The Tao of Programming(mit.edu)
mit.edu
The Tao of Programming
http://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
16 comments
This one is my favourite:
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
I didn't see the one that I'd say is the most important taoist teaching for programmers: "Vomit your intelligence" (found in Zhuangzi, not sure how it is translated in English, in French it's "Vomis ton intelligence").
I understand it this way: intelligence in our activities is this kind of explicit cleverness that is usually visible and smells its freshly graduated student eager to use whatever he learnt recently. Look, I can use metabrogramming to avoid duplicating these two lines of code!
Most very annoying landmines I find in refactoring code code are just side effects of this kind of intelligence. And usually "dumb code" work faster, better, is easier to maintain, and, well, requires more (real) intelligence and experience to write.
Please note that this is a point of view from seasoned coders. From the first time php-scripter, using intelligence and moderate factorisation is obviously advised.
So, to this nice list, I'd add a
I understand it this way: intelligence in our activities is this kind of explicit cleverness that is usually visible and smells its freshly graduated student eager to use whatever he learnt recently. Look, I can use metabrogramming to avoid duplicating these two lines of code!
Most very annoying landmines I find in refactoring code code are just side effects of this kind of intelligence. And usually "dumb code" work faster, better, is easier to maintain, and, well, requires more (real) intelligence and experience to write.
Please note that this is a point of view from seasoned coders. From the first time php-scripter, using intelligence and moderate factorisation is obviously advised.
So, to this nice list, I'd add a
Vomit your intelligence, bro!This one hurt. Ouch!
A manager asked a programmer how long it would take him to finish the program on which he was working. "I will be finished tomorrow," the programmer promptly replied.
"I think you are being unrealistic," said the manager, "Truthfully, how long will it take?"
The programmer thought for a moment. "I have some features that I wish to add. This will take at least two weeks," he finally said.
"Even that is too much to expect," insisted the manager, "I will be satisfied if you simply tell me when the program is complete."
The programmer agreed to this.
Several years later, the manager retired. On the way to his retirement luncheon, he discovered the programmer asleep at his terminal. He had been programming all night.
A manager asked a programmer how long it would take him to finish the program on which he was working. "I will be finished tomorrow," the programmer promptly replied.
"I think you are being unrealistic," said the manager, "Truthfully, how long will it take?"
The programmer thought for a moment. "I have some features that I wish to add. This will take at least two weeks," he finally said.
"Even that is too much to expect," insisted the manager, "I will be satisfied if you simply tell me when the program is complete."
The programmer agreed to this.
Several years later, the manager retired. On the way to his retirement luncheon, he discovered the programmer asleep at his terminal. He had been programming all night.
> 30. In programming, everything we do is a special case of something more general -- and often we know it too quickly.
> 56. Software is under a constant tension. Being symbolic it is arbitrarily perfectible; but also it is arbitrarily changeable.
http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html
> 56. Software is under a constant tension. Being symbolic it is arbitrarily perfectible; but also it is arbitrarily changeable.
http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html
Similarly, http://thecodelesscode.com/contents
It's a bit more contemporary and is still being added to. I can't figure out who the author is though. All I know is they go by the name of Qi https://github.com/QilessQi
Also, all the koans are on Github and translations can be submitted via PRs https://github.com/alessandro1997/the-codeless-code
It's a bit more contemporary and is still being added to. I can't figure out who the author is though. All I know is they go by the name of Qi https://github.com/QilessQi
Also, all the koans are on Github and translations can be submitted via PRs https://github.com/alessandro1997/the-codeless-code
Considering this is a book still in print, this is especially blatant copyright violation. It is a very good book, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tao_of_Programming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tao_of_Programming
I try to point that out every time I see this. I'm usually ignored or flamed for it.
Hmm... that explains the full text links on the wikipedia page...
Hmm? How does it explain anything? The sites hosting the full text are (presumably) violating the author's and/or publisher's copyright. The links to those sites (from here and from Wikipedia) may or may not be doing so (IANAL).
The difficult part of programming is programming. I mean just sit and dissolve yourself into the code and it engulfs you in a timeless world. I often feel the urge to be on the email or internet or HN kills this sort of dissolution and very rarely I get this. When you get it, it is absolutely delightful!
Not to forget: Master Foo Discourses on the Graphical User Interface http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer.html
I live in dark world of cold steel and dungeons. One have to hack and slash bugs not go easy on those. So this Tao thing is not for me, I am the crusher of users. Behold as I wield their skulls! I only have to hide from manager when I'm posting on HN instead of slashing another bug. :)
Upon my departure from the Marine Corps I received a Ka-bar with "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless" etched on the blade. One of the greatest things ever.
that is a great thing, would love to see that. Thanks for sharing.
