The problem with computers is they only do what they are told to do. Unfortunately, what they are told to do is not necessarily what you want them to do.
Want to become so rich that you make Elon look like a pauper. Invent a computer that does what you want it to do, not what you tell it to do.
IIRC back in the day, on 1 April they would circulate an "Opcode wishlist" for things we wanted for microprocessors, including the DWIM instruction, for "Do What I Mean".
Thankfully I haven't had to deal with Javascript for a long time, it doesn't surprise me that it would do that. Also, thankfully I'm no longer dealing with any programming anymore, I'm happily retired into the User domain!
The problem is that most people either don't know themselves or can't explain to anyone else what they really want. Trying to get customers' requirements and desires nailed down enough that they aren't mutually contradictory or even possible is a frustrating exercise. It's not a job I would want to do. The urge to go full Sam Kinison on them would sometimes be too great. I think what they really want is Harry Potter magic, but have never seen The old Disney "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (the Mickey Mouse cartoon).
That's a perfect analogy - people want "Harry Potter magic" from their computers (particularly AI), but what we're likely to get is "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."
I was a QA database manager in a textile mill. Because I couldn't give them The Knowledge they wanted out of the database, the new management brought in a Real Programmer.
RP: They say they want this.
Me: Yeah. I know.
RP: Spends a day looking at the data.
RP: You can't get what they want from the data.
Me: Yeah. That's the problem. The data doesn't say what they want it to say. The physical process the data derives from precludes the answer they want to find. Not my problem anymore. Your problem.
Few months later I resigned to write full time.
Don't know if they ever changed the process to create the information they wanted but that was what it would have taken.
When people say 'computers' or 'programs' what they really think, inside in their real brain, is 'magic.'
I am reminded of the scene from Office Space where the consultants ask the large guy with glasses what he actually does. The scene ends up with him in full rant mode trying to make the case that he takes customer requirements to the engineers (programmers) because they don't have people skills, demonstrating nicely he has none either.
The movie was based on Dilbert. Mike Judge got to production first. Scott Adams is still grumpy about that. Cheers -
I bought a TRS-80 when I was 15. It had 4k RAM. For another $100 I upgraded to 16k. I ended up with a 30+ year career in IT and retired at 55. I was in Senior Management but still coding. Coding was always easy, but management was just a big pain in the butt. That said, I would do it all over again.
I got one when I was 14 - being a girl is no excuse....(so my dad said)
Our local HS was given a computer lab in 1983 by the local business association. My math teacher, former navy officer, set it up and looked for kids in a study hall who had already had Algebra. I was a freshman who had advanced math in 8th grade. He took me and 6 others. I learned how to create algorithms, flow charts, logic, matrix math, programming in Fortran, Basic and Pascal. I use a lot of it to this day (I am a process engineer for chemicals and labs)
I'm afraid that was another Charlie Martin. It's the 11th most common male name in the United States. At one point I was working at data general and there was another Charlie Martin there which wasn't confusing at all.
I taught my students not to ne appliance operators, an amateur radio term for those with inadequate technical knowledge to handle the unexpected, A/K/A knob twiddlers.
I was a freshman at MIT in 1959, and in the first year they had us learn programming on an IBM 704. (That had vacuum tubes; the 7040 was the same computer, but done with transistors - or so I'm told. The closest I came to the machine was looking at it through a glass wall.) But times were changing, and before I graduated I got to play a few games of the original Spacewar on the PDP-1. When I went to grad school in Minnesota, I ended up writing a Spacewar program that ran on the lab's CDC-3100. The routine that got input from my joysticks (which I had to make myself) eventually became o of the standard lab routines. And I guess that's the last thing I did that could really be called programming. I've done things since that counted more as fiddling with computer programming, but I've always stayed computer adjacent, with a bit of computer maintenance and use of dBase III thrown in.
Born five days before Pearl Harbor. On my first birthday, the Stagg Field experimental reactor went critical for the first time. A decent birthday candle, I'd say, and some physicists are jealous of it. There were drawbacks, though - the laboratory director, John Williams, had been at Los Alamos. Every now and then, in exasperation, he'd say "Why, when we were making the atomic bomb ....."
Welcome to the Old Programmers' Home where we have tons of punch card confetti and lots of fan-folded paper to play with. I'm older than you, but I didn't start programming for pay until 1982 although I did some work on punch cards.
I do wonder how much these kids today know about how computers really work with their Python and, ugh, Javascript. Do they do anything other than mash libraries together to build websites? Sorry, just the old coot coming out in me.
Was in a tech school for awhile back in the mid 70s. Think it was COBOL I was learning. Ended up with totally unrelated jobs for years and pretty much forgot about it.
