order of magnitude.
What's better: spending a day figuring out a single line of a complex Bash script, or spending that same day learning literally 100x more because you didn't have to waste that much effort on each individual thing?
For me, the alternative to using ChatGPT to figure some weird piece of Bash trivial out isn't doing the work myself, meticulously and at great length. It's losing interest and not figuring that thing out at all.
Losing interest and not figuring it out at all has been my approach to nontrivial bash. I'm not a UNIX philosophy fan in general, but trying to bea programming language and also a UI, all in one, is a bit much. It's ok-ish as a UI for cases where GUI doesn't work or you want a machine to be able to use the UI, but as a language it's missing a lot of stuff.
