The Zen of Programming
Posted by Trixter on April 24, 2006
I ran across this quote from Peter Jennings (the programmer, not the newscaster) and thought it was worth republishing. It almost completely expresses my love for coding:
I love programming. It is almost impossible to explain the joy of writing software to someone who has not experienced it.
First and foremost, it is an act of creation. From a simple thought, and the arrangement of a few words and symbols, a reality is created that did not exist before.
No other activity can keep you in the moment the way that writing software can. At each step, one hundred percent of your concentration is applied to the solving of the current problem. Time disappears.
A well written program is a work of art. From conception to final presentation, the activity is that of an artist – the embodiment of a dream world expressed as an interactive experience for the user.
Peter was the author of the first commercial computer game, MicroChess, for the KIM-1 (yes, I'd never heard of it either until today). It's a chess program that runs in 1K of ram (variables and code).
Rod Pemberton said
Yes, that’s true. My most recent “in the moment” experience was with a program called install.asm for flopper. ;) It doesn’t work with my PC. I found that writing the following to grab my pre-DOS, BIOS vector table was easier…
; Rod Pemberton 06/06/2006 Public Domain
; alternative to Flopper’s Install.asm
; http://www.oldskool.org/pc/flopper
;
; boot into DOS
; fasm getvec.asm
; partcopy getvec.bin 0 200 -f0
; insert formatted disk into A:
; boot from A:
; upon reboot, eject disk in A:
; boot into DOS
; partcopy -f0 1400 400 vectable.dat
;
; fasm & partcopy can be downloaded together as
; 512devos-001.zip
; http://sourceforge.net/projects/bootsectoros
use16
org 0×7c00
cli
xor ax,ax
mov ss,ax
mov sp,0×7c00
xor ax,ax
mov es,ax
mov bx,ax
mov dx,ax
mov ax,0×0302
mov cx,0×000b
int 13h
jmp 0xffff:0×0000
sti
times 510-($-$$) db 0
dw 0xaa55
ITjobfeed said
Zen programming is all about internalising the structures