10 Mar
2017
10 Mar
'17
5:41 a.m.
This stirred ancient memories in praise of wrong programs:
* If your program sorts a list, then your program is wrong.
This seems a very strange claim.
The whole thing is an abuse of the word "wrong". A program can be all of ugly, inefficient, unidiomatic, &c &c without being WRONG.
Fifty-plus years ago, when computing was 1000 times slower and cost $600/hour, it was typical for professional programmers to mediate between scientists and computers so that those expensive machines would be used efficiently. At Bell Labs, though, Dick Hamming insisted on open-shop computing because "It is more important to have the right problem done the wrong way, than to have the wrong problem done the right way." Doug