Steve Jobs, in 1995: “Everybody should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think”.
–THE SUPER SARCASTIC BEGINNING–
Hello there, I’m Yunus and I have surprising news for you!
You don’t need to learn to write code, nor should you learn any programming, computer science, not even mathematics!
Not even that! Generative AI can do all your biology, chemistry, physics, literature, language homeworks for you without asking why!
Stop learning new things!
All are in the past now!
Why? Because we have ChatGPT!
…which is a super-powerful LLM that can do EVERYTHING FOR US.
It is maybe… even a new god if not more than that. From now on, you should only focus on your dopamine overdose and self-destructive addictions and forever be happy!
Hurray! (subscribe to my TikTok for more sweet copium)
Finally, we have reached a level of superintelligence in the generative AI field, that NO ONE HAS TO LEARN anymore.
We finally did it!
You don’t need to learn to write with a pen, you have a keyboard and soon will have a chip in your brain that does all the thinking for you.
You don’t need to smile, because soon we will transfer our thoughts from one human to another by simply triggering a thought and the chip will do the rest for us. This chip is said to have a new super DSP unit in it! Wow, amazing!
No more boring school! No more using the ugly brain! Hurray!
I couldn’t be happier, let’s celebrate this new super-human era with a wonderful app I just made:
EatShitSleep© -Available on all platforms.
My teacher at the University of Copium gave me a term project where I had to get an Arduino Uno, write C++ for it, and turn LEDs in a sequence while triggering the buzzer to play Beethoven.
It is so funny that I thought those programmers were smart. They will all be GONE, very soon!
I am so smart that I prompted ChatGPT to write the code for my homework and it did it in the FIRST TRY! Can you believe it? Amazing!
I bet all the programmers in the world are doing basic loops and getting paid big bucks! I knew they were lame!
Now my teacher thinks I know how to write Arduino C++ to do the job, but actually, I don’t even know what a “program” really means! I am a genius!
Those universities are funny to me! I am smarter than their barriers!
I will spend the rest of my life watching football and eating potato chips!
When I finish my studies, everyone will think I know a lot, but I WON’T EVEN KNOW MY OWN NAME!
My mom will be so proud of me, if not tell everyone about how smart I am!
–END OF THE SARCASTIC RABBIT HOLE–
Jokes aside, I believe you get the idea here. Have you seen how people reacted to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s speech? If you haven’t seen that, let me give you a summary of the key points people were talking about. He somewhat said: “Everyone on this stage for the last 10-15 years would tell you to learn to code, not anymore. Everyone will be a programmer now. Do other fields, we will automate the thing”.
At first, I thought it was a joke. Then I realized Huang was a marketing genius. He does what he does for the sake of the “brand”. Even though it made me dislike his opinions, the trigger to this article was the people’s reactions. I’ve read tons on comments on YouTube, Instagram and X about the video. Everyone seemed very much happy. They were cheering, laughing at software developers, and what not. As a computer nerd, it hurt me honestly, but not just because they were wrong, because I didn’t expect this much ignorance in the tech world.
I even read comments of “developers” who were terrified and totally believed the reactions and started talking about switching fields, in a panic mode, one after the other…
I couldn’t believe the amount of ignorance I was reading on the screen. It must have been a bad joke… Nope, all real. Patrick Star is proud of you.
If you are new to the field, you may ask, “so what? What they say seems logical to me”. Well, let me assure you, since the ancient computer-era times, people “killed” coding every once in a while, only to end up crying about it when they learned the truth, sometimes refusing to accept it.
I may be a 2000s kid, but I do my research. In the early 80s, software like today’s Microsoft Excel started to go public and gained attention in the market. Since then (been 40+ years!) people started to talk about why “programming was dead”.
Today, even more people (in the IT world) think coding is obsolete.
Why? Because their only experience is with basic-level algorithms.
I’ve read an article of developer who has been in the field for over 20 years, saying that he used to work on deep learning and neural networks in the 90s and now he knows that human-written code will soon be gone, because of A and B and C…
The fact that he has experience, doesn’t mean he knows what he is talking about inherently.
There have been many people in many fields, who terribly failed at guessing the “next big thing”. They were considered experts, if not pioneers.
Did you know that we actually made flying cars and jetpacks? Yes, there are a few in very rich cities used for very specific purposes.
Why don’t you buy a flying car then? (Assuming you can afford it).
Not every fantasy is realistic, nor logical.
I’d like to remind what Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, therefore ChatGPT said: “Learning to code was great, as a way to learn how to think. Coding will still be important in the future.”
It is very rare to find an expert in computer science and ML, who is actively writing software in code, and say “coding will be gone”. The people you see saying it will be obsolete, are the ones who are very far away from writing actual computer code, and are working directly on theorems, mostly not even creating those theorems, but rather doing research on existing ones. Even though I would expect them to have a better understanding of fundamental logic, some have serious gaps in their thought process, which is so evident that their thought chains are total paradoxes.
It is evident that computer science will change a lot.
There is no denying in that.
I assume we will see whole new ways of writing logic, implementing instructions, therefore, writing code.
Is there a possibility that we will completely get rid of C-based languages?
No.
The existing codebase is infinitely huge.
It is not safe for any neural network to work on most of the critical codebases in most fields.
Will there be no more new codebases in that sense?
Not completely, maybe most of them won’t use the same approach.
The relationship between existing structures and emerging ones are not simple and can not be replaced easily, nor they should be replaced most times.
Most people don’t know how to think. The mathematics education is terrible almost everywhere, logic is always thought of something to memorize and pass the exam, therefore it is normal for most people to have no idea about how coding works, even most programmers don’t know how things work.
When you read or talk to an “expert” in a mathematical or engineering field, don’t always expect them to think critically. Most humans lack fundamental logic so much, that even the ones you expect to teach you, can lack them.
Let’s go back to the title of this article and think again.
“Don’t Learn to Code, use Natural Language Instead”.
Do you know why you can never replace symbols with natural language?
Because we invented symbols, so that we can communicate better, preventing confusion about words or expressions we normally use.
Have you ever tried rewriting summation in natural language and did your best to be very precise?
You may think you did a good job, but the moment I bring a hundred people and ask them what they understand, you will realize it is impossible to explain only by using natural language.
Coding isn’t just about creating software applications and making people use them to solve their problems. Coding is about understanding the problems, their possible solutions, consideration of resources and what needs to be done, and sometimes even understanding if something should be done in the first place.
Mathematics is not about memorizing formulas and applying them to practical applications. It is about understanding the universe with symbols, which we would not be able to do with our natural thoughts and communication skills.
The software and computer world will change a lot. Maybe so fast that I won’t believe my own eyes.
The ways we write 90% of the code will change.
One thing will never change:
The reasons behind the history of computing, why we did what we did, and the very fundamentals, the ones everyone forgot about, but that never changed, and will never completely change, but only evolve.
Keep on writing computer programs, keep on solving mathematical problems, keep on thinking, use logic in every aspect of your lives,
and remember, Python is running on an engine written in C, some neural networks are implemented in C++, and computer vision is too.
Say, what happened to the “this is the end of C” ? 🙂
-Yunus Emre Vurgun