Perlisisms (cs.yale.edu)
44 points by tosh 3 hours ago
chriscbr 2 hours ago
Random self plug - I liked a lot of these quotes from Alan Perlis, so around a year ago I bought the domain https://perl.is/ to display them.
summa_tech 2 hours ago
Neat! What do you think about adding a "-2, -1, 0, +1, +2" agreement scale to each quote and showing the average instead of votes?
I think many of those are pretty subjective, and maybe not always right for everyone or for all time. But there are certainly going to be some universal pearls of wisdom, and neither of us can - by ourselves - tell which ones they are.
LelouBil 39 minutes ago
> A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
Great definition actually
hbcdbff 8 minutes ago
Disagree - like many of the quotes on this page, it seems interesting at a very superficial level but upon further inspection turns out to be nonsensical.
If something requires attention, it’s by definition relevant
dundarious 15 minutes ago
Relevance is relative, very much so.
dtagames 3 hours ago
And in #27 we find the rationale behind all LLM coding agents, "Once you understand how a program works, get someone else to write it for you."
hugo0vaz 2 hours ago
I think you misunderstood what the phrase actually means. You can only successfully manage or outsource a process once you understand it well enough to explain it. Therefore, most of the people doing agentic engineering are not following this Perlisim.
dtagames 15 minutes ago
Oh, that's exactly what I meant, except its corollary. People who do understand how software works should absolutely be having agents code it. And we do.
fhars 38 minutes ago
The actual prescient LLM quote is "7. It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one."
summa_tech 2 hours ago
Once you understand how a program works, get someone else to write it for you. Then, you will quickly find out your understanding was insufficient.
dtagames 14 minutes ago
Is that ever true! I wrote a whole Medium article[0] about this, one of my most popular. It's called "YOU ARE BUGS" as a joke from Three Body Problem on Netflix.
[0] https://medium.com/gitconnected/you-are-bugs-improving-your-...
jancsika an hour ago
> 2. Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.
A good way to enforce this is to encrypt the data at the beginning of the process.
Then any function that returns structured data is clearly foolish and can be marked for removal.
LelouBil 37 minutes ago
> Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
Pretty relevant with LLMs and coding agents.
DonHopkins an hour ago
>1. One man's constant is another man's variable.
Did you ever have one of those days when variables didn't and constants weren't?
sriram_malhar 2 hours ago
This feels so quaint today. How I'd like to be back in that timeframe.