gerald sussman once said that programming is no longer constructive, building truths from truths, instead investigative, identifying probable behavior from unreliable libraries. anyway, llms,,,
https://wingolog.org/archives/2009/03/24/international-lisp-conference-day-two
![quote from linked blog post, abridged for space:
[E]ngineering in 1980 was not what it was in the mid-90s or in 2000. In 1980, good programmers spent a lot of time thinking, and then produced spare code that they thought should work. Code ran close to the metal, even Scheme -- it was understandable all the way down. Like a resistor, where you could read the bands and know the power rating and the tolerance and the resistance and V=IR and that's all there was to know. 6.001 had been conceived to teach engineers how to take small parts that they understood entirely and use simple techniques to compose them into larger things that do what you want.
But programming now isn't so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don't know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts...](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/198/229/127/914/339/original/d4ef168fe1b77b29.png)
@wingoAndy Wingo I wrote a response to this the last time you posted it... I think Sussman's assessment was probably more or less correct when he made it, but we built a better world afterwards, and ceding that ground meant giving up fundamental tools of problem-solving that are perhaps more valuable now than they've ever been.
https://blog.information-superhighway.net/on-the-need-for-understanding
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