in these days of coding agents and what-not, i often think of gerald sussman's comment that one no longer constructs systems from known parts, that instead one does basic science on the functionality of foreign libraries (https://wingolog.org/archives/2009/03/24/international-lisp-conference-day-two); he was right then and i hate it as much as i did 16 years ago
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@wingo Someone made a great blog post that spawned from your toot: https://blog.information-superhighway.net/on-the-need-for-understanding
@wingo same, but i feel it's worth noting that early programmers were doing science with the hardware available heh
and that agentic stuff is more pseudo science: "here's how i operate a deeply stochastic process: i have convinced myself it understands language on a semantic level"
You’ve got a dangling %29 in the URL sir
@wingo (flipping heck at that penultimate paragraph)