The Programmers, like the Poets | Hacker News Reader

The Programmers, like the Poets

10 pointsgraderjs6 comments

The programmers, like the poets, work only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. They build their castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

    - Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month

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That sounds nice, but I think that there are significant factors that separate the work of programmers from pure thought. Some constraints that I can think of:

- Physical reality: A computer has a maximum amount of memory, a machine instruction takes a minimum amount of time to complete, etc. These physical realities were quite harsh in the 1960s, when the development of the IBM System/360 (which Brooks described in his book) took place: "The slowest System/360 model announced in 1964, the Model 30, could perform up to 34,500 instructions per second, with memory from 8 to 64 KB. High performance models came later. The 1967 IBM System/360 Model 91 could execute up to 16.6 million instructions per second. The larger 360 models could have up to 8 MB of main memory, though that much main memory was unusual..."[1]

- Mathematical reality: A polynomial-time algorithm's run time may be too slow to be practical; the fact that it's more elegant than the alternative n log n algorithm is irrelevant if it's unusable. Also, floating point numbers stored in a fixed number of bits behave differently from abstract mathematical variables in significant ways.

- Economic reality: If the software is too expensive to develop, or it takes so long that your competitors get to market first, your project may get cancelled before anyone can ever run your code.

That sounds a lot like engineering to me, not at all like writing poetry - a poet can easily write a poem in which immortal beings travel between galaxies faster than the speed of light.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360

On the contrary, I like the analogy because I feel like poets are restricted to rules as well. The very concept of a poem means to be artificially limited in some way.

Or you could see a poem as a program that is run on meat hardware to invoke some emotional reaction. There’s no standardisation and hardly any documentation, so only the absolute best manages to make any program function on more than of a handful of targeted machines, if even that.

Constrained by, yes. Defined by, no.

  print "You are an immortal being travelling between galaxies faster than the speed of light."

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