I worked with Ralph when he was at Brave. I fondly remember many long walks in downtown Vancouver with him, getting tea at Matchstick and chatting about Rust and privacy and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. I still can't believe this. Huge loss.
Programming with LLMs is fundamentally different than going from a lower-level to a higher-level language, even apart from the whole non-determinism thing. With a programming language, you're still writing a for-loop, whether that's in C, Java or Rust. There's language primitives that help you think better in certain languages, but they're still, at the end of the day, code and context that you have to hold in your head and be intimately familiar with.
That changes with LLMs. For now, you can use LLMs to help you code that way; a programming buddy whose code you review. That's soon going to become "quaint" (to quote the author) given the projected productivity gains of agents (and for many developers it already has).
Programming languages need to give the developer a way to iterate (map, fold, for-loop, whatever) over a collection of items. Over time we've come up with more elegant ways of doing this, but as a programmer, until LLMs, you've still had to be actively involved in the control logic. My point is that a developer's relationship with the code is very different now, in a way that wasn't true with previous low-to-high level language climbs.
