Of course but presumably on occasion you do work in other languages? I work in all kinds of languages and so jumping between them it’s pretty handy to bridge the gap.

If I were jumping languages a lot, I definitely think it would be helpful. But pretty much 100% of what I’ve done for the last 3-4 years is Go (mostly) or JavaScript (occasionally). I have used chatgpt the few times I needed to work in some other language, but that has been pretty rare.

I think you could definitely still get value out of generating simple stuff though, at least for me it really helps get projects done quickly without burning myself out

If simple stuff == for loops and basic boilerplate, the kind of stuff that copilot can autocomplete, I write that on autopilot and it doesn’t really register. So it doesn’t contribute to my burnout. If simple stuff == boring, boilerplate tests, I’ll admit that I don’t do nearly enough of that. But doing the ‘prompt engineering’ to get copilot to write that wasn’t any less painful that writing it myself.

For small one off scripts it makes them actually save more time than they take to write

The other day I wrote a duplicate image detector for my sister (files recovered from a dying drive). In hindsight I could have asked chatgpt to do it. But it was something I’ve never done before and an interesting problem so it was more fun to do it myself. And most of the one off stuff I’m asked to do by coworkers is tied to our code and our system and not the kind of thing chatgpt would know how to do.

func randomRGB(uid int) color.RGBA {
	b := binary.BigEndian.AppendUint64(nil, uint64(uid))
	h := sha256.Sum256(b)
	return color.RGBA{h[0], h[1], h[2], 255}
}

That took me under three minutes and half of that was remembering that RGBA is in the color package, not the image package, and uint-to-bits is in the binary package, not the math package. I have found chatgpt useful when I was working in a different language. But trying to get chatgpt or copilot to write tests or documentation for me (the kind of work that bores me to death), doing the prompt engineering to get it to spit out something useful was more work than just writing the tests/documentation myself. Except for the time when I needed to write about 100 tests that were all nearly the same. In that case, using chatgpt was worth it.

If I’ve been working in the same language for at least a year or two, I don’t have to look up any of that. Copilot might be actually helpful if I’m working in a language I’m not used to, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had to look up syntax or functions (excluding 3rd party packages) for the language I work in.

I won’t say copilot is completely useless for code. I will say that it’s near useless for me. The kind of code that it’s good at writing is the kind of code that I can write in my sleep. When I write a for-loop to iterate over an array and print it out (for example), it takes near zero brain power. I’m on autopilot, like driving to work. On the other hand, when I was trialing copilot I’d have to check each suggestion it made to verify that it wasn’t giving me garbage. Verifying copilot’s suggestions takes a lot more brain power than just writing it myself. And the difference in time is minimal. It doesn’t take me much longer to write it myself than it does to validate copilot’s work.

My comment game has gotten far better since I started doing live code reviews. Essentially I ask myself, “Would I feel the need to explain this to someone during a code review?” and if the answer is yes I add a comment.

That’s a hot take. If you want your code to be maintainable at all, it needs comments. If you’re part of a team, write comments for them. If someone else may take over your project after you move on, leave comments for them. And have you ever tried to read uncommented code you wrote a year ago? Leave comments for yourself.

The key difference is that compilers don’t fuck up, outside of the very rare compiler bug. LLMs do fuck up, quite often.

Copilot frequently produces results that need to be fixed. Compilers don’t do that. Anyone who uses copilot to generate code without understanding how that code works is a shit developer. The same is true of anyone who copies from stack overflow/etc without understanding what they’re copying.

It’s not just about learning a language. Given two equivalent languages, writing a project using one or the other is always going to be less work and less of a maintenance burden than writing it using both. A competent manager will take that into account when deciding what tools to use. On top of that, learning a new language has a cost. Of course Rust and JavaScript are not equivalent, but which one is ‘better’ is highly subjective and dependent on how you measure ‘better’. So a manager needs to take that into account. But my fundamental point is that using two languages for a project adds overhead, and learning a language adds overhead, so unless cost (including time) is irrelevant, there must be a compelling reason to choose a dual-language solution* over a single-language solution, and to chose a solution that requires your devs to learn a new language over one that does not. Not to mention switching platforms has a massive cost if your project is already mature. Even if you’re creating a new project, if your team already knows JavaScript and doesn’t have any particular objection to Electron, there’s no compelling reason.

