Generative AI makes things easier, but it doesn’t make it easy. But while recent developments have fundamentally changed how novices and experts might code, the democratization of programming has made learning to code more important than ever because it’s empowered a much broader set of people to harness its benefits. Andrej Karpathy, one of the architects of the current wave of AI, declared, “The hottest new programming language is English.” With amazing advances announced seemingly daily, you’d be forgiven for believing that the era of learning to program is behind us. It’s exhilarating to think that, with the help of generative AI, anyone who can write can also write programs. So when it was discovered that transformer-based systems like ChatGPT could turn casual human-readable descriptions into working code, there was much reason for excitement. Even professional programmers have written buggy code that has resulted in crashing spacecraft, cars, and even the internet itself. It’s well documented that novice programmers can struggle to correctly specify even a simple task like computing a numerical average, failing more than half the time.
It’s long been recognized that programming is difficult, however, with its arcane notation and unforgiving attitude toward mistakes. Michael Littman is the author of “ Code to Joy: Why Everyone Should Learn a Little Programming“
