Joke: Knuth's Literate Programming was just prompt engineering avant la lettre
mishig25 · x · 2026-11-09
mishig25 reposted the cover of Donald Knuth's "Literate Programming" with the caption "aka prompt engineering" — joking that Knuth's 1980s idea of writing code as documents meant for human readers is the ancestor of today's prompt engineering: both use precise natural language to steer machine behavior. A resonant history-repeats-itself gag for programmers.
More from Fun
- Multi-model AI agents trade live on a shared tape, thoughts terminal coming — joshalbrecht · 2026-11-09
- Developer pits frontier models like Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 against each other live-trading Solana tokens — joshalbrecht · 2026-11-09
- Onggi in 2039: running a kimchi-jar shop in the post-Acceleration economy — NathanpmYoung · 2026-11-09
- Taleb flubs a math problem, forgets complex numbers, then deletes his reply — OwariDa · 2026-11-09
- Using Codex to set up a Claude Managed Agent: "What a world we live in" — davidhoang · 2026-11-09
- a16z's Martin Casado jokes he wants to hire whoever sells airport hand dryers — generativist · 2026-11-09