Eventually though I ended up doing data entry at a non-profit part-time evenings. I quickly came to the attention of the people that ran the program when I called the help desk to ask for help (not realizing they were a different company in a different part of the country). I was trying to explain what the computer was doing without realizing they had never seen the office. Finally the man asked if the was a door need me where I could go outside. I said yes, just outside my office. So he asked me to go outside into the parking lot and look up to see if the flying saucer that dropped me off was still waiting.
I eventually went full time still doing data entry and a different department director asked me to look over a description of a new program that was being developed for her department. She welcomed any opinion. The desciption was maybe a dozen pages total. I wrote up and gave her more than double in detailed descriptions of things that made no sense or I thought could be done better. Then pretty much forgot about it.
Several months later the owner of the company that was doing the upgrade was visiting and asked to meet me. He got permission from my boss for me to test the new program. So for about a week I spent my day playing with it and seeing how it worked and what I could break. Again, wrote up detailed comments for him and received a massive bouquet of flowers in return.
Fast forward again and I (still just doing data entry) was invited to visit the company (I was in the Northeast, the company was just outside Chicago) to join others from across the country in testing the 'final' version. One step was to create an account then test the various options. Since the program had to do with blood collection and testing, I went with Count Dracula of Transylvania, Louisiana who had multiple blood conditions. Needless to say when the person in charge started going through different parts by putting the content on a large screen, the Count got a lot of laughs. I didcall their attetion though to the fact that two very related section tabs were unable to communicate with each other. That was fixed before deployment.
I eventually ended up working in my company's IT department doing pretty much everything including working with another fellow to re-write our region's webpage. We were given a program and an instruction manual (for 'same' program but very different version). Neither of us had ever done a website before but managed to come up with a useful and informative one that functioned better then the one our headquarters was using. So I ended up doing programming after all, just HTML instead.
Well, I've been saying I hate computers for 56 years. You're telling a story that a whole lot of programmers need to hear. They go out and build programs and often have no connection to the people who use the programs. Now some of the agile methods urge, including Actual users, but what they're actually including often in real life is managers of the companies that are going to employ the actual users. Long ago, I was architecting a customer service rep system for United healthcare and the manager of the project actually got someone who had been recently a customer service rep involved in the development. I now have United healthcare insurance and the customer service reps seem very pleased with their system.
One of the painful lessons I've had to learn is that managers don't often care "what can your suggestion do for the customer?" What they care about is "What can your suggestion do for me?"
This is why many EMRs are not fit for purpose and cause cognitive overload among medical folks. They're designed as business systems that happen to be used by doctors and nurses, instead of clinical tools supporting harsh medical settings that happen to reside on computers.
I had a really good PC doc who quit practice and took some kind of government job because the EMR was too onerous. But now they hire kids with an interest in medicine and medical school as "scribes" to do the paperwork.
Oh, and thanks about the picture. That's me and my roommate, a ginger named Ginger (makes sense, right?) who walked about ot the jungle in Costa Rica as a kitten and adopted me. GHiblified of course.
Years ago I adopted a two year old Easter bunny that had spent most of her life stuck in a backyard cage waiting/hoping someone would remember to feed her. Finally the mother turned her in to an animal rescue group where I met her. Named her Ginger based on her coloring. We had six good years together with her as chief house bunny and always first in line for treats.
"I notice more and more often that I'm helping students not with their specific assignment, but with really basic and important concepts that I think professors just figure students will grasp by osmosis."
I don't think it's just professors. Our whole societal "conveyor belt" of knowledge seems to have broken down. Students arrive at college knowing almost nothing except how many likes their last post got. What have the parents been doing for the last eighteen years? And what's going to happen to our society when these "sweet summer children" have to take over the reins of society? Nothing good will happen, that's my guess.
It's not only in programming. In teaching math, a lot of the things we "automatically" know don't make it into the classroom presentation, creating an obstacle to the student who doesn't follow the various leaps and the assumptions that create them.
The problem with computers is they only do what they are told to do. Unfortunately, what they are told to do is not necessarily what you want them to do.
Want to become so rich that you make Elon look like a pauper. Invent a computer that does what you want it to do, not what you tell it to do.
IIRC back in the day, on 1 April they would circulate an "Opcode wishlist" for things we wanted for microprocessors, including the DWIM instruction, for "Do What I Mean".
There was a program in some lisp environments called dwim, which tried to take your code and sort out where the parentheses really went.
I remember the PL/1 compiler tried to do that if you missed a semicolon. Produced some interesting error messages.
It still happens in JavaScript
Thankfully I haven't had to deal with Javascript for a long time, it doesn't surprise me that it would do that. Also, thankfully I'm no longer dealing with any programming anymore, I'm happily retired into the User domain!
