Now can we?

gwolf — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 16:43:57 +0000

Can we programmers actually «cite any inspirations for code we write»? Do we often do that?
Be it that I learnt programming at school or by reading books, or that I took a "BootCamp", I cannot usually said where I got a particular construct from. I could, of course, say that I write C in the K&R style — but I doubt that's what Siewicz refers to. And of course, Perl-heads will recognize a "Schwartzian transform". But in general, I learnt _how to code_, and I am not able to attribute specific constructs of my programming to specific bits of code. Just like an LLM.

If most of my programming consisted of searching for answers to a question related to mine in StackOverflow... I *could* get persuaded to link to the post in question in a comment before each included snippet. But that's also not something I've seen to be frequent. And if I didn't write the comment _the same moment_ I included said snippet, it's most likely I never will.

So... I think there is an argumentative issue in here :-)

LWN: Comments on "The FSF considers large language models"

Now can we?