If there is a good reason to learn a language then people will.

Sure. Except in my experience interviewing candidates and from what I’ve seen online, there are a lot of developers out there who aren’t very good. I am not optimistic that the average developer will have an easy time learning a new language. If the “we” in “Is this the electron alternative we’ve been waiting for” is you and I, that’s not a problem. But if OP meant to suggest there will be a large-scale shift away from Electron, then the average developer is quite relevant.

*As someone else pointed out, Dioxus is designed with the intent that you’ll right the frontend in Rust, so it’s not exactly dual-language like I thought.

Ah, well that’s great for folks who already know or want to learn Rust

I seriously doubt that a dual-language platform is ever going to supplant Electron. Electron has the major advantage that the entire app is written in one language. And according to Stack Overflow’s 2023 developer survey, 66% of devs use JavaScript, 45% use Python, 43% use TypeScript, and 12% use Rust. More devs use Java, C#, C++, PHP, and C than Rust. So 2/3 of developers wouldn’t have to learn a new language to use Electron, and only a small fraction of the remainder knows Rust.

async/await infecting all of my code, being unable to create a get myField() method that involves a hash calculation. It may be standard to do heavy lifting concurrently, but async hash functions are certainly not standard in any of the languages I’ve used (which is quite a few).

True, but if you read the article the point is clearly not about source code vs non-source configuration. There’s an implicit assumption that source code is something the developer will be modifying as time goes on, but the real point is, “Don’t make users merge changes.”

I think the author’s primary point is, “Merging changes sucks, don’t make your users do that,” with a corollary: if your program loads configuration from a directory that is only populated by the user, there’s nothing to merge and thus never any merge conflicts. Case in point: /etc/polkit-1/rules.d. I can add whatever rules files I want in there and they’re never going to conflict when I update. If PolKit makes breaking changes to the format, it will log errors somewhere and I can look at those errors, look at my rules, and figure out how to fix them. That’s a hell of a lot easier than merging conflicting changes to code/configuration.

Additionally, switch performs extra sanity checks that checkout doesn’t, for example switch would abort operation if it would lead to loss of local changes.

What checks? Under what situation does checkout lead to loss of changes? If I make changes and attempt to checkout a ref that would overwrite them, I get the following error:

error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by checkout:
        some/file
Please commit your changes or stash them before you switch branches.
Aborting

To my knowledge it’s not possible to overwrite changes when switching branches/refs (git checkout <ref> without any other arguments or flags) so I guess what the author really means is, “If you use checkout incorrectly you can overwrite local changes.” As far as I can recall I’ve never accidentally git checkout <ref> <some/file> so I don’t see a reason to retrain my muscle memory. I do use git restore since it’s behavior is a lot more obvious than checkout/reset though sometimes I still use git checkout <ref> -- <some/file> because muscle memory.

• Scenario: I’m in the middle of writing a new feature.
• Boss, to me: “Shit broke. Go figure it out.”
• Me, thinking: I’m in the middle of doing some complex work. If I commit/stash and close the open files, it will take a day for me to remember WTF I was doing.
• Me: “Oh look, worktrees! I can leave my workspace intact with all the files open, pending changes, test results, terminal output, everything! And just create a new worktree to checkout the production version and debug! I’m saved!”

Also setting up a worktree is really easy. git worktree add ../hotfix prod-branch && cd ../hotfix and get working. Though in reality it’s cd ../hotfix && git checkout prod-branch because I’ve never needed more than one secondary worktree.

I’m a cishet white dude so I experience effectively zero discrimination directed at me, but I am on the spectrum.

I guess basically everyone I regularly interact with either is also on the spectrum or has intense interests regardless, or is used to people like that. Though TBF I have learned to not get intense if I’m in public talking to random strangers. But if someone asks me a question like, “how do computers work”, I will answer at great length.

If my IQ was higher than my body weight I’d be the smartest person on the planet…

Edit: I was thinking lbs, that makes a lot more sense in kg.

I’d stop being awkward if I could but I wouldn’t give up my intense interests. You?

I think the word you want is minutiae?