The problem is that most people either don't know themselves or can't explain to anyone else what they really want. Trying to get customers' requirements and desires nailed down enough that they aren't mutually contradictory or even possible is a frustrating exercise. It's not a job I would want to do. The urge to go full Sam Kinison on them would sometimes be too great. I think what they really want is Harry Potter magic, but have never seen The old Disney "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (the Mickey Mouse cartoon).
That's a perfect analogy - people want "Harry Potter magic" from their computers (particularly AI), but what we're likely to get is "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."
Yes, who could've known that text extrapolation would be called an AI ;-)
I had Minsky as an EE+CS advisor who would be very interested in the direction of AI LLMs these days.
Yeah, but Minsky and papert and the perceptron book probably suppressed neural network work for 20 years until Terry sajnowski came along
I was a QA database manager in a textile mill. Because I couldn't give them The Knowledge they wanted out of the database, the new management brought in a Real Programmer.
RP: They say they want this.
Me: Yeah. I know.
RP: Spends a day looking at the data.
RP: You can't get what they want from the data.
Me: Yeah. That's the problem. The data doesn't say what they want it to say. The physical process the data derives from precludes the answer they want to find. Not my problem anymore. Your problem.
Few months later I resigned to write full time.
Don't know if they ever changed the process to create the information they wanted but that was what it would have taken.
When people say 'computers' or 'programs' what they really think, inside in their real brain, is 'magic.'
I am reminded of the scene from Office Space where the consultants ask the large guy with glasses what he actually does. The scene ends up with him in full rant mode trying to make the case that he takes customer requirements to the engineers (programmers) because they don't have people skills, demonstrating nicely he has none either.
The movie was based on Dilbert. Mike Judge got to production first. Scott Adams is still grumpy about that. Cheers -
I bought a TRS-80 when I was 15. It had 4k RAM. For another $100 I upgraded to 16k. I ended up with a 30+ year career in IT and retired at 55. I was in Senior Management but still coding. Coding was always easy, but management was just a big pain in the butt. That said, I would do it all over again.
I got one when I was 14 - being a girl is no excuse....(so my dad said)
Our local HS was given a computer lab in 1983 by the local business association. My math teacher, former navy officer, set it up and looked for kids in a study hall who had already had Algebra. I was a freshman who had advanced math in 8th grade. He took me and 6 others. I learned how to create algorithms, flow charts, logic, matrix math, programming in Fortran, Basic and Pascal. I use a lot of it to this day (I am a process engineer for chemicals and labs)
2o years old when I bought my first computer, a TRS-80.
As a brother Old Programmer, I eagerly await your next installments.
I was 18 when Charlie and I worked together at JPL.
I'm afraid that was another Charlie Martin. It's the 11th most common male name in the United States. At one point I was working at data general and there was another Charlie Martin there which wasn't confusing at all.
C is basically self-taught. The memory stuff you learn at 2 in the morning, not from the prof.
I agree that it usually is, but it doesn't have to be.
Let’s hear it for LL1 grammars, lex and yacc.
A little dated, but if you want opinions of another old programmer (on healthcare IT):
https://web.archive.org/web/20180910191229/http://cci.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/cases/
I taught my students not to ne appliance operators, an amateur radio term for those with inadequate technical knowledge to handle the unexpected, A/K/A knob twiddlers.
I was a freshman at MIT in 1959, and in the first year they had us learn programming on an IBM 704. (That had vacuum tubes; the 7040 was the same computer, but done with transistors - or so I'm told. The closest I came to the machine was looking at it through a glass wall.) But times were changing, and before I graduated I got to play a few games of the original Spacewar on the PDP-1. When I went to grad school in Minnesota, I ended up writing a Spacewar program that ran on the lab's CDC-3100. The routine that got input from my joysticks (which I had to make myself) eventually became o of the standard lab routines. And I guess that's the last thing I did that could really be called programming. I've done things since that counted more as fiddling with computer programming, but I've always stayed computer adjacent, with a bit of computer maintenance and use of dBase III thrown in.
My God, you may actually be older than me. In fact, it looks like you must be.
Born five days before Pearl Harbor. On my first birthday, the Stagg Field experimental reactor went critical for the first time. A decent birthday candle, I'd say, and some physicists are jealous of it. There were drawbacks, though - the laboratory director, John Williams, had been at Los Alamos. Every now and then, in exasperation, he'd say "Why, when we were making the atomic bomb ....."
I am also an old programmer that started writing code as a teenager, so I'm looking forward to reading!
Welcome to the Old Programmers' Home where we have tons of punch card confetti and lots of fan-folded paper to play with. I'm older than you, but I didn't start programming for pay until 1982 although I did some work on punch cards.
I do wonder how much these kids today know about how computers really work with their Python and, ugh, Javascript. Do they do anything other than mash libraries together to build websites? Sorry, just the old coot coming out in me.
