Perlisisms

(cs.yale.edu)

27 points | by tosh 2 hours ago

3 comments

  • chriscbr 1 hour 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 45 minutes 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.

  • dtagames 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.
    • summa_tech 49 minutes 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.
  • sriram_malhar 1 hour ago
    This feels so quaint today. How I'd like to be back in that timeframe.