h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

you do realise that you are currently using a computer system designed by these programmers, with you and a few other users? of course, programmers are obviously strange. Are you one yourself? personally i have done a small amount of logical instruction which might be called programming if you stretched the definition, but it doesnt appear to have changed me.

Except for this discussion????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes I realise I'm using one of those devices right now. Plus, I'm pretty sure I know what exactly is happening inside the piece, with the notable exception of what a certain piece of software made by M$ is doing all the time. Programming did change me in some ways, like being doubly careful when entering plain numbers somewhere. It's just too easy to omit a digit or to swap two of them, and you'll never find out why your program is misbehaving. My very first program written in assembly was meant to write 'hello world' (what else, heehee ) on the display. It did indeed write 'hello world', but wrote it to sector 0, track 0, head 0 of the harddisk, because it was written that way

Another aspect is, to make sure that *everything* the program acquired/opened/registered/grabbed at some time, must be returned/closed/unregistered/released upon exiting or crashing or whatever way there might be to terminate it. Otherwise it's just, well, just yet another 'regular' Windoze app.

Oh, and a couple more thoughts can be found at A634510 !