How to Learn to Code in 2026

[Axtremus]

How to Learn to Code in 2026

Link to video

So, fellow dinosaurs who have been coding since COBOL was cool^, how does this make you feel?

***^***

click to show

OK, COBOL was never cool; I put that in just to make you feel better.

[Mik]

I just watched a couple minutes but I liked the comment that paranoia makes a good engineer.

I’ve been obsolete as a coder for far too long to worry about it.

[Klaus]

Coding with LLMs works amazingly well, I love it.

But the one thing I'm not so certain about: LLMs are good at creating apps that use and combine the zoo of abstractions (libraries and frameworks etc) out there.

What remains to be seen is whether LLMs will be good at abstracting. Could they ever come up with a good design of a collections library, for instance, if such libraries weren't part of their learning data? Could they recognize patterns such as structural recursion over an algebraic data type and come up with the abstraction of folds/catamorphisms? That's not so obvious.

[Doctor Phibes]

@Mik said:

I just watched a couple minutes but I liked the comment that paranoia makes a good engineer.

That's just what they want you to think.

[Tom-K]

This sounds a lot like learning to play music. A million fundamentals and technicalities and random bits of knowledge going together in order to produce something that is miles above all those details.

That is one smart little girl.