They were when we called them 4GLs.

You mean things like Ruby, Python, Java, SQL that are ubiquitous today?

Yeah but the hype was that the user would become the programmer and programmers wouldn’t be needed anymore.

Well theres a lot less assembly workers, and that tech is now everywhere. Seems like exactly what will happen with AI

In absolute numbers I’m not sure that’s true. But 4GLs aren’t what replaced assembly for anyone. C, C++ and Pascal were the most common assembly replacements.

As for C and C++, there definitely aren’t fewer of them in absolute terms. And even in relative terms they are still incredibly popular.

All of that is beside the point though. The hype around 4GLs wasn’t that they would replace older programming languages. The hype was that they’d replace programming as a profession in general. You wouldn’t need programming specialists because domain experts could handle programming the computer themselves.

This is exactly the same hype around AI coding.

It's a great looking site. I'll keep it in mind once I use up more of the ink I already have!

Thank you! I can relate...buying too much ink is what got me into this mess in the first place :-D.

Guildenstern: No, no, no — what you've been is not on boats.

I read this play for the first time last week and this exchange really stuck with me.

The brain perceives amber as a "bright" color that contrasts well with black, without the headaches that come from staring at white light for hours.

Activision bought Infocom in 1986, and Microsoft purchased Activision in 2023.

I agree so much with this. I used Replit extensively to prototype things in different languages and share my work with my teammates, who could then suggest tweaks to my ideas. We never came close to the limits of the free tier, but I paid for it anyway because I loved the product.

The magic is definitely gone.

FWIW you can still start from template environments by going to "Developer Frameworks," picking an example language, and clicking "Remix."

It's not as nice as before though. I miss when free accounts could have unlimited projects.

I'm coming up on 50 years old, with 26 years in this industry. I work as an engineering manager/director these days. I've worked at startups and bigger companies -- they all have their problems and neither is better. I'm sick of layoffs. I'm sick of hype cycles. Honestly I'm ready for a career change but it would be a huge pay cut and lifestyle change for our family.

I love it! I did something similar at my last job that ran when you cd'ed into a directory

Can I control those robots using VR?

No. The VR revolution will never come.

Correct. The GitHub Action was doing

`git pull origin ${{ github.head_ref || github.ref }}`

In the pull_request_target action, $github.ref is the name of the branch, which in this case included a curl request for a shell script, a pipe character, and bash.