[HN Gopher] Gerald Sussman: Programming is (should be) fun (2022...
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Gerald Sussman: Programming is (should be) fun (2022) [video]
Author : nequo
Score : 289 points
Date : 2024-06-12 22:02 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| Great to hear the views on programming from one of the authors of
| SICP.
|
| The anecdotes in the first few mins are nice as well.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Great to hear the views on programming from one of the
| authors of SICP.
|
| I'll blog about it one day (I know it's been five years I've
| been saying that but hey) but... Sussman invited me for tea in
| his office so I ran to the MIT co-op but couldn't find SICP
| there so I told the person there I really needed that book for
| I'd see Sussman the next day: he called the Harvard co-op and
| they told me they had one copy in stock. So I uber'ed to the
| Harvard bookstore and bought SICP.
|
| Next day I went to Sussman's office at the MIT and when I
| arrived Abelson was there, by chance (he was leaving) so they
| _both_ dedicated me my copy of SICP. And Sussman added "had
| you been there 15 minutes earlier my wife would have signed it
| too!".
|
| I had no idea his wife was the proofreader for SICP.
|
| Fun story. Probably rambling by now but all this really
| happened. I've got a cool picture of these two wizards and me
| holding the purple book they just signed!
| code_biologist wrote:
| That is so cool. Watching those SICP lecture videos as a
| teenager was incredibly formative for me. I still consider
| myself a knight of the lambda calculus.
| bitwize wrote:
| I coined an AI koan that goes something like this:
|
| A novice travelled to the East to learn at the feet of
| Sussman. As Sussman lectured on writing device drivers with
| low-level Lisp code, the novice interrupted: "But Master, is
| Lisp not a high-level language?" To which Sussman replied:
| "There was once a fisherman who spotted an eagle on the
| shore. 'Brother Eagle,' said the fisherman, 'how impossibly
| distant is the sky!' The eagle said nothing, and flew off."
| With that, the novice was enlightened.
|
| It's fictional, but it's based on a real-life Sussman
| encounter I had. A hacker (it may have been Dimitris
| Vyzovitis) was telling me about things he'd done in "low-
| level languages like C and Lisp". Then I said "But Lisp is
| high-level!" at which point the hacker paused and said "Let
| me get Jerry." "Jerry" turned out to be Gerald Sussman, who
| explained to me, in the most nerdy-enthusiastic Sussman-like
| way, that Lisp was the low-level language of a virtual
| machine which he had actually implemented in hardware[0]. And
| it was _profoundly_ enlightening.
|
| [0] See Steele, G.L. and Sussman, G.J., AI Memo 514, "Design
| of LISP-based Processors, or SCHEME: A Dielectric LISP, or
| Finite Memories Considered Harmful, or LAMBDA: The Ultimate
| Opcode", https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5731
| selimthegrim wrote:
| TIL where Lambda The Ultimate came from.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Just in case you only learned about that one: there's a
| whole subseries of 'em.
|
| My current favourite is https://www2.cs.sfu.ca/CourseCent
| ral/383/havens/pubs/lambda-...
|
| _Debunking the "Expensive Procedure Call Myth or,
| Procedure Call Implementations Considered Harmful or,
| LAMBDA: The Ultimate GOTO_
|
| But I see some recent authors have gotten into the game,
| so it could be one of them updates that slot.
| musha68k wrote:
| The book is also so great because it highlights the
| _creative_ aspect to programming - which they show could
| (also) be seen as an art form; where it 's beyond the
| utilitarian aspects of coding; appreciating aesthetics /
| intellectual beauty. All for the sake of instilling in their
| students a more holistic understanding of the _craft_ while
| doing so.
|
| IMHO SICP feels "timeless" somewhat because of that.
| hasmanean wrote:
| I spent my life looking for such an elegant tome. If I had
| discovered it when I was 15 maybe my life would have been
| happier.
|
| Utilitarian programming is like utilitarian food.
| Programming should be seen as an act of worship to the god
| of simplicity. If the artificial world intrudes and makes
| the program complicated, this is what leads to suffering.
| Ultimately it is the world which should be changed.
| neilv wrote:
| Sussman is one of the great ones.
| bryancoxwell wrote:
| Sussman and Rich Hickey are two people whose talks I never stop
| enjoying.
| floobertoober wrote:
| The only person I'd add to that list is Simon Peyton Jones. I
| could watch them talk all day!
| vaylian wrote:
| I don't know him yet. Are there some talks you can recommend
| that would be a good starting point?
