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PARTISAN REVIEW
to
account for the malfunction and designs crucial experiments
to
test them .
Again , he may leave the actual running of the computer
to
others. He is able ,
while waiting for results from the computer,
to
attend to other aspects of his
work such as documenting what he has already done . When he has finally
composed the program he set out ro produce, he is able to complete a sensible
description of it and to turn his attention to other things. The professional
regards programming as a means toward an end, not as an end in itself. His
satisfaction comes from having solved a substantive problem, not from having
bent a computer to his will .
The compulsive programmer is usually a superb technician , moreover
one who knows every detail of the computer he works on , its peripheral
equipment, the computer's operating system , etc. He is often tolerated
around computer centers because of his knowledge of the system and because
he can write small subsystem programs quickly , that is , in one or two sessions
of, say , twenty hours each . After a time, the center may in fact be using a
numberofhis systems. But because the compulsive programmer is essentially
impossible to motivate to do anything but programming , he will almost never
document his programs once he stops working on them. A center may there–
fore come to depend on him to teach the use ofand to maintain the systems he
wrote- and whose structure only he , if anyone, understands. His position is
rather like that of a bank employee who doesn't do much for the bank but is
kept on because only he knows the combination
to
the safe . His main interest
is , in any case , not in small subsystems but in very large , very ambitious super–
systems . In most cases the systems he undertakes to build, and on which he
works feverishly for perhaps a month or two or three, have very grandiose but
extremely imprecisely stated goals . Some examples of these ambitions are :
new computer languages to facilitate man-machine communication ; a
general system that can be taught to play any board game ; a system
to
make it
easier for computer experts to write super-systems. (This last is a favorite .) It is
characteristic of many of such projects that the programmer can , for a long
time, continue in the conviction that they demand no knowledge apart from
knowledge about computers , programming, etc. And that knowledge he, of
course , commands in abundance . Indeed, the point at which such work is
often abandoned is precisely when it ceases to be purely incestuous : when
programming would have to be interrupted in order that knowledge from
outside the computer world may be aquired .
Unlike the professional , the compulsive programmer cannot attend to
other tasks, not even to tasks closely related to his program , while not actually
operating the computer. He can barely tolerate being away from the machine .
But when he is forced by circumstances to be separated from it nevertheless ,
he has his computer print-outs with him. He studies them, he talks about