The points about rejecting fame deserve mention. Not just fame, but the pursuit of it.
You have a finite amount of time in a day. You can allocate it between careful study and practice of programming, or retweeting today's tech groupthink so you can stay relevant.
You have a finite amount of time in a day. You can allocate it between careful study and practice of programming, or retweeting today's tech groupthink so you can stay relevant.
Fun read. However, it seems to promote a very strict philosophy - the most a novice coder can hope to achieve is the mastering of Programming Tao.
I disagree with this.
Programming is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Coding in the shade of a great tree might be all well and good, but how will you ever see the world if you stay in the shade of the greatest of trees?
I disagree with this.
Programming is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Coding in the shade of a great tree might be all well and good, but how will you ever see the world if you stay in the shade of the greatest of trees?
I feel programming is only an act like painting. The point is when you are fully into something, it does not matter if you are sitting in the shade of a tree or otherwise. You begin to flow.. and outside disappears.
Does anyone know if the Turing quote is real?
"I don't know whether I am Turing dreaming that I am a machine, or a machine dreaming that I am Turing!"
"I don't know whether I am Turing dreaming that I am a machine, or a machine dreaming that I am Turing!"
The original would be the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi¹, from the 3rd century BC:
"Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man."
...so I'm guessing that was not a real Turing quote, but possibly a reference to the Turing Test.
¹: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zhuangzi
"Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man."
...so I'm guessing that was not a real Turing quote, but possibly a reference to the Turing Test.
¹: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zhuangzi
Thanks, I've read a lot about Turing and some of his works and had never seen it before
[deleted]
Thus spake the Master Programmer:
"After three days without programming, life becomes
meaningless."
8.4
Hardware met Software on the road to Changtse. Software said:
"You are Yin and I am Yang. If we travel together, we will become
famous and earn vast sums of money." And so they set forth
together, thinking to conquer the world.
Presently, they met Firmware, who was dressed in tattered rags
and hobbled along propped on a thorny stick. Firmware said to
them: "The Tao lies beyond Yin and Yang. It is silent and still
as a pool of water. It does not seek fame; therefore, nobody
knows its presence. It does not seek fortune, for it is complete
within itself. It exists beyond space and time."
Software and Hardware, ashamed, returned to their homes.
Maybe they're saying that firmware is an important design consideration that requires careful attention.
My commentary to verse 8.4 is as follows:
To make a hard distinction between hardware and software, and thinking that all problems can be solved by using strictly one or the other, is a mistake. Master Joel wrote¹ that all abstractions are leaky, and so it is with any working system – any system needs to be a meld between hardware and software, where neither can keep its identity wholly intact. (Writers of) Firmware know this well. Therefore, the Tao cannot exist in either hardware or software, purely by themselves.
1) http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...
To make a hard distinction between hardware and software, and thinking that all problems can be solved by using strictly one or the other, is a mistake. Master Joel wrote¹ that all abstractions are leaky, and so it is with any working system – any system needs to be a meld between hardware and software, where neither can keep its identity wholly intact. (Writers of) Firmware know this well. Therefore, the Tao cannot exist in either hardware or software, purely by themselves.
1) http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...
Firmware is a subtle body,with elements from both worlds ("hardware" and "software"), and a computing system is harmonious when "software" and "hardware" do not step over each others' abstractions, but build a coherent, meaningful system, making the distinction between them relevant in terms of taxonomy, but not disonant in terms of code.
Sadly, there are relatively few well-known examples of this nowadays. I struggle to build such systems every day, but I think I fail most of the time :-).
Sadly, there are relatively few well-known examples of this nowadays. I struggle to build such systems every day, but I think I fail most of the time :-).
I'd be curious to hear your examples in real world terms :-)
There are good examples to see in well-written device drivers. I don't have specific code at hand, but there are bits and pieces that stuck to me.
For example, there was this driver that could do pattern-matching on button presses, written by an ex-colleague of mine. The way this is done by most developers is to hardcode some state machines (there's a limited set of patterns that have to be matched anyway) and populate an array of callbacks for each. This one did something rather different (hopefully, I can remember what; it's been a few years since I've seen that code).
The patterns it had to recognize were arbitrary combinations of short and long button press or hold sequence, double presses and triple presses. Instead of having the state machines hardcoded, the programmer would define a state machine by defining an array of press patterns (e.g. button_event_t events[] = {BTN_CLICK, BTN_HOLD, BTN_DBL_CLICK, BTN_SEQ_END}) and register it with the driver, which added it into a list of patterns to match against. Each pattern could also have as many callbacks to be launched as needed.
