Andy WingoMar 9

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

Show threadSpindley Q FrogMar 9
@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
On The Need For Understanding

I saw this Mastodon post from Andy Wingo recently: in these days of coding agents and what-not, i often think of gerald sussman's comm...

blog dot information dash superhighway dot net
Show threadAndy WingoMar 9
@SpindleyQ omg i had forgotten that i posted this before, how embarassing šŸ˜…
Show threadChristine Lemmer-WebberMar 9

@wingo I for one am glad to see this discourse re-emerge! I will read your essay @SpindleyQ

And I think it's good to bring this up now and think about it!

Show threadSpark Purcell (they/them)Mar 9
@cwebber @wingo @SpindleyQ even this essay does a xkcd/2501, lol
Show threadSpindley Q Frog
@ailurocrat @cwebber @wingo It was really important to me to tie my thoughts to concrete personal experiences, but it was _so_ difficult to edit it down so that the whole thing wasn't completely dominated by infodumping about the minutiae of DOS programming or whatever. In the end I kind of had to punt and hope that the reader would be able to get the gist of the stories. I'm sure people's mileage will vary on whether that worked or not.
Mar 9 at 2:19pmWeb
Show threadSpark Purcell (they/them)Mar 9
@SpindleyQ @cwebber @wingo I got the general idea of it, despite not understanding programming. (my comment wasn't really directly about the essay, it was my usual gripe about it being hard to get into programming without already understanding it at least more than I do)
Show threadSpindley Q FrogMar 9

@ailurocrat Ah! I actually share that gripe!

For almost 20 years I've run an online community that encouraged normal people to make computer games with accessible tools. At the start, many people used a piece of software called "Klik & Play" to make something silly in an hour or two. It was obsolete even at the time - written for Windows 3.1 - but the company offered it as a free download for schools. Every later version of the tool added more complexity, and was less and less approachable.

Show threadSpindley Q FrogMar 9
@ailurocrat The history of early computing is absolutely full of expressive programming tools, thoughtfully designed for people with little to no programming experience to be able to pick up and use to build interesting things with little external instruction, as well as to learn from and grow their own abilities. The landscape's not like that anymore, and it kills me. It's inhumane to make every novice suffer through the pointless complexity of industrial programming ecosystems.
Show threadSpark Purcell (they/them)Mar 10
@SpindleyQ the thing is, i enjoyed playing around with my apple 2c in middle school, just didn't continue figuring out stuff beyond minimal logo pixelated cat pics and changing the font in appleworks.
Show threadSpark Purcell (they/them)Mar 10
@SpindleyQ i would love if someone was patient enough with me to teach me what i feel I need to know (which of course is impossible due to EVERY fucking course NOT for people who just wanna play around, but for entry into corp fuckery which i want NOTHING to do with.
Show threadbriMar 9
@SpindleyQ oh wow, iā€™d been sort of casually trying to remember what the name of klik & play was for a while now, what a nostalgia rush šŸ˜…
Show threadSpindley Q FrogMar 10
@brhfl it's so good!!! I met one of the original authors at GDC in 2012 and it was one of the highlights of my life haha