Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.
Genetics is where we come from. It's deeply natural to want to know.
Computer programming has always been a self-taught, maverick occupation.
There is always one more bug to fix.
Human thinking can skip over a great deal, leap over small misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the attempts to see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or background.
Y2K is showing everyone what technical people have been dealing with for years: the complex, muddled, bug-bitten systems we all depend on, and their nasty tendency toward the occasional disaster.
If you've ever watched someone who is a mother talk on the phone, feed the dog, bounce the baby, it's just astounding to see someone manage, more or less well, to do all those things. But on a computer, multitasking is really binary. The task is either in the foreground, or it's not.
No one in the government is seriously penalized when Social Security numbers are stolen and misused; only the number-holders suffer.
The condition of my personal workspace is my own business, as I see it.
When I am around people I most admire, I tend to hug the wall.
Before the advent of the Web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses.
A computer is not really like us. It is a projection of a very small part of ourselves: that portion devoted to logic, order, rule and clarity.
It will not work to keep asking men to change. Many have no real objective to do so. There's no reward for them. Why should they change? They're doing well inside the halls of coding.
Watching a program run is not as revealing as reading its code.
Our Constitution is designed to change very slowly. It's a feature, not a bug.
I think many people have wonderful stories inside them and the talent to tell those stories. But the writing life, with its isolation and uncertain outcomes, keeps most from the task.
It had to happen to me sometime: sooner or later, I would have to lose sight of the cutting edge. That moment every technical person fears - the fall into knowledge exhaustion, obsolescence, techno-fuddy-duddyism - there was no reason to think I could escape it forever.
I like the little semi-competencies of human beings, I realize. Governance, after all, is a messy business, a world of demi-solutions and compromise, where ideals are tarnished regularly.
Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity.
Writing is a very isolating occupation.
