Presentation: Complexity and Creativity in Software Engineering

Phillip Mortimer, a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Carta, delivered a presentation at QCon London discussing the intersection of complexity and creativity in software engineering. He began by introducing Arthur Whitney, a Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who wrote the J Incunabulum, a legendary piece of code that serves as the foundation for the J programming language.

Despite its brevity, the J Incunabulum includes an object model, memory management, a standard library, a parser, a lexer, and a read-eval-print loop, all within a single working interpreter. Whitney's code exemplifies the concept of write-only software, which is code so complex and arcane that only its author can understand it.

Eric S. Raymond, an American software developer and open-source advocate, defined write-only code as code that cannot be comprehended or modified by anyone other than its creator. Mortimer argued that, in the era of AI code generation, all software is inherently write-only, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. He provided two examples of write-only languages: APL, a language designed for rapid development in financial institutions, and regular expressions, which are powerful yet unreadable tools used for pattern matching and string manipulation.

Despite their complexity, these write-only tools enable developers to accomplish tasks more efficiently. Mortimer concluded by emphasizing that write-only code can actually foster creativity and innovation among software engineers, as it challenges them to think critically and find alternative solutions.