The essential work of is building the theory of the problem + solution. Theory then enables creation of working code. In the end, the code is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Theory is indispensable. (cf. Peter Naur, 1985)
Any conversation
I've been on a kick lately of trying to visualize the oscillating clock, and ultimately the effectively arbitrarily complex activity of a computer processor, as modern refinements of the line shaft factory of the 19th century. Of compute as being not much more than profoundly refined "work" delivered by the electrical grid into marvelously complex machines.
Does that, as a metaphor at least, feel as important to you as it has to me of late? We spend so much time in a world abstracted.
I notice that language models are much better at programming than at writing. This is largely because, in programming, they have a closed feedback loop that allows them to find errors. Writing is much more complicated because the feedback is much more diffuse and delayed over time. In fact, it is often not well-defined.
I needed to process 20,000 json files & 20,000 JXL files. I'm pulling together a website from them all. Anyway, started with emacs elisp to handle it all, just because I've not done that before. Went kinda ok, and I'm gonna use org-mode to export it all to a website (done that bit loads of times before).
In the end, I ended up breaking out my C programming skills (late 80s->nowish). It was a delight. Nothing more refreshing than writing raw code, that doesn't rely on 3rd party code/libs.
