{"id":15759,"date":"2014-06-24T15:09:12","date_gmt":"2014-06-24T19:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=15759"},"modified":"2014-06-24T15:09:12","modified_gmt":"2014-06-24T19:09:12","slug":"its-working-its-working","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/its-working-its-working\/","title":{"rendered":"“It’s Working! It’s Working!”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"R.<\/a>E<\/span>arly 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>. 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!”)<\/p>\n

B<\/span>ut ye gods, could that man code<\/em>. As I recall, he worked mostly but not exclusively on some large-scale marketing-cum<\/em>-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<\/em> the way they wanted it to.<\/p>\n

I had occasion to bring him just one such chunk of problem code.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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!<\/em> And he threw his hands in the air, and his head went back, and — laughing — he cried: It’s working! It’s working!<\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/em>, including every single iteration through that loop-with<\/em>in-a-loop-within-a-loop<\/em>. 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…<\/p>\n

W<\/span>hen 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!<\/em> — their smiles really grow.<\/p>\n

They — we — know what Mike was feeling then. We love that feeling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[183,38,17,18,20],"tags":[309,1712,1713,3074],"class_list":{"0":"post-15759","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-everyday-life","7":"category-backwards","8":"category-04_technology","9":"category-computers","10":"category-programmingetc","11":"tag-programming","12":"tag-nerds","13":"tag-geeks","14":"tag-the-1980s","15":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-46b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15759"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15763,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15759\/revisions\/15763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}