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> 1) have books like 'The Art of Programming' on my shelf, Decades ago I used to be constantly thumbing through vol. 1 of Knuth (Fundamental Algorithms) and co
by Animats 2y ago
> 1) have books like 'The Art of Programming' on my shelf,
Decades ago I used to be constantly thumbing through vol. 1 of Knuth (Fundamental Algorithms) and coding those basic algorithms. Now that all comes from libraries and generics. There has been progress, but not via LLMs in that area.
- nyrikki 2y agoThat is part of the problem, LLM coding assistants often code out what a human would often use a core library for, only including when required, like importing deque in Python to do a BFS. An example I helped someone with on AoC last week. Looking for 'lines' in a game board in Python, the LLM had an outer loop j, with an inner loop i This is how it 'matched' a line. if i != j and (x1 == x2) or (y1 = y2): I am sure you can see the problem with that, but some of the problems in Knuth 4a are harder for others. There is a lot to learn for many in Knuth 1, but I view it as world building for other concepts. With LLMs polluting web search results, the point is to have reference material you trust. Knuth is accessible, I did error on that side rather than suggesting books that are grad level and above that I really appreciate but would just collect dust. People will need to figure out what works for them, but having someone to explain why you do something is important IMHO.