11–20 of 64 posts
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."
Pretty relevant with LLMs and coding agents.
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."
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.
> A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant. Great definition actually
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."
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.
[0] https://medium.com/gitconnected/you-are-bugs-improving-your-...
> A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant. Great definition actually
If something requires attention, it’s by definition relevant
> A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant. Great definition actually
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
Not really. Consider an assembly language for a processor with a very orthogonal register set. The number of registers used by a block of code is relevant, but the identity of those registers isn't. That is, if the code can be written without spilling with six distinct, uniform registers, the choice of one of the 6! possible assignments of those six registers are irrelevant. But when writing that code, you still need to make the choice. And in real assembly languages, it's not necessarily obvious whether the choice here is arbitrary and unconstrained, or externally constrained (e.g. when choosing a mapping that avoids a move instruction by forcing the caller to pass a certain value in an agreed register; or when using an almost-orthogonal register set where it's unclear if later code cares that the value is left in a register that is also the possible target of a div instruction or something), so this requires attention at both write-time and read-time, even when irrelevant.
> A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant. Great definition actually
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
Also, many stupid or nonsensical statements can often yield wisdom if you meditate on them enough. Indeed, many (most?) zen koans are so simplistic that to get any usefulness out of them you have to insert you own assumptions and try to determine how it might apply.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
"If something requires attention, it’s by definition relevant" Not really. Consider an assembly language for a processor with a very orthogonal register set. The number of registers used by a block of code is relevant, but the identity of those registers isn't. That is, if the code can be written without spilling with six distinct, uniform registers, the choice of one of the 6! possible assignments of those six regis…
Maybe "high-level"" low level" should be understood in terms relative to the task and its goals.
Seems to be a strike against LLM-based programming systems like Claude.