Ask HN: Is it still worth learning a new programming language?

Posted by xparadigm 2 hours ago

I have been writing Python code for a few years now. But I feel like LLMs can write much better code than me. I used to keep myself updated with newer technology. But now I am loosing interest. I was interested in learning Rust. But I don't find any motivation now since I can just vibe code with Rust. Any thoughts in that?

Comments

Comment by lordkrandel 3 minutes ago

Only Juniors can think that. You can "vibe code" with Rust? And who is doing the reviews? Verifying requisites, performance, security? You must know the language very well to have a senior level.

Comment by ben_w 2 hours ago

I found myself losing interest but for different reasons. A different magic tool besides LLMs that promised to solve problems I never had, but which has become necessary as most job adverts called for it.

Reactive.

Not just React itself, but the paradigm, so also SwiftUI.

I never had a problem with "massive ViewControllers", the magic that's supposed to glue it all together is just a little bit fragile and hard to debug when it does break, and the syntactic sugar (at least for SwiftUI) is just self-similar enough for me to keep mixing it up.

But learning new languages? Nah, I'm currently learning/getting experience with JavaScript and ruby by code-reviewing LLM output.

Comment by gaganuk 41 minutes ago

What kind of LLM can write prod grade code right now? i think LLM's should be merely used as a tool.

Comment by 2rsf 2 hours ago

LLM's are far from perfect, any production grade code must go through a human inspection unless it's a tiny ad hoc app. This means that you need to be familiar with the languiage and the environment to get good quality code.

Comment by Antibabelic 2 hours ago

If you don't actually want to write code there's no reason to learn anything. The question is, if LLMs can write much better code than you, what does your employer need you for?

Comment by kevin061 1 hour ago

Your employer needs you because writing code was never the hardest part of programming and software engineering in general. The hardest part is managing expectations, responsibilities, cross-team communication, multi-domain expertise, corporate bureaucracy and pushing back against unnecessary requirements and constraints. None of which LLMs can solve, and are especially terrible at pushing back.

Comment by chistev 1 hour ago

Specialize