Amazing tweet.

https://x.com/stevesi/status/2050325415793951124

Here's how history rhymes with this logic. The development of compilers v writing assembly language was not without a very similar "controversy" — that is, are the new tools more efficient or less efficient.

The first compilers were measured relative to hand-tuned assembly language efficiency. The existing world of compute was very much "compute bound" and inefficient code was being chased out of every system.

The introduction of the first compilers generally delivered code "within 10-30%" as efficient as standard professional assembly. This "benchmark" was enough for almost a generation of Fortran programmers to dismiss the capabilities of compilers.

Also worth noting, early compilers (all through the 1980s) routinely had bugs that generated incorrect code. Debugging a compiler is a nightmare (personal experience). This only provided more "ammo."

With the arrival of COBOL the debate started to shift. COBOL generated decidedly "bloated" code so there was no way to win the efficiency argument. But what people started to realize was that a "modern" programming language made it possible to deliver vastly more software and for many more people to work on the same code (ASM notorious for being challenging for multiple engineers on the same portion of code). So the metric slowly started to move from "as good as hand tuned assembler" to "able to write bigger, more sophisticated code in less time with more people). Computers gained timesharing, more memory, and faster CPUs which made the efficiency argument far less compelling (only to repeat with the first 8K or 64K PCs).

This entire transition is capped off with a description in Fred Brooks "Mythical Man Month" book, one of the seminal books in the field of programming and standard issue book sitting in my office waiting for me on my first day at Microsoft. (See full book free here https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/2018-481/readings/mythic...)

It is very early. I was not a programmer when the above happened though I did join the professional ranks while many still held these beliefs. For example, I interned writing COBOL on mainframes while PCs were using C and Pascal which were buggy and viewed as inefficient on processor/space-constrained PCs.

The debate would continue with C++, garbage collection, interpreted v compiled (Visual Basic) and more. As a fairly consistent observation over decades, every new tool is viewed through a lens (at first) by experienced programmers over what is worse while new programmers use the tool and operate in a new context (eg "more software" or "bigger projects"). The excerpt below shows this debate as captured in 1972.

Uncle Bob: It's Over