Re:Epigrams in Programming
by gwern on Saturday December 23, 2023 @11:56AM
(#38745669)
This version shouldn't be linked, even though it's the canonical one everyone links, because it's bad. If you check it against the original paper (https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1982-perlis.pdf) you can see it has transcription errors and omits a bunch - it just drops the last 10! Perlis goes to 130, not 120!
[ Parent
| on HN ]
#131 HTML rhymes with 'hell' for a reason.
Re:Epigrams in Programming
by fuzztester on Saturday December 23, 2023 @02:30PM
(#38747301)
Your arithmetic is off by orders of magnitude.
120! - 130 is not 10!
Worse is better
Re:Epigrams in Programming
by fuzztester on Saturday December 23, 2023 @02:35PM
(#38747352)
Reading the epigrams,
a flash of insight:
Perlis was a secret Zen master.
You know, I dismissed these too easily in a different comment. Thinking of them as koans - containing contradictions, not holding truth, but revealing insights via the reader’s debate and struggle and resistance - makes me like them a lot more!
Re:Epigrams in Programming
by fuzztester on Saturday December 23, 2023 @05:11PM
(#38748788)
へー
https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=ja&text=heh&op=tran...
Make sure to press the speaker icon in the lower box. ;)
or, in perlis's own words:
> 125. Epigrams crystallize incongruities.
Re:Epigrams in Programming
by fuzztester on Sunday December 24, 2023 @02:09PM
(#38755790)
Ah, the duality! as some Advaitins would say ;)
oh, the last 10 are meta-epigrams, the epigrams themselves are difficult, meta-epigrams more so.
Ok, I changed to that from https://cpsc.yale.edu/epigrams-programming on the grounds that accuracy and completeness are more important than (somewhat) degraded readability. Thanks!
Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20230127130734/http://pu.inf.uni... has an HTML version - thanks to o11c (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38746206).