alt Hacker NewsThis echoes SICP's admonition that "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."
Which is absurd on it's face for most day to day programmers, but a critical distinction for theoretical computer scientists.
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It's not absurd if you think about the lifetime of software. It is created once and used immediately, but reread, adapted and tinkered with for decades after that if it is useful.
The number of reads is FAR greater than the number of writes for any given piece of code, and it needs to be comprehensible if it is to be extensible.
So in fact that instruction applies to all software, and I wish more people would take it seriously. It also applies in the AI era, because the AI has to understand the code too, and AI's spend more time reading code than writing it, indeed they base what they write more on what they read than humans do.
This can still be true, but it will be in a language divorced from registers and stacks.
Most day to day programmers prefer to keep the source code to their programs rather than the executable file, so I think it's not absurd at all, it just takes a brief moment of reflection.