Re: [9fans] Simple

[Laura Creighton <lac@cd.chalmers.se>]

>simple?  that's hard.  you either understand it or you don't.
>boyd

No.  It *is* teachable.  You have to hold somebody's feet to the fire
and, line by line, say ``what does that piece of code do.  Now. Is that
something that we need to do.  And is that something we need to be doing
*here*.''  But the only reason I know how to do it is because a long
time ago Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer (hi Geoff! thank you by the way)
held *my* feet to the fire and did the same thing.  A surprising amount of
bad code is in programs because the person who wrote it does not know
what the code does, and does not want to admit ignorance, even to themselves.
This is programming by sympathetic magic.  These charms and those chants
somehow made that code work over there, so I had better put some charms and
chants in my code as well.

I have spent a good part of today trying to understand why boyd's e acute
came to me as an e and not as an i.  After wading around in MIME doc for
a while I have much more sympathy for the sympathetic magic approach. I
could understand this stuff, but boy oh boy the temptation to try to get
away with using it without understanding it is enormous.