The Tao of Programming (1987)
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> 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 mark upon the beach. Then the bird mounts on the wind and, with the blue sky at its back, returns home.
The novice programmer stares in wonder at the bird, for he understands it not. The average programmer dreads the coming of the bird, for he fears its message. The Master Programmer continues to work at his terminal, unaware that the bird has come and gone.
> IN THE NORTHERN DARKNESS there is a fish and his name is K'un.1 The K'un is so huge I don't know how many thousand li he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose name is P'eng. The back of the P'eng measures I don't know how many thousand li across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky.
The big bird is so huge that it is alien to the smaller ecosystems below it. In the same way, CEOs and upper management are so "huge" (at the top of the hierarchy) that their choices seem incomprehensible from the point of e.g. a junior dev. Maybe they good or bad choices, but in any case their day-to-day choices are different from a single developer's.
> The cicada and the little dove laugh at this, saying, "When we make an effort and fly up, we can get as far as the elm or the sapanwood tree, but sometimes we don't make it and just fall down on the ground. Now how is anyone going to go ninety thousand li to the south!"
Here the small creatures make fun of the bird, not exactly understanding its world or experiences, but instead comparing the Peng's actions and natural inclinations to their own. A dove has no need to travel thousands of miles, which is a short trip for the Peng.
In the GP's comment, the novice programmer "stares in wonder at the bird" because - in the same way - his day-to-day experience is so different from the people who run Corporate Headquarters. The Master Programmer knows that CH is "doing it's thing" so to speak, or just following its own nature. Any attempt to understand the machinations and decisions of upper management from the viewpoint of a programmer simply doesn't work, so they do not bother to think about it.
There is not a single thing I know that is always true.
Those sentences are applicated to themself.
The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.
The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now their are ten thousand languages.
Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.
But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it. "
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...
Spelling as plot device, so underrated.
Hmm, can't recall what the name of the movie actually was.
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 first one's my favorite:
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power
off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot
fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what
is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.2/10, would have preferred bobcat?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tao_of_Programming
I now own a copy, and it is glorious.
> 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.
The shelter a massive enterprise with a sane middle-manager provides can be a beautiful place for innovation and creative freedom.
However, the older I’ve become the less corporate bs and re-orgs I’m prepared to live through.
Maybe my Tao is slipping...
In the now-more-prescient-than-ever words of Grace Slick:
Someone's always playing corporation games
Who cares, they're always changing corporation names(Edit: I mention links like this just in case people are interested. If we were treating the post as a duplicate it would be marked [dupe].)
Reading the whole thing, I'm again surprised at how much wisdom is hidden in there.
Shouldn't that be:
"Time for you to return."
though?
I also don't know enough about systems programming to be sure whether RET or LEAVE is the right instruction there :P
Heh, nothing changed.
> But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
I really laughed at the bit about 'structured programming.' As it turns out, long ago, structured programming was a thing.
This was related much later by the professor himself, and he was fully aware of how prescient the student was.
It's not the law of no astonishment.
When Worlds end, The Rest Is Silence of Code.