On Peano, AI Coding Assistants and the Mirror of Galadriel

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was born in 1982, a year that let me see, one after the other, the Commodore-64, the Amiga-600 and my first pc ever, an Olivetti-286 bought second or even third hand from a family friend. We are at the end of the ’80s, early ’90s at the latest, and I remember three things from that time:

computing was an “analogue” experience of sharing. We would all be together, now at my house, now at yours, trying to work out how these things worked.
a book on the C language, “Guida al Turbo C”, or something of the sort with the word Turbo in it. I remember buying it at a newsstand. I bought it because it came with floppy disks and because the cover had the words “Turbo” and “Programmazione” written on it. But above all “Turbo”.
after television ran one of the first news stories about “computer viruses”, my grandmother became very unhappy about leaving me in front of one of those machines, at the risk of catching some strange illness.

I can say that I have never abandoned C in thirty-odd years; even when I write in C++, everything stays very “C-ish”. If I write in Python I keep thinking about the chain reaction from the code to the interpreter, and I cannot help wondering which choice in the code is the more advantageous.

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On Peano, AI Coding Assistants and the Mirror of Galadriel