What a Programmer Does (1967) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12568863 - Sept 2016 (45 comments)
(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
Bookmark here for me to read in 2036.
This seems true.
In my experience, these things that happened to kill programs could be considered entropy:
- New (e.g. hardware / software / code / people / focus)
- Money (e.g. actual or perceived infusion of it / actual or perceived lack of it / focus changed)
- Loss (e.g. someone or something left / was injured / died / was destroyed / was deleted / was corrupted)
And I think that if you have a system that contains risk due to entropy, then even a planned event resulting in success is entropic, e.g.:
- I plan a sunset for X software.
- There is risk of an asteroid or sudden epidemic that would thwart that plan.
- The “dice are rolled”, and the sunset happens because the asteroid and epidemic didn’t happen.
- Therefore, the planned sunset occurred due to less than 100% chance. This is still entropic.
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svat•1mo ago
> I particularly like his definitinon of a bad programmer. (My personal record is about 12 years.)
here?
tjr•1mo ago
If that is what he meant, I presume this remark was written well in the past, as TeX has lasted way more than 12 years.
bdunks•1mo ago
syncsynchalt•1mo ago
You're not alone in assuming DEK wrote the note, a lot of people seem to attribute it to Knuth.
svat•1mo ago
> This article from Datamation is by someone from ADR - the name might be Moore. (It wasn't meant to be anonymous; that was accidental). A lot of people who knew me thought I wrote it. I wish I had!
> I particularly like his definition of a bad programmer. (My personal record is about 12 years.)
The scan comes from Knuth's personal collection scanned by the Computer History Museum. Many of the documents have similar notes by Knuth, so I assumed this was by him too. Though on closer look, I'm not so sure the handwriting is the same. (It would be ironic if a note about misattribution gets misattributed.) How do you know the note is by Chuck Baker?
grener75•1mo ago
syncsynchalt•1mo ago
svat•1mo ago
It's interesting that the editor didn't know the author of one of the articles in their magazine!