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The Tao of Programming

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122 pointsedw51921 comments

What a classic!

Edit: It is a bit weird that this is the top story right now. Must be a slow day.

I saw it earlier on reddit, and when I noticed it on hn, I was about to flag it for being yet another trash story copied from reddit, but then I saw that it already got 15 votes. I must be too young for this, but I did't find it funny, insightful or engaging, thus I did't feel any inclination to read more than a couple pages.

It's on the lines of Tao Te Ching, a great book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching

Try read it again. It really is a classic - tells of an age before everybody and their dog became programmers. It's a bit more subtle than the current fare and mixes humour and wisdom well.

I usually wouldn't care too much about karma for individual comments or posts but seeing the above comment being downvoted simply for not liking a book, I must say the voting patterns on HN are getting quite weird.

Unless a comment is offensive or distracting the conversation, take it easy with the downvotes people.

</meta>

I recently thought that it might be an interesting experiment to not display any vote counts but instead order the posts based on them (as already done I guess).

pg did this for a few hours and used circles where the point number one, something like orange or red color was used to denote a popular comment.

Many people disliked this however and decided that the numbered system was better, thought a few hours allows very little benefits to be seen.

"I did't find it funny, insightful or engaging"

The wise programmer is told about Tao and follows it. The average programmer is told about Tao and searches for it. The foolish programmer is told about Tao and laughs at it.

If it were not for laughter, there would be no Tao. ;-)

Which makes you sound like the average pseudo-science practitioner. They also keep telling others they "just don't get it", but perhaps someday, they will, of only the would 'embrace the teaching'. We scoff at that, but when someone uses the same approach with programming, while adding some Eastern sugar, we suddenly think it should be clear it's enlightening? Bollocks.

If you think the purpose of this is to be "enlightening", I suspect you may have missed the point. It's funny, in much the same way as the Principia Discordia is funny, and that's about it. It does rather a good job at it, too, imho.

I think your message enlightened this apprentice.

Being older doesn't miraculously make it more fun, insightful or engaging. It may just not be your cup of tea.

In many places, it beautifully treads the thin line between humour and wisdom -

  Grand Master Turing once dreamed that he was a machine. 
  When he awoke, he exclaimed:

      "I don't know whether I am Turing dreaming that I am a machine,
       or a machine dreaming that I am Turing!."

:D :D :D

I like this text a lot. There is this serene peace you get when you know your code works no matter what.

The first thing that came to mind after reading the text was Joel's article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...

quote: "Today, to work on CityDesk, I need to know Visual Basic, COM, ATL, C++, InnoSetup, Internet Explorer internals, regular expressions, DOM, HTML, CSS, and XML. All high level tools compared to the old K&R stuff, but I still have to know the K&R stuff or I'm toast."

The first time I read it was a few years ago, and it was in Russian. Brings back some memories, like when I was so crazy about programming that I learned basics of assembler using only the debug utility on windows without any books. Those were great days!

You missed the best part. Get yourself an Apple II, a C64 or an 8-bit Atari.

But get the real thing. Getting an emulator is not nearly as fun.

An oldie but a goodie

I bought this at Book Buyers in Mountain View a few weeks ago. Its entertaining. They had a few copies, if anyone wants one.

I found this book in bargain bin years ago. I guess it must merit reading.

The TL;DR; of programming.

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