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| That must of course be "Haskell is useless"
| https://youtu.be/iSmkqocn0oQ?si=IkTHHdH1423tOVvz
|
| But apart from that, his enthusiasm can even make the
| mseemingly most boring topic interesting.
|
| I'd personally start either at "the story of Haskell"
| Escape from the Ivory Tower https://youtu.be/cOqxiS-
| WN1w?si=1iXpGE7cJZa4tbbJ Or something more recent, about
| Epic's Verse
| https://youtu.be/OJv8rFap0Nw?si=OE2mUllQfLmV29Bk
| dualogy wrote:
| > But apart from that, his enthusiasm can even make the
| seemingly most boring topic interesting.
|
| Totally, his ever-fresh, ever-genuine excitement with all
| this stuff is so contagious (for the duration, and then
| some =)
| endgame wrote:
| And if Haskell isn't your jam, maybe Excel is more to
| your taste? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH2Je6wUvPs
| keithalewis wrote:
| It's only the most popular programming language in the
| world.
| endgame wrote:
| And it's functional, too!
| tmtvl wrote:
| I quite enjoy Guy Steele's talks as well.
| gumby wrote:
| I don't know Hicky, but Guy, Gerry and Hal are great human
| beings as well.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The talks that guy and Richard Gabriel did together were
| pretty good. And of course Richard Gabriel himself.
| sph wrote:
| Add Joe Armstrong to that list for me.
| christophilus wrote:
| I loved listening to Joe. Humility and humor (or, should I
| say humour in his honor?), practicality and intelligence. RIP
| xyzwave wrote:
| I haven't watched the video yet, but I was instantly reminded of
| the Alan J. Perlis quote he and Abelson used for SICP's
| dedication:
|
| > I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer
| science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an
| awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted
| every now and then, and after a while we began to take their
| complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were
| responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these
| machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for
| stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping
| fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never
| loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become
| missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world
| has too many of those already. What you know about computing
| other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful
| computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think
| and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more
| than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.
| ozim wrote:
| Oof hits hard when I think about agile coaches, clean code
| ambassadors and whole cottage industry of how to make your code
| and team perfect.
| schneems wrote:
| I've learned that aiming for perfection is how some people
| have fun. I think the tragedy is when fun, energy, and mental
| health aren't part of the conversation about how work gets
| done.
| HansardExpert wrote:
| As a support engineer...
|
| "Hey Mr Customer... don't worry that all your data is corrupt
| or you lost access to your disks ... you have been set in a new
| direction and we're just making your day job 'fun'"
|
| They're not Bugs ... what you have here are little balls of
| 'fun' /s
|
| ;)
| nequo wrote:
| That may well be the difference between "programming" and
| "software engineering."
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I know which I'd rather do.
| itronitron wrote:
| "this is your first step on an incredible journey to fully
| appreciate how humans ascribe meaning and significance to
| words they have typed or photographs they have taken..."
| Ma8ee wrote:
| "We in computer science"! I interpret that as people doing
| research, not the rest of us who mostly do bean counting
| programs. For those that pay our salaries, not losing any beans
| is way more import than how much fun we have, or how much we
| stretch the possibilities.
| schneems wrote:
| I think the act of coding is fun, even if the domain is not.
|
| I think the goal should still be fun. It's not fun to lose
| the beans.
|
| I think when the coding becomes overly fearful is when bugs
| and problems happen. Maybe you don't have much leeway around
| the bean part, but you have a lot of room to test and
| validate that system. How do you make that system as fearless
| to work with as possible?
|
| It's a difficult goal, but achieving it is a worthwhile
| accomplishment. A difficult puzzle that some might find fun.
| jt2190 wrote:
| You're describing nothing more than having the programmer
| be able to stay in the "fun/challenging" zone, above the
| "boring" zone and below the "stressful/helpless" zone. This
| is obviously very personal: What is boring for you may be
| challenging for me. Further, _all_ learners of _any_
| subject are trying to stay in this zone. Professional
| educators are very aware of this and refer to it broadly as
| "student engagement".
|
| The goal of a software project, however, is not optimal
| individual learning about programming, it is usually
| something else.
