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The Philosophical Programmer: Reflections on the Moth in the Machine
My friend Lori read this several years ago, when she was a programmer and I was not. I ran across it at the library and thought I could do with a little rumination on my current occupation.
Daniel Kohanski offers a nice historical overview of the computer, some thoughts on writing beautiful code, and best of all, some observations on how the rigid and unforgiving logic of computers is changing the way we (programmers) think. There's some good theology in there somewhere.
The most advanced work in computers today is in artificial intelligence, which is one way of saying, we're trying to make computers a little more forgiving and a little more fuzzy. Take your PC out for a few beers; that'll fuzzy it up.
My favorite excerpt:
At one job, I came up with a maxim henceforth to be known as Kohanski's First Law
of Programming: Something that has a one-in-a-million chance of going wrong
will go wrong the first day we go live. To which was added Liff's Corollary: It will
either happen in the first five minutes or just after everyone has left for the day.
Ain't it the truth.
File under books Mon Mar 28 10:08:29 CT 2005