@AGARTHA_NOBLE @mjg59 @raymaccarthy I mean, it takes a lot of discipline to remove the soul from some prose; I think code's not any different.

@raymaccarthy @mjg59 I don't really hate LLMs per se, but they do generate this soulless "enterprisey" code as an artifact of how they're trained. The thing that rubbed me the wrong way about the series of posts was mainly that it's this call to mediocrity.

And then he uses Roast Beef as an example; Roast Beef is severely depressed and has this pathological self-deprecation and also is not a real hacker: he's a drawing of a dog. But one of the reasons Achewood sticks with people is Onstad is brilliant with his use of language and is pretty good at sketching personalities. There are people that say comics are not art, Ebert went to his grave insisting video games cannot be art, this guy is saying to the reader, specifically, that some code can be art but then says "Your code sucks, it's never going to be beautiful" and he uses this guy as an example:
2007-02-02

@mjg59 If you measure prose by looking at corporate emails and VCR manuals, then you come to the same conclusion.

When I write prose, I'm putting my thoughts into English. When I write code, I'm telling my thoughts to a machine.

Even a little script, I'm teaching the machine how I want to talk to it. I put it in ~/bin and I've taught the computer a word. I build up my little environment where the machine and I understand each other. Dick Gabriel, the "Worse is Better" author, said:

> I'm always delighted by the light touch and stillness of early programming languages. Not much text; a lot gets done. Old programs read like quiet conversations between a well-spoken research worker and a well-studied mechanical colleague, not as a debate with a compiler. Who'd have guessed sophistication bought such noise?

If style and thoughts couldn't come out through the code, he wouldn't be able to say something like that.

ken, when describing his compiler bug, started off talking about adding '\v' to the C compiler. First he hard-coded the numeric value for '\v': `if(c == 'v') return 11;`. Then, because the C compiler was written in C, he could write `if(c == 'v') return '\v';`. And he said "It is as close to a 'learning' program as I have ever seen." He's taught the machine. A lot of people have read the paper, but you can go read ken's code, a lot of it is out there. (You can download a CD image, mount it, and look at his code: http://9legacy.org/download.html .) You can see a style of thinking, you can see ken in his code. Maybe you can't see someone's personality in a four-page technical manual that comes with your refrigerator, maybe you can't see someone's personality in a webapp at your day job, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to create something beautiful.

Here is a small program:

echo '++++[->++++<]>[-<+++++>>+++++++>++<<]<------.>>+++++.--.+.>.<[-<+>>>+<<]>[--<++>>-<]>---.+++++++++++++.+.<<<.>>>-------.---.<<<--.>.>>+++.-------.++.++[->+<<+>]>++++++.<<.<<.>[-<<->>]<<++++.[>>>--<<<-]>>>+.' | \
sed -E 's/(.)/\1\n/g' | \
awk 'BEGIN{print "BEGIN{p=0;"}END{print "}"}/\./{print "printf \"%c\",a[p]"}/\+/{print "a[p]++"}/-/{print "a[p]--"}/</{print "p--"}/>/{print "p++"}/\[/{print "while(a[p]){"}/\]/{print "}"}' | \
awk -f /dev/fd/0

Every coder I have showed this program to in person has laughed: why did they laugh?
p761-thompson.pdf

@mjg59

> There's no way to turn "increment this variable" into life changing prose.

"There's no possibility for prose to be beautiful. There's no way to turn 'What time is it?' into life-changing prose."

> (1) your code is not that code

Maybe *yours* isn't.