The button driver itself had absolutely no idea about all this pattern crap, all it did was receive interrupts from GPIO ports and place them in a queue. An "event" matcher would munch on that queue, interpret elementary events (like button was pressed, button was depressed, button was held etc.) and put these in another queue that was pushed to the "action" matcher. Each time there was an interaction with it, it would start a new pattern matching drill; it would walk the list of events it knew about, "add" those whose first step matched the current one to a temporarily-used list (it was only adding pointers, of course, not copying the actual event) and "remove" the first press pattern (it would actually increment an index counter so as not to start copying bytes around). If nothing happened before a certain amount of time passed, the list would be disposed of. If it did, however, the temporary list would be walked again, removing those elements whose new first step didn't match the current one, and so on until the list would be brought down to one element. The callbacks would then be scheduled to run (these were actually delayed jobs, not blocking function calls), the one-element list disposed of and so on.
This was beautifully structured in every possible way:
1. The button driver, that did the GPIO magic, only worked with GPIO interrupts.
2. Recognizing specific user presses was done by another subsystem, and
3. Recognizing specific sequences of user presses was done by another subsystem
None of these had to do anything foreign to them: the button driver (which encompassed roughly #1 and #2 with nice separation between them) only did button stuff. Matching sequences of button actions superficially sounds like "button stuff" which is why it's routinely mashed in the same soup, with horrible results, but this one wasn't.
It had the further advantage that now automatic testing of anything was blatantly trivial (background: each sequence of presses would trigger actions that could potentially take up to one hour), since events like BUTTON_PRESSED or BUTTON_HOLD didn't have to come from actual interaction, they could be pushed in there by a test routine communicating with a PC through a serial port. Extending the range of possible actions or redefining them was trivial, since all that had to be done was edit arrays. It was also trivial to allow customization of these sequences by end-users.
But this is also aesthetically pleasing: there's no conflict of abstraction between "software"and "hardware". There is one module that abstracts only what is relevantly abstracted in hardware, and produces purely software-abstractions, that are meaningful only to humans, not silicon, such as BUTTON_HOLD events (silicon only knows about signals it translates into a bit flip which we like to call an interrupt). It didn't push non-silicon stuff into software that spoke to silicon, nor did it push silicon stuff high up there where there should only be software stuff.
Oh yeah: this was on a microcontroller that had 4K of RAM, and the software also included a communication stack for some weird-ass protocol, a flash driver, a temperature sensor, energy metering, LED signaling, toggling an array of relays, driving a buzzer, a firmware upgrade mechanism, a sort of application settings manager, a clock (the kind that shows the hour) with multiple alarms and the rest of the OS, pretty much all of it written by us. This guy was a guru though. The parts written by me sucked.
For example, there was this driver that could do pattern-matching on button presses, written by an ex-colleague of mine. The way this is done by most developers is to hardcode some state machines (there's a limited set of patterns that have to be matched anyway) and populate an array of callbacks for each. This one did something rather different (hopefully, I can remember what; it's been a few years since I've seen that code).
The patterns it had to recognize were arbitrary combinations of short and long button press or hold sequence, double presses and triple presses. Instead of having the state machines hardcoded, the programmer would define a state machine by defining an array of press patterns (e.g. button_event_t events[] = {BTN_CLICK, BTN_HOLD, BTN_DBL_CLICK, BTN_SEQ_END}) and register it with the driver, which added it into a list of patterns to match against. Each pattern could also have as many callbacks to be launched as needed.
The button driver itself had absolutely no idea about all this pattern crap, all it did was receive interrupts from GPIO ports and place them in a queue. An "event" matcher would munch on that queue, interpret elementary events (like button was pressed, button was depressed, button was held etc.) and put these in another queue that was pushed to the "action" matcher. Each time there was an interaction with it, it would start a new pattern matching drill; it would walk the list of events it knew about, "add" those whose first step matched the current one to a temporarily-used list (it was only adding pointers, of course, not copying the actual event) and "remove" the first press pattern (it would actually increment an index counter so as not to start copying bytes around). If nothing happened before a certain amount of time passed, the list would be disposed of. If it did, however, the temporary list would be walked again, removing those elements whose new first step didn't match the current one, and so on until the list would be brought down to one element. The callbacks would then be scheduled to run (these were actually delayed jobs, not blocking function calls), the one-element list disposed of and so on.
