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jr conlin —〰—

@lettosprey

Several old Devs gathered around a poorly lit table in a run down bar near the edge of the Wastelands.

With a voice that speaks of the scars of long fought battles one Dev breaks the silence: "There were... programming languages written in XML. You had things like <If condition="something"> ... </if>"

The Dev begins to sob and retract into a fetal position as they mumble something about function returns and binary interface layers. The rest just pour themselves another round.

4 comments
Lett Osprey

@jrconlin I may be harming myself here, but JSTL (JSP Standard Template Library) was an example, and given what the alternative was at that time, it was kinda refreshing. You only used it to handle view logic, getting "beans" from the "actual business layer code". The "language-as-xml" code was just to render HTML.

The alternative had been a mix of c-line languages hidden in <? ?> tags mixed with HTML. That was a nightmare.

The other was ColdFusion that I think initially lacked the separation view / business layer and that would be a bit more of a nightmare. Once the Enterprise Java spec came with the taglibs, ColdFusion could more or less be written as a JSP taglib, and that is the path it took, and got the same separation possibility. That all got bought by Macromedia or something. The flash people. Evil stuff.

It was not as cool as doing REST calls from the browser and just doing everything in the client, but that was not a thing at that point :P

@jrconlin I may be harming myself here, but JSTL (JSP Standard Template Library) was an example, and given what the alternative was at that time, it was kinda refreshing. You only used it to handle view logic, getting "beans" from the "actual business layer code". The "language-as-xml" code was just to render HTML.

jr conlin —〰—

@lettosprey

Oh, yeah. There's good case for having separation of flows and having business logic apart from display logic (MVC FTW and all)

The horrifying thing was seeing XML programming being used for business logic. And someone trying to work out how to do bit twiddling for network layer stuff by converting to strings and string functions.

I mean, +1 on creativity and thinking outside the box and all, but... <endless screaming into the void>

jr conlin —〰—

@lettosprey
Bringing things back to your main point, that's also my fear about AI "coding". Is it possible to use ML to construct efficient, well structured, safe code? Possibly, yes. Could it be done before the heat death of the universe? Maybe.

Would I still trust it without review and rigorous, adversarial testing? Hell no. AI doesn't get special treatment.

Lett Osprey

@jrconlin but, who is there to review the code, when no one understands?

This brings to mind a job ad that popped up while I read online newspaper, I guess it deemed it relevant for me as it was a IT "developer" job. The ad was for a "no code / low code" position, where "ChatGPT and similar tools" would be use to write "software without the need to write code"

The job ad specified that since you did not actually write code, you did not really need to be a coder.

I am not actually sure WHAT they wanted people to know.

Surely, this was some crap popup company that would go away in no time.

No.

IT WAS THE TAX AUTHORITIES!

I did not have time to find a void to scream into, there was no time.

Am I concerned? Am I scared? YES.

But there is also the off chance that I will not need to pay taxes next year because no one knows anything about what anyone owes and it is years until it is repaired, so who knows, it might work out ok.

(no, seriously, I enjoy public health care)

@jrconlin but, who is there to review the code, when no one understands?

This brings to mind a job ad that popped up while I read online newspaper, I guess it deemed it relevant for me as it was a IT "developer" job. The ad was for a "no code / low code" position, where "ChatGPT and similar tools" would be use to write "software without the need to write code"

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