"We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" - Gerald Sussman (2011)

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gobdovan · 2026-06 · Recommendation

Grandparent is onto something. You can't define correctness without a spec. And since most business-oriented software, which most of us work with, isn't made against a comprehensive spec, you can argue that anything falling outside it is either a bug or a feature. 'If your disk backup software corrupts backups' has behind it a clean definition that's (pretty) unambiguous and you don't care about, since it's already outsourced to some cloud solution. But 'User finds it easy to buy more stuff' does not. Also, mandatory Sussman reference [0], where he talks about correctness not being that important and gives Google as example, that just needs to be close enough and not disastrously incorrect + interesting stuff around engineers confusing brittleness with correctness. [0] [VIDEO]

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teleforce · 2025-04 · Recommendation

I highly recommend Prof. Sussman talk at the Strange Loop conference 2011 [1]. It's not his inaugural lecture but it's pretty close where he talk about his research work with his former students. It's also paved the way to modern constraint programming based on logic and optimization which are the machine intelligence that's complementary to the conventional data driven and learning bases AI. [1] "We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" - Gerald Sussman - MIT (2011) [video]: [VIDEO]

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throwaway71271 · 2023-09 · Recommendation

For some reason programming is not getting any easier, I can even make an argument its getting worse despite all the improved tooling and andragogy investments we have done. Programming is in some sort of local minimum and we keep going in circles. Few years ago I watched this talk by Gerald Sussman: "We really don't know how to compute" - [VIDEO] and it made me question my views on what I think programming is. I dont know if its because people are afraid to try new things, or there is no funding to try new things, we are kind of stuck. People thinking "don't reinvent the wheel" and for some reason think we have built a wheel (as Casey Muratori says: [LINK] ). We have a square at best. There are so many problems in the world, and a lot of them need robust and resilient programs to be solved, e.g. self cleaning public toilets or worm farm that you feed bio garbage and it produces protein flour. The challenge is exactly the same as it was 80 years ago, manage complexity in chaotic and emergent systems: chaos, complexity and entropy as the poet said. And to be honest, I think we have gotten worse at managing all of those, most bugs that we encounter now is like a murder mystery from Detective Conan and it requires Shinichi Kudo level of deductive reasoning to figure out what is going on. Programming will remain hard if you keep thinking it is just a translation problem from a "business requirement" to a "computer language".

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