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I was looking in my old Bell Labs notebooks and found this (handwritten) passage from 1997. It has some arguable points, and I'd probably say much of it differently today (with fewer male pronouns at least), but I found it worth rereading. I was thinking about the book that would eventually become The Practice Of Programming with BWK.

Note that there are whole sentences in this short passage that can't fit in a toot, but the alt text appears unbounded, so grab it there if you care.

Leonard Ritter

@robpike the problem with the house analogy (i used it too) is we usually know how a house is built, whereas a programmer seeks to build a florbenflomp which has never been built before. because once it is built, replication is virtually free, and so it usually is unneccessary to build another one. hence every new programming project worth its salt is revolutionary and alienating. you're not just assembling components like an engineer, but also deriving logical foundations like a mathematician.

@lritter @robpike I feel more like a painter or song writer than an engineer most of the time.

@photex @robpike yes! my original forte used to be electronic music composition. all disciplines that manifest completely original works from first principles.