David Gewirtz explores ChatGPT's ability to write code in 12 popular programming languages, including Java, Python, and Rust, by having it generate a program that outputs a time-based greeting and a looped 'Hello, world!' message. The exercise highlights ChatGPT's strengths and limitations in coding, emphasizing the importance of testing AI-generated code. While ChatGPT generally performs well, it occasionally lacks syntax coloring for less common languages like Scala and Forth, underscoring the need for human oversight in AI-assisted programming.
The author, a software company co-founder, reflects on the traditional growth-focused metrics in the tech industry and questions their relevance in the face of global challenges like climate change. Inspired by David Fleming's book "Lean Logic," the author considers the concept of resilience—defined as a system's ability to cope with shock—as a more fitting goal than growth. The article explores the idea of an analytics platform that measures resilience through community and non-transactional activities, but acknowledges the difficulty in quantifying such metrics. Ultimately, the author concludes that true resilience cannot be captured by data alone and requires genuine human interaction and problem-solving.
Retool's Ryan Lucas has written a history of Visual Basic, detailing how it became the world's most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development. At its peak, Visual Basic had nearly 3.5 million developers worldwide. Many of the innovations that Alan Cooper and Scott Ferguson's teams introduced 30 years ago with VB are nowhere to be found in modern development, fueling a nostalgic fondness for the ease and magic VB delivered that we have yet to rekindle.
