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[d/l] |
Your comment lead me to realise that the programming world is like a mirror-image of the real world. In the sense that a lot of conventions here are opposite. Laziness and all. Not a big fan, but Alice in wonderland comes to mind. Also the mob-world where a "good killer" is prided!
Other people also realised that general upside-down of conventions in programming (ethic? work-ethic?) much earlier. For example, Joseph Weizenbaum (himself a computer programmer, created ELIZA):
... bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with
sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles,
their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised
to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems
to be riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice. When not so
transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts
over which they pore like possessed students of a cabbalistic
text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours
at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them:
coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near
the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and
unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are
oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move.
These are computer bums, compulsive programmers ...
And to take it a bit further, I will not claim that "information and access should be free" were invented by (the first) computer programmers, of which most of them were hacking at MIT around a PDP-?, but definetely the motto and what it entails became a huge part of their ethic and actions (re: lock-picking and MIT, see also "Hackers" by Steven Levy). For the beginning, at least. Ending IMO at the turn of the millenium when Capitalism conquered the programming world: the dot.com and the floatation.
A (personal) observation: Perl as an interpreted (vs compiled) language greatly adds to code-sharing, even if licensing can range. Frequently the question pops up here and elsewhere (and by myself too), how can I protect my Perl program? And the answer is: you can't :)
bw, bliako | [reply] |