3 ms·
I wonder how old this advice is. I know that it predates the century but I'm not sure how far back. (A favorite quote of mine that I believe is from the 1970s
by readthenotes1 2y ago
I wonder how old this advice is. I know that it predates the century but I'm not sure how far back.
(A favorite quote of mine that I believe is from the 1970s says "It's easier to make working code fast then to make fast code work."
Since the fundamental problems of programming have not changed over the centuries, I wouldn't at all be surprised if there's an anti-clever saying from the dawn of computing)
- tialaramex 2y ago> the fundamental problems of programming have not changed over the centuries It hasn't been a whole century yet. Grace Hopper's career started in 1944, eighty years ago.
- readthenotes1 2y agoAda Lovelace predates her
- tialaramex 2y agoAlthough it is very common for laypeople to be told that Ada is the "first programmer" in some sense, I don't find that very convincing at all. For Ada this was purely an intellectual exercise. Grace's machine really existed, and her insight really works, even if today we would not call what she initially built a "compiler". The machine processes data, the program is data, have the machine process the program. This is recursively meta-applicable, and it's notable that rather than being something higher ups or intellectuals had specified should be done, Grace was being entirely practical. When you write some typescript inside a C# program today and then somehow in a web browser the equivalent code ends up executed by its JS engine, that's all the fruit of Grace's insight just applied over, and over, and over.