How Larry Wall's virtues of a Perl programmer inspire me in this era of engineering
The peril of laziness lost | The Observation Deck
In his classic Programming Perl — affectionately known to a generation of technologists as "the Camel Book" — Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris: If we’re going to talk about good software design, we have to talk about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris, the basis of good software design. We’ve all fallen into the trap of using cut-and-paste when we should have defined a higher-level abstraction, if only just a loop or subroutine. To be sure, some folks have gone to the opposite extreme of defining ever-growing mounds of higher level abstractions when they should have used cut-and-paste. Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less.
A quote from Andrew Quinn
One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the …
Optimistic Computing
I recently made two new friends: Abhinav Omprakash and Dawn Walker. Abhinav said I’m an optimist and I should write about it. Dawn said I shouldn’t try to coin any new terms. I should know better, but this essay follows Abhinav’s recommendation — and credits Dawn, in the very likely event I should have followed her advice instead. I have been alive for approximately four decades. Each of those decades was witness to its own fun brand of computering.
The third golden age of software engineering – thanks to AI, with Grady Booch
The third golden age of software engineering – thanks to AI, with Grady Booch
Who understands alignment anyway
I remember watching many in the HCI community bristle when in 2016 Michael Jordan wrote a blog post calling for the creation of a new “human-centric engineering discipline.”
Good design hasn’t changed with AI — John Pham, SF Compute
zach lieberman on Twitter / X
Today I was able to weave a line from Myron Krueger in a talk I gave : Computation is the medium of our lifetimes - it’s not just a technical medium but a cultural medium as well. We should explore the culture of computation.— zach lieberman (@zachlieberman) April 10, 2024
Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)
Amy J. Ko : Searching for Justice in Programming Language Design
How Cursor is building the future of AI coding with Claude
The Jevons Paradox of AI - Wesley's notes
Why AI can make us more productive but will never save us time
”The distinction between programmer and user is reinforced and maintained by a tech industry that benefits from a population rendered computationally passive. If we accept and adopt the role of less agency, we then make it harder for ourselves to come into more agency.”
always-already-programming.md
gist.github.com
