He discovers computers, and
how hard programming is.
I wrote my first program for the IBM
650 [a vacuum tube magnetic drum
computer from the 1950s], probably
in the spring of my freshman year, and
debugged it at night. The first time I
wrote the program, to find the prime
factors of a number, it was about 60 instructions
long in machine language.
They were almost all wrong. When I
finished, it was about 120 or 130 instructions.
I made more errors in this
program than there were lines of code!
My first program taught me a lot
about the errors that I was going to be
making in the future, and also about
how to find errors. That's sort of the
story of my life, making errors and trying
to recover from them. I try to get
things correct. I probably obsess about
not making too many mistakes.
-- Communications of the ACM, July 2008, Vol. 51, No.7
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