Software engineer for 40 years, including 12 building commercial expert systems. Lisp is the Red Pill.
And there we have it. Code is a means to an end, we’re told. Quality and readability are secondary. Or worse. Leadership gets away with this now because the AI tools are “good enough”.
Knuth is turning over in his grave.
That’s exactly the tension I was trying to describe.I agree that code is ultimately a means to an end. Nobody gets paid just to produce beautiful code.But “it works today” and “we can safely understand, change, and operate it a year from now” are…
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Don't kill him off yet! Knuth is very much still alive and writing; even about Claude, recently: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf
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