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(See also Goals, Death)
"Now wait", he interrupted before Richard even had a chance to start, "don't I vaguely remember that you had some sort of computer when you were here? When was it? 1977?"
"Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind of electric abacus, but ..."
"Oh, now, don't underestimate the abacus," said Reg, "In skilled hands it's a very sophisticated calculating device. Furthermore it requires no power, can be made with any materials you have in hand, and never goes bing in the middle of an important piece of work."
"So an electric one would be particularly pointless," said Richard.
"True enough," conceded Reg.
"There really wasn't a lot this machine could do that you couldn't do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble," said Richard, "but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim-witted pupil."
Reg looked at him quizzically.
"I had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply," he said. "I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I'm sitting."
"I'm sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?"
This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.
Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?"
"It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils", came a low growl from somewhere on the table, "without undergoing a pre-frontal lobotomy."
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
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BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.
Seymour Papert
An anecdote from IBM's Yorktown Heights Research Center. When a programmer used his new computer terminal, all was fine when he was sitting down, but he couldn't log in to the system when he was standing up. That behavior was 100 percent repeatable: he could always log in when sitting and never when standing.
Most of us just sit back and marvel at such a story; how could that terminal know whether the poor guy was sitting or standing? Good debuggers, though, knew that there has to be a reason. Electrical theories are the easiest to hypothesize: was there a loose with under the carpet, or problems with static electricity? But electrical problems are rarely consistently reproducible. An alert IBMer finally noticed that the problem was in the terminal's keyboard: the tops of two keys were switched. When the programmer was seated he was a touch typist and the problem went unnoticed, but when he stood he was led astray by hunting and pecking.
"Programming Pearls" column, by Jon Bentley in CACM February 1985
As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing.
A person who is more than casually interested in computers should be well schooled in machine language, since it is a fundamental part of a computer.
Donald Knuth
A hacker does for love what others would not do for money.
user, n.: The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot."
Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top
[I always thought "computer professional" was the phrase hackers used when they meant "idiot." Ed.]
From Fortune
HTTPD Error 666 : BOFH was here
It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?
Alan Perlis
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