Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris · Adam Jacob

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 …

Reflections of an "Old" Programmer - Ben Northrop

Framing our programming careers in terms of knowledge accumulation and decay can yield some interesting insights.

Programming as Theory Building: Why Senior Developers Are More Valuable Than Ever

Peter Naur's 1985 theory of programming explains why experience matters more in the age of AI-generated code

Programmer as wizard, programmer as engineer

Context matters. Sometimes we need to get things done, sometimes we need to build things to last.

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.

Small Programming Tricks

A lot of effective engineering comes from the accumulation of small nuggets of knowledge.

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.”

Reading

Carl Kolon's favorite articles about programming.

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