| schneems wrote:
| > The goal of a software project, however, is not optimal
| individual learning about programming, it is usually
| something else.
|
| Sure. It's my goal. Not my project's. My project doesn't
| care about anything really.
|
| The name of the game for me (the programmer) is
| maximizing my output without getting burned out. To that
| end, my intermediate goal is to find fun where I can.
| That's the game.
| convolvatron wrote:
| the sad thing is that the organizations that dont have any
| fun, that are focussed on the serious, soul crushing business
| of making sure no beans get dropped, are generally really
| awful at keeping track of the beans.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I produce my best work at my best productivity when I'm
| having fun, so those that pay my salary should appreciate
| that. This is a case where my values and the values of the
| beancounters are aligned.
|
| If I'm not having fun, then I'm in the wrong position and
| need to move on. Life is too short to have my day job be a
| grind, and I won't produce great work in that condition.
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| I can't wait to watch this. I haven't gotten to do SICP yet but
| have it checked out and did get to listen to the classes while
| doing home renovations.
|
| The Sussman quote from the SICP classes about understanding
| complicated things makes it in to a lot of my presentations (in
| architecture of all things) and it's the slide that ALWAYS gets
| people frantically taking a note.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Would you kindly share that quote here?
| hydrox24 wrote:
| Until OP delivers (and in case OP does not); I suspect it's
| the following quote:
|
| > "The key to understanding complicated things is knowing
| what not to look at, not to compute, not to think" --Sussman.
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| That's it, and thanks. Somehow I missed the request to post
| the comment. (facepalm)
| rramadass wrote:
| The Software Industry needs to take notes from this. They are the
| ones who have beaten the fun out of Programming and turned it
| into a drudgery/chore and have caused many Programmers who loved
| their craft to quit the field entirely. It is possible to meet
| customer/business needs and still create/maintain a work
| environment where the programming activity itself is fun for the
| developers. The way to do it is to abandon _Taylorism Management_
| and approach Software Development as a "Human-first" activity
| akin to that of a poet/painter/artist. Promote Autonomy,
| challenges compatible with competence, encourage
| novelty/learning/training and focus less on schedules,
| micromanagement and detailed processes.
| stevenally wrote:
| Second that. I have been in the industry for 37 years. The
| Taylorism didn't exist until "Agile" came along around the year
| 2000. Every programmer was a craftsman before that.
|
| These days, I wouldn't take (or get)a job in most software
| companies. I suspect that in quite a few non software companies
| there are software craftspeople working away quietly.
| dualogy wrote:
| > The Taylorism didn't exist until "Agile" came along around
| the year 2000.
|
| Its widespread adoption (and usually counter to the spirit of
| the original Manifest itself) took years however -- years
| where most places, the craftfulness was still prevalent.
| Myself I haven't encountered that in teams until the
| mid-2010s, less than a decade ago. Might have been earlier in
| SV, of course, though. And the bigger Java/.NET/Enterprise
| shops.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > The Taylorism didn't exist until "Agile" came along around
| the year 2000.
|
| There was _plenty_ of that before 2000, but it was more in
| the mainframe world. "Data processing". Government
| contracts. Business applications. "Software analysts" who
| broke the problem down into small chunks, and gave those to
| programmers.
|
| I have been in the industry for 39 years, and I avoided
| almost all of that, but it was there...
| mingusrude wrote:
| > ...akin to that of a poet/painter/artist.
|
| Anecdotally, programmer colleagues that view themselves as
| artists are generally harder to work with than those that
| identifies as craftsmen. It's generally much easier to have a
| sound argument about someone's work if they don't view it as
| their art.
| p_l wrote:
| "Craft" is very much an emotional identity and art form, and
| for many people craft is fun as well - maybe not the exact
| same emotion, but for me craft is the quiet kind of fun.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I identify as a craftsman but I resonate with the above
| comment.
|
| Ultimately programming is half technical (what does the
| computer do) and half human expression (reading and writing
| code).
|
| The latter [0] is really more of an art than a science or an
| engineering discipline. Look at all the attempts to prove
| that one particular way of writing programs is more
| productive, comprehensible or maintainable than others. They
| all failed in unique ways, perhaps because human
| communication is highly complex and contextual. The only
| thing we all might agree on is "consistency is good".