This was beautifully structured in every possible way:
1. The button driver, that did the GPIO magic, only worked with GPIO interrupts.
2. Recognizing specific user presses was done by another subsystem, and
3. Recognizing specific sequences of user presses was done by another subsystem
None of these had to do anything foreign to them: the button driver (which encompassed roughly #1 and #2 with nice separation between them) only did button stuff. Matching sequences of button actions superficially sounds like "button stuff" which is why it's routinely mashed in the same soup, with horrible results, but this one wasn't.
It had the further advantage that now automatic testing of anything was blatantly trivial (background: each sequence of presses would trigger actions that could potentially take up to one hour), since events like BUTTON_PRESSED or BUTTON_HOLD didn't have to come from actual interaction, they could be pushed in there by a test routine communicating with a PC through a serial port. Extending the range of possible actions or redefining them was trivial, since all that had to be done was edit arrays. It was also trivial to allow customization of these sequences by end-users.
But this is also aesthetically pleasing: there's no conflict of abstraction between "software"and "hardware". There is one module that abstracts only what is relevantly abstracted in hardware, and produces purely software-abstractions, that are meaningful only to humans, not silicon, such as BUTTON_HOLD events (silicon only knows about signals it translates into a bit flip which we like to call an interrupt). It didn't push non-silicon stuff into software that spoke to silicon, nor did it push silicon stuff high up there where there should only be software stuff.
Oh yeah: this was on a microcontroller that had 4K of RAM, and the software also included a communication stack for some weird-ass protocol, a flash driver, a temperature sensor, energy metering, LED signaling, toggling an array of relays, driving a buzzer, a firmware upgrade mechanism, a sort of application settings manager, a clock (the kind that shows the hour) with multiple alarms and the rest of the OS, pretty much all of it written by us. This guy was a guru though. The parts written by me sucked.
Sounds like the Master Programmer has never worked
at a company that crunched you for 80 hour weeks, for weeks.
Why are programmers non-productive? Because their time is wasted in meetings.
Why are programmers rebellious? Because the management interferes too much.
Why are the programmers resigning one by one? Because they are burnt out.
Having worked for poor management, they no longer value their jobs."Sounds like the Master Programmer has never worked at a company that crunched you for 80 hour weeks, for weeks" - I guess Master Programmer is smart enough to avoid such workplaces.
Nor do they have people depending on them to put food on their table. When you have to provide, you don't have too much freedom in where you work. It's rare to move your entire family across country, for example. So maybe you're stuck in some backwater city, because your kid goes to school there and you don't want to ruin their social life by uprooting them just because you're facing some crunch time. Is it impossible for you to be a master programmer in that situation? Certainly not.
The point is, it's not a good idea to take our freedom for granted. We're kind of spoiled right now, because the job market is literally figuratively on fire. Once the job market saturates within a decade, people will hopefully realize how rare it was for us to have such freedom of choice in where we were able to choose to work.
The point is, it's not a good idea to take our freedom for granted. We're kind of spoiled right now, because the job market is literally figuratively on fire. Once the job market saturates within a decade, people will hopefully realize how rare it was for us to have such freedom of choice in where we were able to choose to work.
You say you do not have freedom in where you work, and that basically is the reason it is true for you. The biggest limitations are the ones we build for ourselves.
I'd suggest instead of thinking of it like a job, think of it like it is: a business arrangement exchanging time and effort for a certain set of compensation. If you wish to avoid working with a bad arrangement on one end, find another vendor you an barter with. If you feel trapped by bills or something, that's a separate problem but still one largely set up by your mind.
Obviously lots of nuances to this exist and there are a large number of factors we don't control, but make no mistake, you do control where you work. If you want to maintain the "spoiled freedom" I would suggest you become more valuable in your trade.
I'd suggest instead of thinking of it like a job, think of it like it is: a business arrangement exchanging time and effort for a certain set of compensation. If you wish to avoid working with a bad arrangement on one end, find another vendor you an barter with. If you feel trapped by bills or something, that's a separate problem but still one largely set up by your mind.
Obviously lots of nuances to this exist and there are a large number of factors we don't control, but make no mistake, you do control where you work. If you want to maintain the "spoiled freedom" I would suggest you become more valuable in your trade.
When I was pivoting away from my failed academic career - and the ripples of the Dot Com bubble were still fresh in most employers' minds - I had a job interview that went more or less like this:
HR Clerk> Why should I pay you [for a full time position] more than what you are currently making [at your current, unsustainable, part time gig].
Crpatino> Because I'd rather scrub toilets and sell potatoes by the road before giving away my skills for nothing.
HR Clerk> I am sorry, I did not intend to offend you, but you must realize this is a question every employer is going to ask...
