Simon Willison’s Weblog

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

— Nathaniel Borenstein # 8th May 2024, 8:24 pm

It’s hard to overstate the value of LLM support when coding for fun in an unfamiliar language. [...] This example is totally trivial in hindsight, but might have taken me a couple mins to figure out otherwise. This is a bigger deal than it seems! Papercuts add up fast and prevent flow. (A lot of being a senior engineer is just being proficient enough to avoid papercuts).

— Geoffrey Litt # 18th March 2024, 6:16 pm

Find a level of abstraction that works for what you need to do. When you have trouble there, look beneath that abstraction. You won’t be seeing how things really work, you’ll be seeing a lower-level abstraction that could be helpful. Sometimes what you need will be an abstraction one level up. Is your Python loop too slow? Perhaps you need a C loop. Or perhaps you need numpy array operations.

You (probably) don’t need to learn C.

— Ned Batchelder # 24th January 2024, 6:25 pm

This is what I constantly tell my students: The hard part about doing a tech product for the most part isn’t the what beginners think makes tech hard — the hard part is wrangling systemic complexity in a good, sustainable and reliable way.

Many non-tech people e.g. look at programmers and think the hard part is knowing what this garble of weird text means. But this is the easy part. And if you are a person who would think it is hard, you probably don’t know about all the demons out there that will come to haunt you if you don’t build a foundation that helps you actively keeping them away.

— atoav # 30th November 2023, 9:18 pm

Interviewing a developer for whom English wasn’t his first language and he kept calling legacy code “legendary code” and now that’s all I want to write.

— Mark Norman Francis # 17th July 2018, 5:43 pm

Code is like a poem; it’s not just something we write to reach some practical result. Sometimes people that are far from the Redis philosophy suggest using other code written by other authors (frequently in other languages) in order to implement something Redis currently lacks. But to us this is like if Shakespeare decided to end Enrico IV using the Paradiso from the Divina Commedia. Is using any external code a bad idea? Not at all. Like in “One Thousand and One Nights” smaller self contained stories are embedded in a bigger story, we’ll be happy to use beautiful self contained libraries when needed. At the same time, when writing the Redis story we’re trying to write smaller stories that will fit in to other code.

— The Redis Manifesto # 2nd March 2018, 7:11 pm

By far the most important lesson I took out of this game is that whenever there’s behavior that needs to be repeated around to multiple types of entities, it’s better to default to copypasting it than to abstracting/generalizing it too early.

This is a very very hard thing to do in practice. As programmers we’re sort of wired to see repetition and want to get rid of it as fast as possible, but I’ve found that that impulse generally creates more problems than it solves. The main problem it creates is that early generalizations are often wrong, and when a generalization is wrong it ossifies the structure of the code around it in a way that is harder to fix and change than if it wasn’t there in the first place.

— SSYGEN # 26th February 2018, 5:23 am

Good design in computer programming consists of inventing abstractions that don’t leak.  Good programming consists of implementing those abstractions in such a way that they don’t leak.

— Mike Taylor # 26th April 2010, 5:42 pm

I think it’s really important to know the whole stack even if you don’t operate within the whole stack.

— Brad Fitzpatrick # 25th December 2009, 11:31 pm

Don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit.

— Linus Torvalds # 16th December 2007, 9:53 pm

The Web Application Scale of Stupidity goes from OGF (One Giant Function) to OOP (Object Oriented Programming), like this: OGF ——– sanity ——— OOP

— Cal Henderson (paraphrased) # 2nd November 2007, 6:23 am

Large codebases are the problem, not the language they’re written in. Find a way to break/decompose big codebases into little ones.

— Bill de hÓra # 27th September 2007, 3:11 pm

Erlang fits all the characteristics of an OO system, even though sequential Erlang is a functional language, not an OO language

— Ralph Johnson # 8th August 2007, 7:47 pm