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PARTISAN REVIEW
The psychological situation , in which the compulsive programmer finds
himselfwhile so engaged , is strongly determined by rwo apparently opposing
facts : first , he knows that he can make the computer do anything he wants it
to do, and second , the computer constantly displays undeniable evidence of
his failures to him. It reproaches him . There is no escaping this bind . The
engineer can resign himself
to
the truth that there are some things he doesn't
know ; but the programmer moves in a world entirely of his own making . The
computer challenges his power , not his knowledge .
Indeed , the compulsive programmer's excitement rises to its highest,
most feverish pitch when he is on the trail of a most recalcitrant error, when
everything ought to work but the computer nevertheless reproaches him by
misbehaving in a number ofmysterious , apparently unrelated ways . It is then
that the system the programmer has himself created gives every evidence of
having taken on a life of its own and , certainly , of having slipped from his
control. This too is the point at which the idea that the computer can be
" made
to
do anything " becomes most relevant, and most soundly based in
reality. For, under such circumstances, the misbehaving artifact is , in fact , the
programmer's own creation . Its very misbehavior can , as we have already said ,
be the consequence only ofwhat the programmer himself has done . And what
he has done he can presumably come to understand , to undo , and to redo to
better serve his purpose. Accordingly, his mood and his activity become
frenzied when he believes he has finally discovered the source of the trouble.
Should his time at the console be nearly up at that moment, he will take
enormous risks with his program, making substantial changes, one after
another , in minutes or even seconds, without so much as recording what he is
doing, always pleading for just another minute . He can, under such circum–
stances , rapidly , and virtually irretrievably , destroy weeks and weeks of his
own work. Should he , however, find a deeply embedded error, one that actu–
ally does account for much of the program's misbehavior, his joy is unbound–
ed. It is a thrill to see a hitherto moribund program suddenly come back to life ;
there is no other way to say it. When some deep error has been found and
repaired, many different portions of the program that until then gave nothing
but incomprehensible outputs, suddenly behave smoothly and deliver
precisely the intended results . There is reason for the diagnostician to be
pleased and , if the error was really deep inside the system , even proud.
But the compulsive programmer's pride and elation are very brief. His
success consists of having shown the computer who its master is. And having
demonstrated that he can make it do this much , he immediately sets out
to
make it do even more. Thus the entire cycle begins again . He begins
to
" improve " his system , say , by making it run faster , or by adding " new
features " to it, or by improving the ease with which data can be entered into it
