Perlisisms

These are fun to say out loud in the voice of the Kai Lentit's Perl programmer

https://youtu.be/0jK0ytvjv-E?t=43

https://youtu.be/xE9W9Ghe4Jk?t=238

> 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.

> 102. One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.

Seems to be a strike against LLM-based programming systems like Claude.

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."

> 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.

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

Pretty relevant with LLMs and coding agents.

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

>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?