Less broken

From Dreaming in Code, a book about the Chandler project:

In his memoirs, computing pioneer Maurice Wilkes wrote of the moment in 1949 when, hauling punch cards up the stairs to a primitive computer called EDSAC in Cambridge, England, he saw the future: “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.” From Wilkes's epiphany to the present, despite a host of innovations, programmers have been stuck with the hard slog of debugging. Their work is one percent inspiration, the rest sweat-drenched detective work; their products are never finished or perfect, just varying degrees of “less broken.”

Well, that resonates!

Posted at 2007-01-14 21:11:59 by Richard • Link to Less broken
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