The Priesthood

Developers curse LLMs for churning out crap code, and the very words "vibe coding" send a lot of people into a holy rage. Well, this is not the first time, and it will not be the last.

Princeton, early 1950s. The graduate students of John von Neumann, the man whose architecture computers still carry, translate programs into ones and zeros by hand. One of them, Donald Gillies, gets fed up and writes an assembler. Von Neumann is furious: a precious scientific instrument must not be wasted on clerical work. Gillies is told to drop the nonsense and get back to work, meaning back to the ones and zeros, now without the assembler.

Richard Hamming, the Bell Labs mathematician behind the Hamming codes that error correction in RAM still rests on, recalled that the assembler interested maybe 1% of the old programmers. To the rest it was "sissy stuff": with mnemonics you could not tell where anything sat in memory. They patched bugs straight in binary and, by all accounts, were proud of it.

John Backus, the creator of Fortran, heard from the same crowd, in turn, that it was impossible, that it was possible but too expensive in machine time, and that sure, it worked, but no self-respecting programmer would touch it. Backus called these people a priesthood guarding secrets too complex for mere mortals. Some of them even objected to decimal numbers: the machine must not be entrusted to the uninitiated, and everyone understands decimals.

In 1968 Dijkstra publishes "Go To Statement Considered Harmful". The old school fires back: nothing efficient can be written without GOTO, these are academic toys. The argument dragged on for about ten years; in 1974 Knuth writes "Structured Programming with go to Statements" as an attempt at reconciliation.

In his 1980 Turing lecture Tony Hoare warns that Ada (the language that today runs aircraft, tanks and missiles) is too complex and too dangerous for critical systems.

In 2007 Linus Torvalds, in a well-known email, calls C++ a horrible language and refuses to let it anywhere near git.

Joe Armstrong of Erlang compared objects to asking for a banana and getting a gorilla holding the banana, with the entire jungle thrown in.

As technology advances, development moves to a higher and higher level. That has to be understood and accepted. The problem is never the tool. It is how people use it.