Szymon Kaliski

"Learning to Program" and LLMs

• the discourse of "should I learn programming" keeps popping up; also the discourse of "programming" "going away" started to pop up with LLMs
• I think the distinction to make is between "programming" as in "profession to build software", and "programming" as in "computational thinking"
  • LLMs definitely are useful with the former right now, and I think will become more useful over time, as we figure out the Open Questions Around LLM Interfaces for this activity
    • even then, I don't think "programming" as a profession will go away, but that might be wishful thinking
  • on the other hand, "computational thinking" is more like reading, writing, arithmetic, geometry, playing an instrument, etc.
    • it's the Papert's Constructionism, the Key's Dynabook, the Bret's Dynamicland, the "Simulator", etc.
    • I don't think it's possible, or useful, to offload this to a bunch of GPUs
    • and I think it's useful to learn, the same way anything else is useful to learn

Backlinks

1. 2025-09-29Bi-Directional State Synchronization in React and Graphical Notation in Figma¹