Early in my programming career, I was assigned to a group of somewhere between twenty-five and fifty programmers, ranging in experience from more or less new (like me) to maybe ten years or so. Among the senior staff was a guy named Mike.

Mike fit almost every stereotype of nerd-dom you can imagine. Think of cartoonist Robert Crumb, say (that’s him in the self-portrait over at the right). Mike wore thick black-rimmed glasses; his hair nearly always seemed in need of a good washing; when his suits, ties, shoes, and socks were all on the same fashion wavelength on a given day, it was more or less accidental. He had various skin and dental issues. All of this fed into how he related to the rest of us, which was: barely. He never went out to lunch with anyone, as far as we could tell — in fact, except for occasional odd, misshapen sandwiches of indeterminate ingredients, he seemed not to eat at all. He had a good but rather skewed sense of humor, which could make conversations with him disorienting experiences. (“BE ALERT!” said a sign over his desk, “THE WORLD NEEDS MORE LERTS!”)

But ye gods, could that man code. As I recall, he worked mostly but not exclusively on some large-scale marketing-cum-engineering project (this was a giant telecommunications firm) with a couple dozen other programmers. But he was so good that people occasionally consulted with him on thorny little one-off jobs, when they just couldn’t get some tiny little thing — a subroutine, a calculation — to work quite the way they wanted it to.

I had occasion to bring him just one such chunk of problem code.

I can’t remember what it was supposed to do. But I remember that it was one of my favorite sort of programming: a procedure which could have been written to sprawl across a printout pages in length… but for which I had come up with a tight, intertwined, probably Rube Goldberg sort of nested loop which almost but did not quite do (as I said) as I wanted it to.

Mike looked through the program. He started to laugh — it was a wheezy, phlegmmy noise, not laughter at but laughter with. (He loved this sort of puzzle.)

He told me to leave him alone with the problem, and come back in fifteen or twenty minutes. I left his cubicle, went back to mine, and poked at the problem some more on my own. But I didn’t have to wait fifteen or twenty minutes.

I stood up at my desk, stretched, probably yawned. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eyes, I saw a figure pop up about thirty feet away. Mike, of course. And when I say “pop up” I mean he had done just that, sort of sproing! And he threw his hands in the air, and his head went back, and — laughing — he cried: It’s working! It’s working!

When I got to his office he showed me what he’d done. His solution was ingenious, as I’d expected, but what had truly excited him was a bit of code he’d put into place to assure that the program was functioning properly every step of the way, including every single iteration through that loop-within-a-loop-within-a-loop. In particular, the desktop terminal — we used terminals without screens back then, like sophisticated networked typewriters loaded with thermal paper — was spewing out line after line, overandoverandoverandoverandover, of all the intermediate results en route to the program’s conclusion…

When I’ve shared this story with other programmers, they smile at the image of Mike. Either they’ve known a Mike of their own, or they’ve been somebody else’s Mike (sometimes both). But then when I get to that joyous cry — It’s working! It’s working! — their smiles really grow.

They — we — know what Mike was feeling then. We love that feeling.