Programming Perl by Larry Wall et al.
Around 2001, I needed to learn Perl. The primary means for doing so was Programming Perl by Wall, Orwant, and Christiansen — and indeed I did learn Perl, and spent an early part of my career using it as the glue language that made all sorts of impossible tasks possible (there are legacy posts recorded here that attest to this).
But the book had three surprising gifts that have stayed with me far longer than the syntax.
- A model for how to teach with a linguistics inflected, recursively absurd humor
- A preview of the wonder of watching a toddler learn to speak
- An absurdist hello-world I have carried into every language since:
razzle
By Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant
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Dear Dario, Open Source Claude Code
Photo Credit: TechCrunch at https://www.flickr.com/photos/techcrunch/53202070940/
It’s a nightmare that wakes any developer in a cold sweat: I exposed internal code. This week, some poor developer at Anthropic unintentionally published the source code to Claude Code. The internet genies have copied it thousands of times and now all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will never get the code off the internet again.
But now what? I’d argue that Anthropic should open source Claude Code. Here’s the open letter I’d write to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei if I thought there was any chance he’d pay the likes of me any attention.
My Successes with AI-augmented Code as of March 2026
Being a computer dork of a certain stripe, I’ve had a TODO(.md) in my
personal wiki for a long time that was full of IT / tooling tasks that I wanted
to do, but that I never found the time:
- Port the NeXT desktop to FreeBSD
- Clean up my blog repository of incorrectly committed binary assets that were bloating out my storage footprint and slowing up checkouts
- Remedy data loss in my blog due to a botched cleanup operation
- etc.
I delivered every one of these with the help of AI. So I thought I’d take a quick inventory from roughly last year at this time to now.