Comment by robenkleene

Comment by robenkleene 2 days ago

2 replies

> I strongly get the impression that the difference has a lot more to do with the programmers than their programming language.

The problem with this perspective is that anyone who works on more niche programming areas knows the vast majority of programming discussion online aren't relevant to them. E.g., I've done macOS/iOS programming most of my career, and I now do work that's an order of magnitude more niche than that, and I commonly see programmers saying thing like "you shouldn't use a debugger", which is a statement that I can't imagine a macOS or iOS programmer saying (don't get me wrong they're probably out there, I've just never met or encountered one). So you just become use to most programming conversations being irrelevant to your work.

So of course the majority of AI conversations aren't relevant to your work either, because that's the expectation.

I think a lot of these conversations are two people with wildly different contexts trying to communicate, which is just pointless. Really we just shouldn't be trying to participate in these conversations (the more niche programmers that is), because there's just not enough shared context to make communication effective.

We just all happen to fall under this same umbrella of "programming", which gives the illusion of a shared context. It's true there's some things that are relevant across the field (it's all just variables, loops, and conditionals), but many of the other details aren't universal, so it's silly to talk about them without first understanding the full context around the other persons work.

hn_throwaway_99 2 days ago

> and I commonly see programmers saying thing like "you shouldn't use a debugger"

Sorry, but who TF says that? This is actually not something I hear commonly, and if it were, I would just discount this person's opinion outright unless there were some other special context here. I do a lot of web programming (Node, Java, Python primarily) and if someone told me "you shouldn't use a debugger" in those domains I would question their competence.