|
| [0] The former is in my opinion generally overlooked in many
| fields, even though it's the most measurable. But it is
| apparently often in conflict with with the latter
| unfortunately.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| The news of Lynn Conway's death hit me hard because I learned a
| lot from her but I never got to meet her and thank her.
|
| I learned a lot from Sussman too and I'm very glad I've gotten
| the chance to buttonhole him in the hallway several times and ask
| him a question and let him talk. I always learn something much
| more interesting than the answer to my original question.
|
| I highly recommend stopping by and saying hi to Sussman if you
| find yourself at CSAIL.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| To me, I always feel this disconnect when people from academia
| talk about programming. I guess this is just me because of my
| personal experiences as a coder though, andothers don't have
| this.
| xbar wrote:
| Hm. I feel it differently. As a software engineering
| entrepreneur for some decades, I feel keenly the urgency of
| getting features implemented, bugs fixed, and teams motivated.
| It is usually a grind.
|
| But when I want to feel a spiritual connection to the
| fundamental principles of my work effort, academia is one of
| several places I turn to.
| danybittel wrote:
| Oh I love this: "I use programs as a way of remembering stuff. My
| memory is the programs I write. If I learn something math or
| physics or some other maybe biology and I write a program that
| represent that so I can read the program later it's not
| ambiguous, easy to read and that way I sort of store my
| knowledge."
| dgb23 wrote:
| Then you will likely enjoy this talk as well:
|
| "Programming for the Expression of Ideas"
|
| https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Expression-of-Ideas/
|
| Very adjacent to the quote above. He talks about how
| programming helps to understand things (mathematics,
| physics...) in a deeper way.
| dazzawazza wrote:
| When I was a child I often explored problems using BASIC. It
| was a really powerful way for me to creatively learn. I tend to
| think in pictures and find maths hard to truly understand.
| Coding allows me to create pictures and relationships in my
| head. I was lucky to find this out when I was young. I'd be
| lost without it.
| lynx23 wrote:
| I use programming exactly for that, to get rid of ambiguity in
| notes and make them execut/verifyable. Actually, that was my
| biggest issue with math: I dont trust myself to make no errors
| and neither can I trust myself to see them. A
| compiler/interpreter will make me notice.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Reminds me of my favorite quote from Living Documentation by
| Cyrille Martraire:
|
| > Software development is all about knowledge and decision-
| making based on that knowledge, which in turn creates
| additional knowledge. The given problem, the decision that was
| made, the reason it was made that way, the facts that led to
| that decision, and the considered alternatives are all
| knowledge... each instruction typed in a programming language
| is a decision... Software design can last a long time. It can
| last long enough to forget about previous decisions made, as
| well as their contexts. It can last long enough for people to
| leave, taking with them their knowledge, and for new people to
| join, lacking knowledge. Knowledge is central to a design
| activity like software development. Most of the time this
| design activity is, for many good reasons, a team effort
| involving more than one person. Working together means making
| decisions together or making decisions based on someone else's
| knowledge. Something unique with software development is that
| the design involves not only people but also machines... Using
| a formal language like a programming language, we pass
| knowledge and decisions to a computer in a form it can
| understand. Having a computer understand source code is not the
| hard part... The hardest part is for other people to understand
| what has been done so that they can then do better and faster
| work. The greater the ambition, the more documentation becomes
| necessary to enable a cumulative process of knowledge
| management that scales beyond what fits in our heads. When our
| brains and memories are not enough, we need assistance from
| technologies such as writing, printing, and software to help
| remember and organize larger sets of knowledge.
| librasteve wrote:
| raku is still -Ofun
| fuzztester wrote:
| Sure is.
|
| Just saw this a few days ago:
|
| Raku -Ofun for Everyone - Daniel Sockwell
|
| https://youtu.be/waHAGThlRH8?si=a_Jvt6jf5aQpjC-Y
| omoikane wrote:
| This presentation seem to be mostly about the community
| aspects of Raku in how they made the language approachable.
| Is there a presentation that focuses more on the technical
| aspects of how Raku's syntax and libraries would make it more
| fun relative to Perl or Ruby?
| fire_lake wrote:
| Tragic that they replaced Lisp with Python in universities. We're
| suppose to be learning about computation, not corporate duct
| taping.
