The terminology is used to talk about languages that have async and sync functions where you declare (or color) the function as either async or sync.
In these languages it's pretty common for the language to enforce a constraint that async functions can only call other async functions. Javascript / Typescript, Python are popular examples of languages with colored functions.
In the author's own analogy of blacksmithing and metallurgy, I see an interesting parallel.
Humans worked metal for a long time and you can make better and better forges without knowing the metallurgy of why the result is better. If I make the fire hotter the metal comes out better, and I can get to work making forges that produce hotter and hotter fire.
LLMs could in this analogy be the forge. We can make them bigger and bigger and get better and better answers out, in the same way a pre-metallurgy human could make their forges hotter and hotter and get better and better metal out.
But the hottest forge doesn't mean you get metallurgy.
Just to emphasize this as someone that's worked in Elixir professionally for a decade now.
It really is that easy. The interoperability between Erlang and Elixir is fantastic and the communities get along well. There has been a long time push from many of the thought leaders that BEAM (the VM that Erlang and Elixir run on) should be a community regardless of language. That way we can share resources.
When I first learned Elixir I spent all my time in Elixir. Erlang has a lot of nice libraries though, so it wasn't uncommon back when I started to reach for one.
It was a pretty gentle learning curve, you can write Elixir with no knowledge of Erlang at all. You can consume Erlang libraries from Elixir with no knowledge of Erlang at all. Then if you are like me, you are curious about how something works and you go read some library code and it's a bit odd but you can mostly get the gist of it. Then over time reading Erlang is easy enough, the prolog inspired syntax is the hardest hurdle to get over, but then you realize how much Erlang and Elixir have in common.
Waiting for your child to come home from a particularly difficult day of kindergarten
"He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him! I'll chase him 'round the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round perdition's flames before I give him up!"
It's the same thing they tried to sell with low/no-code.
The problem is that the engineer turning what you want into code isn't normally the bottleneck. I would say about 50% of my job is helping people specify what they want sufficiently for someone to implement.
Non-technical people are used to a world of squishy definition where you can tell someone to do something and they will fill in the blanks and it all works out fine.
The problem with successful software is that the users are going to do all the weird things. All the things the manager didn't think about when they were dreaming up their happy path. They are going to try to update the startTime to the past, or to next year and then back to next week. They are going to get their account into some weird state and click the button you didn't think they could. And this is just the users that are trying to use the site without trying to intentionally break it.
I think if managers try to LLM up their dreams it'll go about as well as low/no-code. They will probably be able to get a bit further because the LLM will be willing to bolt on feature after feature and bug fix after bug fix until they realize they've just been piling up bandaids.
I am cautiously optimistic that there will be a thriving market for skilled engineers to come in and fix these things.
I'm holding out hope for https://www.slate.auto/en I know it's somehow associated with Amazon, is it going to be a cloud-connected privacy nightmare. I haven't heard anything about it, but I also wouldn't be surprised.
Until you have a cheap and effective robot butler. I also used to hate folding clothes, and then I got one of those folding boards that you see sometimes at clothing stores. (One of these things https://www.walmart.com/ip/BoxLegend-T-shirt-Folding-Board-T...)
Honestly a game changer. Sounds stupid, but there's just something very satisfying about being able to quickly fold a bunch of clothes and get very nice results.
And if we get humanoid robots at some point, they can use them too.
The terminology is used to talk about languages that have async and sync functions where you declare (or color) the function as either async or sync.
In these languages it's pretty common for the language to enforce a constraint that async functions can only call other async functions. Javascript / Typescript, Python are popular examples of languages with colored functions.
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