Simon Peyton Jones

I really want to make sure that it's... Like, putting new stuff into GHC.

If somebody sends me a pile of AI-generated code to put into GHC, I'm not going to put it in unless I've reviewed it or somebody's reviewed it because in 10 years' time, I'm going to want to change that code.

How do I even know what it does if it's simply a magic incantation that somebody's done that kind of worked on the test they did but maybe won't work in deployment?

That's no good.

So...

I really want long-lived maintainable code to be well reviewed.

Sorry.

And to do that, I need reviewers who can write code.

Let me mention one other perspective.

If you think about what every child should know, when I think about what every child should know about computing, I would include binary and bits.

Not, oh, just as for physics, I would include atoms and molecules.

Now, it's not that in real life anybody manipulates atoms or molecules or takes decisions which are based directly on the knowledge of atoms.

But somehow, knowledge that all matter is made up of atoms, you know, constituted of a finite number of elements, that knowledge underpins everything we understand about the natural world.

If you literally had never been told that,

you are sort of emasculated, even as a citizen, let alone as a scientist.

So if you literally do not know that everything is composed of bits, that words and music and text and LLMs and everything is all just bits, I think you're crippled.

So I want every child to learn.

It's like I want you to learn the bottom.

It's all bits, nothing else.

It's all just bits.