| epolanski wrote:
| Plenty of universities teach Lisp, Haskell, Scala, Reason,
| etc..
| fredrikholm wrote:
| The SICP course as it is taught today at MIT had Scheme
| replaced with Python some years ago. I'm assuming that's what
| OP was referring to.
| kkylin wrote:
| I don't think the new course is "SICP with Python"; my
| impression (from talking to GJS!) is it's a different
| course that now uses Python. But maybe someone here has
| experience with it & can speak up.
| armitron wrote:
| That's not accurate. They retired SICP and added a new
| introductory course [1] based on Python to placate the
| suits. Neither Sussman nor any of the other SICP folk is
| involved with that.
|
| Sussman created a follow-up course to SICP [2] which is
| still based on Lisp and still being offered today.
|
| [1] https://irreal.org/blog/?p=11127
|
| [2] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/
| systems wrote:
| but then again lisp got replaced in practice and is only really
| a niche language nowadays
|
| so the move away from lisp is not bad
|
| and while i dont like python purely as programming language
| (its not theoretically engaging or fun) python is top 3 or 5 in
| practice, people like it
| mhh__ wrote:
| People like coldplay and voted for the Nazis!
| jcgrillo wrote:
| This is missing the forest for the trees. The language for a
| university course in computation needn't be "commercially
| relevant". What's important is whether it serves the
| pedagogical purpose of teaching students to _think about
| computation_.
|
| Learning this or that programming language isn't _at all_
| what it 's about--you can (and will over and over again
| throughout your career) do that on your own time. It's about
| developing the abstract thought pathways that _enable_ you to
| quickly learn and think about computing.
|
| I don't know why MIT chose to stop teaching the course, but
| it sure would lower my opinion of that institution if it was
| something to do with the direct commercial appeal of "knowing
| Python".
| ducktective wrote:
| Recommend to also watch:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35945134
| epolanski wrote:
| I can't lie, I loved programming for many years. It used to be my
| main hobby too. Trying any new language or software, reading
| programming books, contributing to many chats across
| libera/freenode and what not.
|
| But since I have become a freelancer and I started working in
| smaller contexts where the focus is to ship decent code at a
| higher rate this passion has vaned. I think this is overall good
| for me as an engineer, but has removed lots of fun and often
| learning from my daily job.
| systems wrote:
| that probably has more to do with freelancing and consulting in
| general, rather than something inherit in programming
|
| freelancing and consulting, is usually about problem solving,
| and even problem shooting (get rid of the problem as soon as
| possible, elegance not required)
|
| you want to be a builder a tool maker, with freelancing, i dont
| see this happening, if you move to a consultant role maybe
|
| for me consultant are a bit more into longer term relationship
| , so maybe this should be your next step
| epolanski wrote:
| I use the term freelancer too freely maybe, I'm mostly a full
| time consultant and I often have very long clients (years).
|
| Still, I tend to choose high pressure small environments (I
| honestly get bored in low productive corporate environments).
| progx wrote:
| ChatGPT says "But for many, the rewards outweigh the challenges,
| making programming a fun and fulfilling activity."
|
| After 36 years i can say "i only wanna get the sht done" :)
| submeta wrote:
| Sussman's and Abelson's SICP forever changed the way I think
| about code, abstraction, modularity, in a time where my peers
| were hacking in Pascal or C. Where I used Lisps/Scheme to create
| a mental model of the problem, they had to do the abstraction in
| their head and then implement it in a language that demanded low
| level focus.
|
| So I am forever thankful for having been exposed to SICP early
| on.
| davikr wrote:
| On that note, I find that programming in certain languages is
| more fun, or can be more comfortable, than in others. I don't
| think I'll ever be comfortable with C++.
| clbrmbr wrote:
| I once saw Sussman speak in a group of about 20 neuroscience PhD
| candidates in an NYU basement. He was talking about AI
| interpretability long before it was in vougue.
|
| Anyways I asked one question and he immediately sensed there was
| an EE in the room and went to the side blackboard and showed how
| we can figure out how an opamp works through first principles.
|
| So much energy and intelligence in that man. Left an impression
| for sure.
| sharas- wrote:
| I wonder does Gerald Sussman do TDD :D:D (for TDD'ers: the tone
| of this comment is ironic)
| sharas- wrote:
| The more he talks about fun, the more seriously he should be
| taken
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Before I even get into Python vs Scheme vs Others, programming
| for fun is out of the window when deadlines, agile, story points
| are involved.
