At the risk of being a bit of a douchebag, it seems like nearly every tech opinion piece I read now boils down to "things used to be hard but they aren't anymore because LLMs can understand things faster than we can, so can ignore/change fundamentals!"
I didn't really find the argument convincing the first time and I don't really find it convincing now.
That said, with regards to macros, I actually do agree that the fear against them is broadly overblown. I have seen scary terrible horrifying macro soup in Clojure, but that has generally been outlier cases. Something like core.async abuses the hell out of macros, and despite that I think it very often increases readability and understanding of the language.
> it seems like nearly every tech opinion piece I read now boils down to "things used to be hard but they aren't anymore because LLMs can understand things faster than we can, so can ignore/change fundamentals!"
Sure, LLM coding agents being capable doesn't mean we can ignore fundamentals.
But LLM coding agents surely adjust the cost/benefit considerations for all kinds of programming efforts.
Arranging your code in such a way that it's so complicated you need an LLM to understand it is surely silly.
Using an LLM to write a macro because you weren't going to learn how to write macros and deal with all the subtle cases? I think that's arguable.
tombert · · focus · HN ↗
I didn't really find the argument convincing the first time and I don't really find it convincing now.
That said, with regards to macros, I actually do agree that the fear against them is broadly overblown. I have seen scary terrible horrifying macro soup in Clojure, but that has generally been outlier cases. Something like core.async abuses the hell out of macros, and despite that I think it very often increases readability and understanding of the language.
rgoulter · · focus · HN ↗
Sure, LLM coding agents being capable doesn't mean we can ignore fundamentals.
But LLM coding agents surely adjust the cost/benefit considerations for all kinds of programming efforts.
Arranging your code in such a way that it's so complicated you need an LLM to understand it is surely silly.
Using an LLM to write a macro because you weren't going to learn how to write macros and deal with all the subtle cases? I think that's arguable.