Still working on my first fiction book, but I do have a work biography up called A Geek's Progress: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C3N2N14N.
Great picture!
Was in a tech school for awhile back in the mid 70s. Think it was COBOL I was learning. Ended up with totally unrelated jobs for years and pretty much forgot about it.
Eventually though I ended up doing data entry at a non-profit part-time evenings. I quickly came to the attention of the people that ran the program when I called the help desk to ask for help (not realizing they were a different company in a different part of the country). I was trying to explain what the computer was doing without realizing they had never seen the office. Finally the man asked if the was a door need me where I could go outside. I said yes, just outside my office. So he asked me to go outside into the parking lot and look up to see if the flying saucer that dropped me off was still waiting.
I eventually went full time still doing data entry and a different department director asked me to look over a description of a new program that was being developed for her department. She welcomed any opinion. The desciption was maybe a dozen pages total. I wrote up and gave her more than double in detailed descriptions of things that made no sense or I thought could be done better. Then pretty much forgot about it.
Several months later the owner of the company that was doing the upgrade was visiting and asked to meet me. He got permission from my boss for me to test the new program. So for about a week I spent my day playing with it and seeing how it worked and what I could break. Again, wrote up detailed comments for him and received a massive bouquet of flowers in return.
Fast forward again and I (still just doing data entry) was invited to visit the company (I was in the Northeast, the company was just outside Chicago) to join others from across the country in testing the 'final' version. One step was to create an account then test the various options. Since the program had to do with blood collection and testing, I went with Count Dracula of Transylvania, Louisiana who had multiple blood conditions. Needless to say when the person in charge started going through different parts by putting the content on a large screen, the Count got a lot of laughs. I didcall their attetion though to the fact that two very related section tabs were unable to communicate with each other. That was fixed before deployment.
I eventually ended up working in my company's IT department doing pretty much everything including working with another fellow to re-write our region's webpage. We were given a program and an instruction manual (for 'same' program but very different version). Neither of us had ever done a website before but managed to come up with a useful and informative one that functioned better then the one our headquarters was using. So I ended up doing programming after all, just HTML instead.
I should mention, I hate computers...
Well, I've been saying I hate computers for 56 years. You're telling a story that a whole lot of programmers need to hear. They go out and build programs and often have no connection to the people who use the programs. Now some of the agile methods urge, including Actual users, but what they're actually including often in real life is managers of the companies that are going to employ the actual users. Long ago, I was architecting a customer service rep system for United healthcare and the manager of the project actually got someone who had been recently a customer service rep involved in the development. I now have United healthcare insurance and the customer service reps seem very pleased with their system.
One of the painful lessons I've had to learn is that managers don't often care "what can your suggestion do for the customer?" What they care about is "What can your suggestion do for me?"
I'm really going to be aggressively non-political here and on TSOD — I started these to get AWAY from political content — but I wrote some about this here: https://pjmedia.com/charlie-martin/2025/03/20/why-governments-and-other-big-organizations-act-like-idiots-n4938119
This is why many EMRs are not fit for purpose and cause cognitive overload among medical folks. They're designed as business systems that happen to be used by doctors and nurses, instead of clinical tools supporting harsh medical settings that happen to reside on computers.
I had a really good PC doc who quit practice and took some kind of government job because the EMR was too onerous. But now they hire kids with an interest in medicine and medical school as "scribes" to do the paperwork.
Adding to costs.
Perhaps a trillion dollars spent on IT to date that could buy new hospitals and provide a lot of people inexpensive health care.
Is it worth it? Highly debatable.
Don't get me wrong, I used to be an enthusiast, until these systems and the IT departments in hospitals started dominating healthcare.
Oh, and thanks about the picture. That's me and my roommate, a ginger named Ginger (makes sense, right?) who walked about ot the jungle in Costa Rica as a kitten and adopted me. GHiblified of course.
Years ago I adopted a two year old Easter bunny that had spent most of her life stuck in a backyard cage waiting/hoping someone would remember to feed her. Finally the mother turned her in to an animal rescue group where I met her. Named her Ginger based on her coloring. We had six good years together with her as chief house bunny and always first in line for treats.
"I notice more and more often that I'm helping students not with their specific assignment, but with really basic and important concepts that I think professors just figure students will grasp by osmosis."
I don't think it's just professors. Our whole societal "conveyor belt" of knowledge seems to have broken down. Students arrive at college knowing almost nothing except how many likes their last post got. What have the parents been doing for the last eighteen years? And what's going to happen to our society when these "sweet summer children" have to take over the reins of society? Nothing good will happen, that's my guess.
It's not only in programming. In teaching math, a lot of the things we "automatically" know don't make it into the classroom presentation, creating an obstacle to the student who doesn't follow the various leaps and the assumptions that create them.