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AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

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Marvin Minsky/Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood and sloppily-formulated ideas

from Minsky/LLMs

OTOH – they can do a lot of interesting and powerful things! And while they may not be intelligent in their own right, they seem perfectly suited to be components of a Society of Mind or tools for realizing Marvin Minsky/Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood and sloppily-formulated ideas.

People seem to realize this, that's why everybody and his brother is building some kind of "agent platform" with no very good idea what that means. Doesn't matter I guess.

from In Defense of Mechanism

See Marvin Minsky/Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood and sloppily-formulated ideas

Amen to tools for thought. Not clear turning a programming language into an OS is the ultimate tool, although it is suggestive. This is the thing about Lisp – it may be a programming language but it also feels like a medium for expressing ideas. Most languages are utilitariand and don't feel like thinking.

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Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood and sloppily-formulated ideas

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Marvin Minsky/Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood and sloppily-formulated ideas

07 Jul 2022 - 24 Oct 2025

theory/Minsky - Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood and sloppily-formulated ideas.pdf at master · devinmcgloin/theory

I recommend this paper to people who make arguments of the form that "computers can do only precise, fully defined things that they are programmed to do". Although in this age of generative AI people probably don't talk that way any more.

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Sussman gave a talk with the same title Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood and sloppily formulated ideas | Companion to the 20th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications

Programming as a linguistic phenomena, a means of self-expression

There is poetry and prose