I develop an interactive climate / future scenario model, now in scala, earlier in java, almost no dependencies. No visualisation frameworks - the diverse plots hand coded in scala (transpiles using scala.js, makes SVGs on demand). The science code from demography through economy emissions, bioegeochemistry, to climate - just scala, no interface to other languages / models, no “solver” tool. Data input just text files -easy to check. Some modules over 20 years old (except converted java -> scala), still work reliably. It’s efficient as all client-side, no IO/net between adjustments and results. Seems no big institute would employ me for such model dev because my experience doesn’t tick the boxes of all the current fashionable frameworks. But at least I can share a way to explore the future for ourselves … and yes it’s bleak but not so dire as many people here seem to assume, we still have choices.
One choice I think you’ve nicely demonstrated: the choice of a solid base and not choosing to add dependencies.
Choosing not to do something can be hard.
Also double points for having a sustainable software project that helps with environmental sustainability. Really walking the walk haha
Hi, thanks for the encouragement, delayed response due focusing on the code, and a related conference, and now trying to keep up with the COP. As it happens, the “ratchet” system of pledges created in Paris (COP21) is an iterative algorithm - start with wild guesses and gradually improve them by feedback - this made sense given the weaknesses of diplomacy, but it’s hard to summarise this mess with neat code in a compact model.
Interesting observation on the current trajectory of the software development environment
What do you think about the increased usage of AI to help developers code? I feel like AI is another step into the abstraction swamp
This AI stuff is annoying me. I don’t work in development - I’m a pentester and recently had to work on some scripts with a colleague.
He is a few years my senior and basically completely relies on ChatGPT for simple string matching and splitting in bash. I could not believe my eyes. He got ChatGPT to spit out a command that didn’t work exactly as we needed it to because it was looking for the wrong string. It was a really simple fix but he again had to ask ChatGPT for how to fix it, until I was like “let me do it”.
It’s not that he’s dumb or anything, but I feel like he just grew completely lazy from that and doesn’t even want to think anymore. Later on he was troubleshooting the same script for a few hours until he noticed that ChatGPT output messed up the order of lines and tried to access a variable that was only declared in the next line.
I think ChatGPT and whatever else are really useful tools, but people tend to use them as shortcuts to learning instead of getting things done quicker. That is in everyone’s own responsibility - I just have the hunch that my job will get way more interesting with a new generation of incompetent developers 😁
