> Firstly, there is a false premise here which is that the story is about a great programmer who worked hard to do nothing but add real value to a program. Obvi

> Firstly, there is a false premise here which is that the story is about a great programmer who worked hard to do nothing but add real value to a program. Obviously, this is not so. The story makes it clear by including detail like '"Even the initializer is optimized", [Mel] said proudly', where is it clear that Mel understands that the initializer runs only once, but he optimized it anyway. Some of what Mel did added value, and some of it was just done for Mel's own benefit of learning and self-actualization. The RPC-4000 was a goofy machine that had extremely variable IPC depending on machine code layout. It could get as bad as 60 instructions every second if they were on the wrong parts of the drum. I'd expect the initializer to be optimized as well even though it's going to run once, since not optimizing would land you with a very long wait for it to get ready.