Greenspun's Tenth Rule for Integration

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a previous post about applying these EIPs concretely on Kubernetes for AI orchestration. That post answers “how”; this one is the “why you should care” piece that should have come before it.

Philip Greenspun, writing about Lisp in the mid-1990s, formulated what came to be called his Tenth Rule: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. His point has aged well. Programs grow; the things they need to express grow with them; absent a richer substrate, the missing pieces get reinvented in the language at hand, typically badly.

Patterns on Hullabalooing

Greenspun's Tenth Rule for Integration