# A Hacker's Guide to Herbert Simon's Heuristic Compiler (1961)
Copyright © 2026 Jeff Shrager (<jshrager@gmail.com>). All rights
reserved. (See copyright details at the end of this document.)
*For the curious visitor who wants to see GPS-style means-end analysis
turned on the job of programming itself: a 1961 IPL-V program that
writes IPL-V programs*
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*Warning*: Large parts of this document were created using AI
assistance. *Doveryai, No Proveryai!*
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## Before You Arrive: What Is the Heuristic Compiler?
In 1961 Herbert Simon, working at Carnegie Tech and the RAND
Corporation, asked whether writing a program could be treated as a
show original
This was done entirely by Claude in about two hours from the 1961 source listing, although it started from a nearly complete, modern IPL-V interpreter that I wrote in Common Lisp in order to make the Logic Theorist run again ([2603.13514] Executable Archaeology: Reanimating the Logic Theorist from its IPL-V Source )
I explicitly tried to minimlally intervene because of the elegance of the world’s last AI-assisted coder (claude) making world’s first AI-assisted coder run again!
'Jeff
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