The Tao of programming is Nigel Tao, long one of the main people on the Go team. Not to be confused with the Tao of mathematics, who is of course Terence Tao, Nigel's brother.
The Tao of Programming (1987)
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Re: The Tao of Programming (1987)
#22Ha! I first came across this verse (7.2) early in my career, circa 2001 or so, and it always stuck with me. > 7.2 In the East there is a shark which is larger than all other fish. It changes into a bird whose wings are like clouds filling the sky. When this bird moves across the land, it brings a message from Corporate Headquarters. This message it drops into the midst of the programmers, like a seagull making its ma…
That feels like kind of a dangerous advice. Seems to me that means that if Google announces that they want to roll out a full cencorship in China so that they can enter the market over there, the most prominent developers will just silently continue to work on it..?
Re: The Tao of Programming (1987)
#23I really get 4.4 for some reason: > True, sometimes there are difficult problems. I see them coming, I slow down, I watch silently. Then I change a single line of code and the difficulties vanish like puffs of idle smoke. I've started to debug like this. Sure, I also actively debug by adding print statements and manipulating my code. But there's something to be said about just thinking and waiting for the answer.
Interesting. Generally, what I do as the first step is immediatelly connect a remote debugger and debug the piece of code that I think is problematic (which is correct in around 90% of the times for me). Then, the answer is generally trivial. I started doing this because it felt way more time efficient than staring into the code and trying to think what goes wrong over there.
Re: The Tao of Programming (1987)
#24Re: The Tao of Programming (1987)
#25> Only a fool expects rational behavior from his fellow humans. Why do you expect it from a machine that humans have constructed? Computers simulate determinism; only Tao is prefect. Spelling as plot device, so underrated.
> "Spelling as plot device"
I'm curious, what do you mean ? could you point me somewhere to learn about it ? is it something like or related to a McGuffin ?
Re: The Tao of Programming (1987)
#26> The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler. The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages. Heh, nothing changed.
You left out the most important line in the whole treatise :) > But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
Cobol does not look that bad given the mess we are in today.
Re: The Tao of Programming (1987)
#27> Only a fool expects rational behavior from his fellow humans. Why do you expect it from a machine that humans have constructed? Computers simulate determinism; only Tao is prefect. Spelling as plot device, so underrated.
> "Spelling as plot device" I'm curious, what do you mean ? could you point me somewhere to learn about it ? is it something like or related to a McGuffin ?
The typo "prefect" at the end is part of the plot, that nobody id perfect.
Re: The Tao of Programming (1987)
#28I was not until many years after I read this until I realized it was an actual book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tao_of_Programming
I now own a copy, and it is glorious.
Re: The Tao of Programming (1987)
#29The Tao of programming is Nigel Tao, long one of the main people on the Go team. Not to be confused with the Tao of mathematics, who is of course Terence Tao, Nigel's brother.
Also not to be confused with another brother - Trevor, an autist savant with double degree in mathematics and music, as well as a chessmaster.
That's what you get when a pediatrician and a mathematics/physics teacher have kids. Who would've known. (Not trivializing at all. Complimenting, if anything.)
They're so cute too. https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/brilliant-brothers-dr-t...
Re: The Tao of Programming (1987)
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Spelling as plot device" I'm curious, what do you mean ? could you point me somewhere to learn about it ? is it something like or related to a McGuffin ?
The typo "prefect" at the end is part of the plot, that nobody id perfect.
Apparently the typo was "fixed" in the html version http://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html maybe whoever ported didn't catch the subtle double meaning ? Or was just a typo.