Another year and yet another "deep" question from Edge - What Is Your Deep, Elegant Or Beautiful Explanation?. My favorite two responses:
Why Programs Have Bugs by Marti Hearst
"When espousing the joys of programming, the programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. ... Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time.
In many creative activities the medium of execution is intractable. Lumber splits; paints smear; electrical circuits ring. These physical limitations of the medium constrain the ideas that may be expressed, and they also create unexpected difficulties in the implementation.
... Computer programming, however, creates with an exceedingly tractable medium. The programmer builds from pure thought-stuff: concepts and very flexible representations thereof. Because the medium is tractable, we expect few difficulties in implementation; hence our pervasive optimism. Because our ideas are faulty, we have bugs; henour optimism is unjustified."
- The Mythical Man-Month:: Essays on Software Engineering by Fred Brooks
How To Have a Good Idea by Marcel Kinsbourne
"To have a good idea, stop having a bad one. The trick was to inhibit the easy, obvious but ineffective attempts, permitting a better solution to come to mind. To the novice the Good Idea seems magical, a leap of intellectual lightning. More likely, however, it resulted from an iterative process as outlined above, with enough experience in back to help reject seductive but misleading premises. Thus the extraordinary actually arises step by step out of the ordinary.
When the finest minds fail to resolve a classical problem, during decades, or centuries of trying, they were probably trapped by a premise that was so culturally "given", that it did not even occur to them to challenge it, or they did not even notice it at all. But cultural context changes and what seemed totally obvious yesterday becomes dubious at best today or tomorrow. Sooner or later someone who may be no more gifted than his/her predecessors, but is unshackled from some very basic and very incorrect assumption, may hit upon the solution with relative ease. Alternatively, one can be a fish, wait a million years or two, and see what comes up."
Why Programs Have Bugs by Marti Hearst
"When espousing the joys of programming, the programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. ... Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time.
In many creative activities the medium of execution is intractable. Lumber splits; paints smear; electrical circuits ring. These physical limitations of the medium constrain the ideas that may be expressed, and they also create unexpected difficulties in the implementation.
... Computer programming, however, creates with an exceedingly tractable medium. The programmer builds from pure thought-stuff: concepts and very flexible representations thereof. Because the medium is tractable, we expect few difficulties in implementation; hence our pervasive optimism. Because our ideas are faulty, we have bugs; henour optimism is unjustified."
- The Mythical Man-Month:: Essays on Software Engineering by Fred Brooks
How To Have a Good Idea by Marcel Kinsbourne
"To have a good idea, stop having a bad one. The trick was to inhibit the easy, obvious but ineffective attempts, permitting a better solution to come to mind. To the novice the Good Idea seems magical, a leap of intellectual lightning. More likely, however, it resulted from an iterative process as outlined above, with enough experience in back to help reject seductive but misleading premises. Thus the extraordinary actually arises step by step out of the ordinary.
When the finest minds fail to resolve a classical problem, during decades, or centuries of trying, they were probably trapped by a premise that was so culturally "given", that it did not even occur to them to challenge it, or they did not even notice it at all. But cultural context changes and what seemed totally obvious yesterday becomes dubious at best today or tomorrow. Sooner or later someone who may be no more gifted than his/her predecessors, but is unshackled from some very basic and very incorrect assumption, may hit upon the solution with relative ease. Alternatively, one can be a fish, wait a million years or two, and see what comes up."
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