Hello, In the spring of 1978, I wrote a (circa) 700-word microprogram for multiprecision integer arithmetic on paper, typed it into a computer, had it cleaned of syntax errors by the micro-code assembler, printed it, and spent much of the summer in my mother's summer house debugging this program text by hand, without the use of any automated computing device of any kind. I found lots of errors, corrected them, rechecked the result by hand, found additional errors, corrected those and, finally, (in the autumn of 1978) ran the program for the first time. Every multiprecision integer operation but division worked. After some debugging, a single (rather silly) error was found in the division routine. I never found additional errors in this code. This is not intended to imply that I am a Mozart rather than a Beethoven (most likely neither!) in the field of programming. Rather, it is an attempt to point out that the development environments that we use these days encourage a completely different mode of work than what was used some 20-30 years ago. Thus, today, I do like I have the impression most programmers do, compile and run (tests) as often as possible, even every very few keystrokes of code changes. I am not an expert in the difference between composers like Mozart and Beethoven, but my expert father tells me that Mozart, reputedly, had a phenomenal musical memory that allowed him both to recall large sequences of music played to him and, undoubtably also, work with long sequences of "hypothetical" music, that is, music being composed, for prolonged periods, in his head, without the need to make any notes on paper etc. It seems that such differences in modes of work does not imply any similar interesting or usefully utilizable difference in the way we should produce our programs. The analogy seems irrelevant, in other words. Best regards Thorkil On Tuesday 12 December 2006 12:07, Kirsten Chevalier wrote: ...
I've been thinking about this. Are there really any programmers who are like Mozart in the way you describe? Donald Knuth might be one, or at least, he wrote that he wrote and debugged all of TeX on paper before entering it into a computer and "only found 13 more bugs" (or something like that), once he did. I don't remember if it was 13 exactly, but "13 more bugs" might be the closest that any programmer gets to Mozart, or at least any programmer in the 20th or early 21st century.
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Cheers, Kirsten
-- Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier@alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt "What is research but a blind date with knowledge?" -- Will Henry _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe