\ [email protected]
FORTH ?KNOW IF HONK ELSE FORTH LEARN THEN
: C(-; LICK SMILE NOSE WINK ;
\ FORTH PAPER TAPE PUNCHER:
: PT# ( L --- L/2 )
DUP 1 AND IF
ASCII @
ELSE BL THEN
HOLD
2/
;
: PT. ( N --- )
<# PT# PT# PT#
ASCII . HOLD
PT# PT# PT# PT#
#> TYPE
;
: CUT
." -----------" CR
;
: PTAPE
CUT
BEGIN
KEY ?DUP WHILE
DUP ." |" PT. ." |" SPACE EMIT CR
REPEAT
CUT
;
Lisp -vs- Forth -vs- PostScript:
; Lisp:
(defun caar (x) (car (car x)))
(defun caaar (x) (car (car (car x))))
(defun caaaar (x) (car (car (car (car x)))))
\ Forth:
: droop drop drop ;
: drooop drop drop drop ;
: droooop drop drop drop drop ;
% PostScript:
/poop { pop pop } def
/pooop { pop pop pop } def
/poooop { pop pop pop pop } def
Remembering and typing git commands does not improve the code or your understanding of it.
Reading the code yourself, human- or LLM-generated, does.
Vibe coders intentionally don't read LLM-generated code. That is the whole point, the definition of vibe coding.
But those kinds of people aren't likely to read code hand-written by their human colleagues either.
It's not whether an LLM or a human generates the code or not, it's about whether you take the time and effort to read it.
Accusing non-vibe LLM-using coders of outsourcing their thinking is only valid if they don't bother reading code, and that makes them vibe coders.
If you read the code, you're insourcing and internalizing the LLM's thinking, and you're then qualified to criticize it and ask the LLM to fix it, or fix it yourself.
I try to be a conscientious objector -- repossessing the term like reclaiming queer: conscientious about objects, prototypes, and code; conscientiously objecting to evil or sloppy work. Named at a Kaleida meetup with David Ungar's Self team and the ScriptX object-system designers; Joe Weizenbaum's line runs through Heinz Lemke's PIXIE history too.
This week, discussing light pens and PDP-7 drivers with Heinz, Alan Kay, and Lars Brinkhoff, we joked about issuing Conscientious Objector club cards for our wallets -- to show when someone asks us to write terrible, unethical, poorly designed code. Wallet-sized ethics beats /pr-merge-dev skills that merge after one day with no human review.
Not everybody here is a vibe coder. Some of us are just trying to read the diffs.
But Github is already fully volatile, capricious, fickle, erratic, unpredictable, variable, inconsistent, changeable, unstable, whimsical, protean, fluid, and a polluting poisonous room temperature liquid heavy metal, so why would you also need mercurial?
>I admit that my slogan "Snap! is Scheme disguised as Scratch" would sort of push in the direction of hygienic macros. But historically we built Snap! more with the idea of Logo disguised as Scratch. It was just when we added lambda that we started thinking more in Scheme terms.
Everything you can do with Scheme you can also do with Snap! with a visual blocks programming user interface. Functional programming, recursion, higher order functions, closures, continuations, macros, metaprogramming, all described by Brian Harvey's curriculum, the Beauty and Joy of Computing:
Brian calls SICP the actual best computer science course ever invented, which is quite a complement from the guy who wrote the second best computer science course ever invented. ;)
He has a lot of interesting thoughs about AI in education.
I used to love using Macintosh Common Lisp, which was a glorious Lisp development environment that originally compiled to native 68K code, and had full access to native APIs like QuickTime. On the PowerPC Mac, I used Connectix SpeedDoubler to dynamically translate MCL's compiled 68K code into PowerPC code. It worked surprisingly well, so we didn't have to hold our breath waiting for MCL's native PowerPC port.
> Connectix Corporation was a software and hardware company that released innovative products that were either made obsolete as Apple Computer incorporated the ideas into system software, or were sold to other companies once they became popular.
SpeedDoubler and RAMDoubler were great, and actually kinda delivered on their promises. But what I really needed during the reign of System 7 was BootDoubler: software that made every other reboot instantaneous.
>Spreadsheet certainly are visual programming languages: by any measure, by far one of the most common most widely used types of visual programming languages in the world.
There's a third case between "today's task" and "accretive work" that I lived through on The Sims, and it's the one that scares managers the most: a system that IS accretive work, but looks exactly like a pile of disposable hacks for most of its life.
Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The Sims and The Sims Online, called the method "Design by Accretion" and "Tuned Emergence" in an interview with the Armchair Empire that I republished on my old blog.
Her description: The Sims and SimCity were incrementally assembled out of "a mass of separate components", like a planet forming out of a cloud of dust -- they had to reach critical mass before tuning could even begin.
Before it was tuned, The Sims was known inside the company, not very affectionately, as "the toilet game", because there wasn't much else to do. SimCity 2000 wasn't fun until six weeks before it shipped.
The Sims didn't come together until a couple of months before ship. In her words: "Being involved in that tuning process, and seeing the game take shape from what had previously been a mass of separate components, was one of the most powerful experiences of my career."
The hard part wasn't the code -- it was explaining to EA not to panic. By every rule in EA's playbook the toilet game would never work, and it took Will Wright's tremendous stamina to keep it from being cancelled. Here's a screen recording of the actual June 1998 "Sims Steering Committee" build we showed EA to buy another year and a half -- bathtubs placeable on hills, placeholder pie menus, Archie Bunker permanently holding a burning cigar:
The distinction Kontorovich/Elliott-McCrea call "canonization" is what Chris called tuned emergence: the late, undervalued pass that turns an accreted mass into a coherent system.
What made The Sims accretive rather than disposable wasn't visible in the code mid-accretion -- it was that the tuning pass was a committed part of the method, held by people with the authority and stamina to protect it.
Which suggests the real question to ask about any AI-generated pile of working fragments isn't "is this slop?" but "who is signed up to tune it, and will management hold its nerve until they do?"
A toilet game with a Will Wright becomes the best-selling PC game of all time. A toilet game without one stays a toilet.
Lisp -vs- Forth -vs- PostScript: