There’s a very long history of extremely effective labor saving tools in software.
Writing in C rather than Assembly, especially for more than 1 platform.
Standard libraries. Unix itself. More recently, developing games in Unity or Unreal instead of rolling your own engine.
And what happened when any of these tools come on the scene is that there is a mad gold rush to develop products that weren’t feasible before. Not layoffs, not “we don’t need to hire junior developers any more”.
Rank and file vibe coders seem to perceive Claude Code (for some reason, mostly just Claude Code) as something akin to the advantage of using C rather than Assembly. They are legit excited to code new things they couldn’t code before.
Boiling the rivers to give them an occasional morale boost with “You are absolutely right!” is completely fucked up and I dread the day I’ll have to deal with AI-contaminated codebases, but apart from that, they have something positive going for them, at least in this brief moment. They seem to be sincerely enthusiastic. I almost don’t want to shit on their parade.
The AI enthusiast bigwigs on the other hand, are firing people, closing projects, talking about not hiring juniors any more, and got the media to report on it as AI layoffs. They just gleefully go on about how being 30% more productive means they can fire a bunch of people.
The standard answer is that they hate having employees. But they always hated having employees. And there were always labor saving technologies.
So I have a thesis here, or a synthesis perhaps.
The bigwigs who tout AI (while acknowledging that it needs humans for now) don’t see AI as ultimately useful, in the way in which C compiler was useful. Even if its useful in some context, they still don’t. They don’t believe it can be useful. They see it as more powerfully useless. Each new version is meant to be a bit more like AM or (clearly AM-inspired, but more familiar) GLaDOS, that will get rid of all the employees once and for all.
Ken Thompson tried and failed to implement Fortran on the PDP-7 using TMG. He even had to strip down BCPL, which was specifically designed with implementations on small machines in mind. Could a really good programmer have produced a Fortran compiler that could run with only four kilowords of memory? Maybe, but evidently B was easier to fit than Fortran. Would Dennis Ritchie have felt the need to develop B into NB and finally C if he could have simply squeezed a compiler for a comparable existing language into Unics (sic)? Probably not. I said C was lighter to implement than Fortran, let alone something like PL/I, because they did make a C compiler for the underpowered PDP-7 and failed to make a Fortran compiler.
Pascal was brand new at the time. Maybe some extended variant of it could have served the needs of the Unix team at Bell Labs, but I don’t know if Dennis Ritchie was even aware of it in 1973.
The point is that C was born out of necessity. Good high level systems languages existed before it and the Unix people were certainly familiar with them. If you could have fit a Fortran or Pascal on their PDP-7 Unics, good for you. Maybe the world would have turned out better if Unix had been made in Pascal instead.
@bitofhope They never produced a C compiler for the PDP7, only a very primitive threadcode B “compiler” where calling it a compiler was pushing it somewhat.
And yes IBM not only got Fortran into 8kW (6bit words) they did it on a machine in memory with no disk storage.
C is not lighter than Fortran (and I write compilers amongst other things). B was although it’s a stretch to call the PDP7 B a compiler as it really just chains together subroutine calls.
Fair enough, I concede. It’s true that C really came into its own on the PDP-11, whose design was a big influence on the language itself and the PDP-7 NB can’t really be considered a true C compiler.
In light of the points you brought up I’d like to amend my earlier disparagement of C by admitting that actually it wasn’t even all that light. Sure, it wasn’t as much of a behemoth as PL/I or ALGOL 68, but indeed a Fortan or a Pascal could probably have fit the same systems where C was born.
@bitofhope and to be clear I just care about the history. I’ve no problem with the idea the software world would have been a better place if Unix had been built on and spread a language that took less of a relaxed attitude to types and pointers.