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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

When my mom was learning to program, she was annoyed that the computer did not recognize that "O" means zero, and "l" means one. Her old manual typewriter didn't have 0 and 1 keys. So her typing habit resulted in a lot of errors.

Later she taught programming. The first thing she told students was: "Computers are dumb. They will only do exactly what you tell them."

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I was lucky and that was also the first thing I learned about programming (with the amazing 80's "The Home Computer Course" magazine). I still remember the first program I read:

    10 REM Computers are never wrong
    20 PRINT "Please type a number"
    30 INPUT A
    40 LET A = A + 1
    50 PRINT "The number you typed was"
    60 PRINT A

After a few paragraphs of explanation I learned that computers do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do.

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