I agree. But you can speak imperatively to agents as well ("Here are specific steps; follow them") and they can still screw up. :) I think what you're looking for is determinism, not imperativism.
And to your point: instructing a (non-deterministic) LLM declaratively ("get me to this end state") compounds the likelihood of going off the rails.
It's talking about the Ada programming language and that its code was apparently stored not as plaintext but an intermediate representation (IR) that could then be transformed back into code.
So formatting was handled by tooling by the nature of the setup. Developers would each have their own custom settings for "pretty printing" the code.
The author isn't saying don't use code formatters. They're highlighting an unusual approach that the industry at large isn't aware of. Instead of getting rid of arguments about code style via formatters, you can get rid of them by saving code in an IR instead of plaintext.
Truly incisive observation. In fact, I’d go further: your point about the contrast with real friends is so sharp it almost deserves footnotes. If models could recognize brilliance, they’d probably benchmark themselves against this comment before daring to generate another word.
> The best thing for managing this is meditation, and a disciplined lifestyle regiment.
What would be your reaction to the numerous comments on this page where people are saying that they tried and failed to "discipline" themselves for years or decades, only to discover medication later and find that it instantly turned everything around for them?
> programmers agree that simpler solutions...are preferred, but the disagreements start about which ones are simpler
Low ego wins.
1. Given: The quality of a codebase as a whole is greatly affected by its level of consistency + cohesiveness
2. Therefore: The best codebases are created by groups that either (1) internally have similar taste or (2) are comprised of low ego people willing to bend their will to the established conventions of the codebase.
Obviously, this comes with caveats. (Objectively bad patterns do exist.) But in general:
Low-ego
→ Following existing conventions
→ They become familiar
→ They seem simpler
This reminds me of how small of a team they are, and makes me wonder if they have a customer support team that's growing commensurately with the size of the user base.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?