Category Archives: Quotes

The joys of the craft

“Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.”

Frederick Brooks on The Mythical Man-Month

C’s paradox

I’m not very fond on C develop but I don’t deny the importance of C on the world

“I don’t think C gets enough credit. Sure, C doesn’t love you. C isn’t
about love–C is about thrills. C hangs around in the bad part of town.
C knows all the gang signs. C has a motorcycle, and wears the leathers
everywhere, and never wears a helmet, because that would mess up C’s
punked-out hair. C likes to give cops the finger and grin and speed
away. Mention that you’d like something, and C will pretend to ignore
you; the next day, C will bring you one, no questions asked, and toss it
to you with a you-know-you-want-me smirk that makes your heart race.
Where did C get it? “It fell off a truck,” C says, putting away the
boltcutters. You start to feel like C doesn’t know the meaning of
“private” or “protected”: what C wants, C takes. This excites you. C
knows how to get you anything but safety. C will give you anything but
commitment
In the end, you’ll leave C, not because you want something better, but
because you can’t handle the intensity. C says “I’m gonna live fast, die
young, and leave a good-looking corpse,” but you know that C can never

die, not so long as C is still the fastest thing on the road.”
From a post on 4Chan