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Comment by Eliezer | Hacker News Reader

Ones and zeroes in the clean environment of a computer chip can be controlled absolutely. When you write a reasonably self-contained program, everything that goes right and everything that goes wrong is entirely your fault. It is not a metaphor; programming simply is small-scale godhood.

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Ones and zeroes can't be controlled absolutely all the time.

"...Sun's UltraSPARC II workstations were crashing at an alarming rate. The inability to initially locate the source of the problem created significant customer dissatisfaction issues for Sun. The root cause of the problem was finally traced to IBM supplied SRAMs that were experiencing high upset rates due to charged particles causing soft errors in the memory system. Ultimately, not only did Sun switch memory vendors, they also designed new error checking and correcting logic and implemented it across the entire cache architecture."

from:

http://www.actel.com/documents/SER_FAQ.pdf

It's omnipotence without omniscience, though. Any reasonably complex program will grow beyond the programmer's ability to keep it all in his head at once.

Ah, but if you run it slowly enough (step through it, for instance), you get the same thing in effect; anything you want to know you can find out before anything changes.

Assuming a REPL, and methods of introspection that do not otherwise change state of the system!

You don't need a REPL to step through a program.

You're absolutely right. Sorry, I had repressed those memories ;)

You can easily lose the big picture by stepping through each line of code, especially if your program is heavily iterative or even mildly threaded. You can miss the forest for the trees or the trees for the forest; the middle ground is elusive at best.

Yup - you can't find a race condition by stepping through your code.

Can I quote you on that as "Computer programming is omnipotence without omniscience"?

Sure, go hog wild.

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