| whartung wrote:
| Coding is fun. When you have Stuff to Do, and momentum and a
| clear path to do it.
|
| You have a ditch to dig and you just get into it.
|
| Stack of simple web pages to knock out. Bunch of business rules
| to code up. Couple of routine CRUD screens.
|
| Architecting is fun. Whiteboard, pens, couple folks in the same
| groove around the table. Sussing it out. Waving off the 0.01%
| edge case "what ifs".
|
| Fighting frameworks? Fighting tools? Wiring together badly
| behaving black boxes?
|
| That's not fun.
|
| Neck deep in bad documentation. Heated discussions talking past
| each other on a forum. Negotiating with the dumber than rocks AI
| that had a flash of competence.
|
| I like to say if I wanted to wire together badly documented black
| boxes, I'd have become an EE.
|
| I've always said: "I love programming, but I hate computers." All
| the fiddling. Software going stupid. Updates frustrating new UX.
| "Honey, the printer isn't working."
|
| Coding is fun.
|
| The rest of it, not so much.
| richrichie wrote:
| Feynman called it the computer disease. I think that is
| understudied danger of computers - addictive play/fidget
| machines that stunt intellectual and personal growth.
| me_me_me wrote:
| this is a deep cut. Remember the days when you just 'make and
| run' to test your programs?
|
| Now I need pipelines, helm charts, and other 5 tools +20 mins
| of busy nothing work to see if a small change fixed something.
| dr-smooth wrote:
| Yak Shaving: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/yak-shaving-
| defined-ill-get-t...
| darkerside wrote:
| Agree! But, coding is not (all of) software development. Said
| another way, maybe some people like the idea of software
| development more than they actually like software development.
| samatman wrote:
| What all the "not fun" stuff you're referring to has in common,
| is extraneous complexity.
|
| We don't pick a framework so that we can spend hours trying to
| figure out why our model of what it does is different from what
| it actually does. We run ./configure so we can run make, not so
| we can spend time determining why running autoconf results in
| the functionality we're expecting to use getting stubbed out.
|
| And so on. The amount of time we have to spend on things which
| aren't the problem can grow arbitrarily large. Manifesting a
| solution to the actual problem, with all of its intrinsic
| complexity, _that_ is fun.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > Fighting frameworks? Fighting tools? Wiring together badly
| behaving black boxes?
|
| > That's not fun.
|
| <popular cloud platform> makes me want to shoot myself in the
| face. How did we get to this point? What the fuck? Did people
| just need a lot of busy work to make themselves feel
| productive???
| amirhirsch wrote:
| >I like to say if I wanted to wire together badly documented
| black boxes, I'd have become an EE.
|
| I like to say that Electrical Engineers don't believe in magic;
| Computer Scientists don't believe in physics!
|
| I worked for Gerry making software for 6.002x an experimental
| intro EE class. I remember when Gerry came back from a weekend
| with a whole constraint propagator coded up!
| carapace wrote:
| No. Not any more. Programming should be as dull as operating a
| sawmill.
|
| I knew a guy, his construction company built half of Lake Tahoe
| back in the day. When he retired he built himself a work shop in
| the basement and made furniture until the day he died. It's
| incredible furniture. I'm sitting at one of his desks, on one of
| his chairs. 40 years old and still in excellent condition, and
| beautiful! Helical legs. You cannot buy furniture like this in
| the store. Handmade by a master craftsman at the height of his
| skill and knowledge. Made solely for the love of the craft and
| the joy of giving gifts.
|
| That kind of person has fun working.
|
| Computer programming IS fun to the kind of person who enjoys
| computer programming. Those people can do what they like.
|
| The rest of us want "boring" software: machines that get the job
| done, that don't break, that don't spew private data into the
| cloud willy-nilly, etc.
|
| If making that kind of software isn't intrinsically fun for you
| then maybe don't be a computer programmer? (We made a huge
| mistake making the normals think that learning a bit of JS was a
| viable career path.)
|
| Industrial software shouldn't be fun (except of course to the
| people who already find it fun to deliver solid working
| software!)
|
| - - - -
|
| In re: bugs being fun little learning opportunities...
