> A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

Great definition actually

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.

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.

> 2. Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.

A good way to enforce this is to encrypt the data at the beginning of the process.

Then any function that returns structured data is clearly foolish and can be marked for removal.

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."

The actual prescient LLM quote is "7. It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one."

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.

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.

> Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.

Pretty relevant with LLMs and coding agents.

>1. One man's constant is another man's variable.

Did you ever have one of those days when variables didn't and constants weren't?

This feels so quaint today. How I'd like to be back in that timeframe.