The interview went more or less uphill from there, though I did not end up getting the position. But what I want to point out is that you are not required to just take whatever X employer is offering you. You must remember that this is a game with asymmetric information. They are trained to low-ball you every time they have a chance, expecting that you will push back and negotiate. And if you do not negotiate, they just shrug their shoulders and pocket the difference.
I am aware that it is different when you already have a job. But it is not the only way to "put food on the table", no matter how much it looks like. There are other jobs, and there are other industries. And you always have the option to create a job for yourself if all else fails.
You may need to take it as it is for some limited time while you put your ducks in line, but you don't have to do that forever.
HR Clerk> Why should I pay you [for a full time position] more than what you are currently making [at your current, unsustainable, part time gig].
Crpatino> Because I'd rather scrub toilets and sell potatoes by the road before giving away my skills for nothing.
HR Clerk> I am sorry, I did not intend to offend you, but you must realize this is a question every employer is going to ask...
The interview went more or less uphill from there, though I did not end up getting the position. But what I want to point out is that you are not required to just take whatever X employer is offering you. You must remember that this is a game with asymmetric information. They are trained to low-ball you every time they have a chance, expecting that you will push back and negotiate. And if you do not negotiate, they just shrug their shoulders and pocket the difference.
I am aware that it is different when you already have a job. But it is not the only way to "put food on the table", no matter how much it looks like. There are other jobs, and there are other industries. And you always have the option to create a job for yourself if all else fails.
You may need to take it as it is for some limited time while you put your ducks in line, but you don't have to do that forever.
> Sounds like the Master Programmer has never worked at a company that crunched you for 80 hour weeks, for weeks.
Nor has the master programmer worked for a company populated by utter morons who leave a large minefield in every task where all one-day estimates turn into one week ones the moment you start sharpening your tools...
(that's reality in corporate land)
Too bad I'm sitting here reading HN and playing my piano for a bit between emails...
Nor has the master programmer worked for a company populated by utter morons who leave a large minefield in every task where all one-day estimates turn into one week ones the moment you start sharpening your tools...
(that's reality in corporate land)
Too bad I'm sitting here reading HN and playing my piano for a bit between emails...
"When a program is being tested, it is too late to make design changes"
Clearly never used HyperCard.
Clearly never used HyperCard.
With not a single mention of a female programmer (but many he's and him's), I can't get behind this. Let's be an inclusive community, please.
You're looking at an old text here (even though it was just posted on HN). From the mention of DOS, I'm guessing it was written in the 1980s. Inclusive language was not yet common at the time.
You'd like it to be re-written with inclusive language. It's OK to want that, I guess, but... when faced with a pre-inclusive-language text, what will you do? Accept it for what it is (old, written by people not yet aware of this issue)? Or will you reject it because of what it is not?
Perhaps the best answer is to find the author and gently suggest an inclusive re-write. (And perhaps that's what you were trying to do, but I suspect that the poster is not the author. Finding the author may unfortunately take a bit more digging.)
You'd like it to be re-written with inclusive language. It's OK to want that, I guess, but... when faced with a pre-inclusive-language text, what will you do? Accept it for what it is (old, written by people not yet aware of this issue)? Or will you reject it because of what it is not?
Perhaps the best answer is to find the author and gently suggest an inclusive re-write. (And perhaps that's what you were trying to do, but I suspect that the poster is not the author. Finding the author may unfortunately take a bit more digging.)
I see. I had the impression it was newly written in a retro style. This makes a lot more sense now and I can appreciate it as a historical document.
The ToP was written in 1986, published in 1987. Many strides have been made since then, with many strides to go.
[deleted]
This is more akin to literature. Many stories are full of men, but this doesn't mean they are irrelevant to women. No one is purposely trying to exclude you.
I realize now that this is a historical document and not newly written, so I understand it was a different time back then. However, just for the sake of argument, let's say that it had been newly written. In that case the point isn't that it's irrelevant to women (it's not, since none of the characters had to be male for the story to work), but that women might feel left out of the programming subculture. (Disclosure: I'm a man)
Some of them are gender-neutral (e.g. "the Programmer" in 3.3).
That's great in isolation, but the overall score is extremely low here. The ones where the programmer is explicitly male are 2.4, 3.1, 3.2, 3.4, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 6.3, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 8.2, 8.3. In many of the ones where the programmer is gender-neutral, there are often other characters that are referred to as male, such as a manager, a farmer, a prince, a warlord, a corporate executive, a magician and a father.
The only mention of a woman I found was a hostess (!!) in 2.1.
The only mention of a woman I found was a hostess (!!) in 2.1.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
Hacker Koans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan