Advice to a Junior in High School?

[Jeremy Bowers]

On Tue, 02 Sep 2003 09:14:41 -0700, Stan Graves wrote:
> Yes.  I have had the mis-fortune of being a maintenance programmer for
> far too much of my life.  I have read reams of documentation, and
> hundreds of thousands of lines of code.  I have attempted to make
> sense of code written to do one thing, but extended and tortured into
> doing another.

For what it's worth, you're reading the slush pile and judging the whole
discipline with it, if that statement is accurate. To be fair, you need to
be comparing the *best* of computer science against Shakespeare, not
whatever happens to cross your desk. You can't judge English Novels by
Danielle Steele, either. The whole "Turing Machine" bit (including the
Halting Problem, incomputability, the whole "there are problems we can't
solve, provably") has personally moved me a lot more then Shakespeare.
Knuth has a piercing clarity. There are others. (Python itself is
surprisingly larger then the sum of its parts, to stay on topic, and I'm
not just saying that; I mean it.)

(Actually, I'm not a fan of Shakespeare; he's good with words but I think he
is worshipped because he was first; the first guys to be decent at
something are held up as geniuses later, but I think the exact same work,
done thirty years later after somebody *else* had been first, would be
merely a historical footnote. So I'll take the larger point and
extrapolate to "English masterpiece".)

(On the later point, I'm agreeing to disagree.)