I'm curious on how much of this is basically overcome by the new tools? As much as vibe coding annoys me, I can't argue against how good autocomplete from these LLMs can be.
Very human of us to spend billions of dollars and tons of electricity to bang our programming languages into shape since sane syntax is slightly uncomfortable the first 10 minutes you work with it.
I believe there are some strongly typed stack based languages where you really always do have something very close to a syntactically correct program as you type. But now that LLMs exist to paper over our awful intuitions, we're stuck with bad syntax like python forever.
On one level, I do prefer my code to be readable left to right and top to bottom. This, typically, means the big "narrative" functions up top and any supporting functions will come after they were used. Ideally, you could read those as "details" after you have understood the overall flow.
On another level, though, it isn't like this is how most things are done. Yes, you want a general flow that makes sense in one direction through text. But this often has major compromises and is not the norm. Directly to programming, trying to make things context free is just not something that works in life.
Directly to this discussion, I'm just not sure how much I care about small context-free parts of the code?
Tangential to this discussion, I oddly hate comprehensions in python. I have yet to get where I can type those directly. And, though I'm asking if LLM tools are making this OBE, I don't use those myself. :(
So far any "autocomplete" from an LLM has only served to insanely disrupt my screen with fourtey lines of irrelevant nonesense that cannot be turned off (the "don't suggest multiline autocompletes" option does not prevent LLM autocomplete from doing so) and has only served to be less useful than non-LLM based autocompletes were, which I was massively impressed with, because it was hyperlocal and didn't pretend that the niche code I'm writing is probably identical to whatever google or microsoft writes internally.
I've had some minor success with claude, but enabling the AI plugin in intellij has literally made my experience worse, even without using any AI interactions.
