Go To by Steve Lohr

 

You write a few lines of code and suddenly life is better for a hundred million people. That's software.

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By June 1949 people had begun to realize that it was not so easy to get a program right as had at one time appeared. The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs. --Maurice Wilkes

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比起医生，教师等其他职业，软件编程，是最近几十年才开始兴起的一个新型职业，任何投身于该事业的人都可以名正言顺的成为拓荒者。

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A compiler is a program that translates instructions written in a language familiar to human beings into binary.

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You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work. An you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.

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有人经常问一个问题，*岁学什么晚不晚？我想反问一下你能使时光倒流吗？如果不行，就请收起你的疑虑，立即开始行动。因为不努力，不尝试，若干年后的你只会徒增几年年龄。

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A person either has or has not the mental characteristics that makes someone a good programmer, and it has little to do with educational background. In recruiting, Sammet looked for a certain intellectual passion, a willingness to get lost inside the code and the machine for sheer fun of it.

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In programming, a profession with elements of artistry and creativity, workers are not interchangeable units of labor.

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In 1962, the United States Mariner I spacecraft, on a mission to Venus, had to be destroyed shortly after leaving the launch pad, after it swerved out of control. Investigation found that the problem was caused by a single errant character in a FORTRAN program that was part of the rocket's guidance system.

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Sitting in the Bell Labs offices years later, Thompson described the appeal as having all the craftsman's satisfaction of making things, without the cost and trouble of procuring all the materials. It's like building something where you don't have to order the cement. You create a world of your own, your own environment and you never leave this room.

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"For people who program, programming is fine", Kurtz explained more than four decades later, speaking of the rigorous, intellectually-consuming pleasure of talking to the machine - often to the "consternation of those around you who might want a minute of your attention."

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"The people making policy decisions in our country ought to understand computing because it is a pervasive part of our lives," Kernighan said. "And until you do battle with the machine, you don't really understand how precisely you must talk to a computer to make it do what you want. And you don't understand all the things that can go wrong."

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Programming is the perfectly controllable medium. You can do anything you want with code. You have absolute control.

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Standing in front of 6000 programmers at Microsoft's professional developers conference in Orlando in the summer of 2000, Bill Gates emphasized that his company's approach to the Internet future would be much the same as the tried-and-true formula it has employed with such success in the past. We build a software platform, he told the audience, and we attract developers. " That has been the same since the beginning of time," Gates declared.

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"I thought I knew sommething about programming," Stroustrup recalled. "I didn't know much, but it was enough to earn some money and learn some things. And one thing I could do was pack more into those machines that anyone else."

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"Respect for groups that doesn't include respect for individuals of those groups isn't respect at all. Many C++ design decisions have their roots in my dislike for forcing people to do things in some particular way." "Thus," Stroustrup writes later, "C++ is deliberately designed to support a variety of styles rather than a would-be 'one true way.'"

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Simony said "My Dad lived his life and he felt that I should live mine. He was very clear about it. He never gave me reason to regret what I did. He never would have done what I did, but he helped me do it."

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"You're making stuff, stuff that wasn't there before and you have absolute control. When you are a kid, no one listens to you. But the computer does," Hertzfeld said, recalling the sensation of power over the machine. "It was something that resonated with my sould. I loved it. And I was good at it."

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"It's all about control and decentralizing that control," he explained. "Programming is power, because code implements the policy of the creator. And the more knowledge you have in that envirionment - the programming environment - the more power you have."

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"The only thing I ever build anything in is softeware. And with software, there are not the constraints of matter that you have with physical things. It's as if you could support a thousand-pound weight with a straw."

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And like so many physicists and mathematicians who lapsed into computing, Lampson speaks of the satisfaction of engineering - of making things with software, a building material that requires only intellect to assemble, not armies of workers or trucks and cranes to hoist. Programming, Lampson says, is free-range engineering.