Is this a survey?

Posted Aug 19, 2025 13:23 UTC (Tue) by Otus (subscriber, #67685)
In reply to: Is this a survey? by rweikusat2
Parent article: The State of Python 2025

> Driving is vastly simpler than programming, as evidenced by the fact that much more people can do the former than people who can do the latter. Hence, the chances that the 'technologly' which couldn't do the former can certainly do the latter are exceedingly slim despite there are truckloads of thoroughly clueless people who believe "programming" is about memorizing some 20 - 30 odd syntax rules, a terrible burden they hope to be relieved from by "AI" so that they can henceforth just yell gibberish at a computer and it'll magically do what they couldn't express.

The two domains are completely different. You can't fail at driving 10% or even 1% of the time without huge problems. But if you get good code 90% of the time you can work with that. (Sounds better than some developers I've worked with.)

That's not to say that you should use AI coding agents. I'm sceptical they offer much of a productivity benefit for production code yet. But getting five nines (or whatever) of reliability is crucial for driving in traffic, but not for writing code. One is an online task that has to happen real time, the other you can apply any number of checks you want to before actually using it.

Is this a survey?

Posted Aug 20, 2025 9:10 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

I think most people have failed at driving by taking a wrong turn, failing to park inside a narrow spot, occasionally exceeding speed limits and all sort of things.