|
| Margaret Hamilton worked out how to write bug-free software
| during the Apollo 11 project. The IT industry collectively went,
| "meh."
|
| We need a serious attitude adjustment.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Corrollary: people who build bridges don't think it's fun when
| bridges collapse, but bridge builders have had millenia of
| accumulated experience that inform the codes and practices of
| bridge building.
|
| That's what we lack in software. If you do electrical work that
| isn't up to code, you as the electrician are liable. That means
| literally that if you _touch_ a system, and you were the last
| one to touch it, you 're liable. So it better be up to code
| when you're done.
|
| It should be the same for computerers.
| dualogy wrote:
| > Margaret Hamilton worked out how to write bug-free software
| during the Apollo 11 project.
|
| Since search engines suck so bad lately: anyone know a good
| complete summary of that method of hers?
| fragmede wrote:
| ChatGPT is good at those kinds of questions.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Not a summary but here are a bunch of docs on one version of
| her approach: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/a
| ccess/text/20...
|
| And here is a critique:
| https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA198753.pdf
| photochemsyn wrote:
| A better title: "Academic omputer science is (should be) fun".
| The main points are that discovering analogies, philosophical
| contemplation, debugging problems, coming up with good ideas and
| gaining clarity are all fun activities - but this is mostly the
| luxury of the academic professor, who is paid to engage in such
| activities, and doesn't seem applicable to 'the customer wants
| this at the end of the week!' world, other than the debatable
| joys of debugging.
|
| The majority of "programming" should probably be thought of like
| "welding" - essentially a vocational school subject. If you want
| to develop a new welding technology, sure that's a graduate
| school-level academic/research undertaking, but the vast majority
| of welders - like programmers - will work with well-characterized
| tools and fairly simple systems. A vocational student doesn't
| want to waste any time learning MIT/GNU Scheme and then never use
| it again in their professional career - but an academic student
| might find it rewarding, rather like learning to read and write
| in Linear B as a linguistics major.
|
| Certainly any work can be 'fun' - I worked in biotech labs for
| years, some were fun and some were terrible, but that had little
| to do with the nature of the work - it came down to quality and
| emotional stability of co-workers and managers, whether the
| workspace was well-designed and adequately supplied and safe to
| work in (sloppy labs are dangerous and unhealthy), if the pay was
| high enough to live a decent life outside of work, whether there
| was a corporate culture of cutting corners and letting shoddy
| work slip by (assuming you want to take some pride in doing a job
| right) - and it's the same in any other professional situation
| like programming industrial control systems and so on.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Have you ever worked as a welder? I think you'll find that
| people who are curious, thoughtful, and educated (whether
| autodidactically or otherwise) do better work than those who
| aren't across all professions. When I worked as a welder a long
| time ago the people who were smart, motivated, and curious did
| better work than those who were just punching a clock.
|
| So I do think that programming is like welding, but not in the
| way you meant it.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| When I think 'welding' I'm thinking of high-tech welding
| systems, aluminum TIG welding, or the laser-welding assembly-
| line shop I worked in before going to college. The people
| running such shops are skilled professionals, certainly, even
| if they didn't hold graduate degrees in materials science or
| applied physics.
|
| Maybe your view of welding is that it's comparable to digging
| ditches? And one doesn't have to go into hundreds of
| thousands of dollars in debt to attend some exclusive college
| to be smart, motivated and curious.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Maybe I misunderstood, I was responding to your
| characterization of welding as a "vocational school
| subject" whose future practitioners wouldn't want to waste
| their time learning anything that isn't the direct
| application of various welding processes to their first job
| in the field. In fact, though, folks who are the best at
| actually doing the welding are those who are most
| interested in developing their craft as welders--whatever
| that takes be it attaining theoretical knowledge,
| experimenting with obsolete or rarely used processes (e.g
| forge welding), etc.
|
| Analogously, computerers who are best at computering aren't
| the ones who just want to learn enough jquery to get that
| computer gig.
|
| So what's the point of education? Is it to illuminate the
| path to excellence for those who choose to follow it, or is
| it to try to land someone a job and no other thing?
| Mohamedrila0418 wrote:
| YouTube
| yazzku wrote:
| "Programming is Abstract Engineering Design"
|
| "No physical limitations"
|
| Is this how you get Electron apps? Mike Acton would have a thing
| or two to say here.
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