

Richard Dawkins's Guilty Pleasure (no anchor link, scroll down ~3 screens) - Harkins
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2007/feb/03/weekend7.weekend5

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kqr2
To save you from scrolling, here's the Richard Dawkins portion:

 _Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, author

Computer programming

I have now kicked the habit, but every so often the craving returns and I must
thrust it down and away. But whence the guilt? Isn't programming useful? In
the right hands, yes. But my projects (inventing a word processor, machine
translation from one programming language to another, inventing a programming
language of my own) could all be done better (and were) by professionals. It
was a classic addiction: prolonged frustration, occasionally rewarded by a
briefly glowing fix of achievement. It was that pernicious "just one more push
to see what's over the next mountain and then I'll call it a day" syndrome. It
was a lonely vice, interfering with sleeping, eating, useful work and healthy
human intercourse. I'm glad it's over and I won't start up again. Except ...
perhaps one day, just a little ... _

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RobGR
I think his description of computer programming is very accurate.

I suspect that many people are attracted to computer programming because at
first, when you are learning it, it gives a constant series of little instant
gratifications -- you can change something, reload or recompile, see the
effects of your work.

This might explain many of the "computer people" stereotypes; impatient,
unhappy with maintainence type tasks that show no immediate benefit, and
generally "immature" from the point of view of others.

When you first start programming, you can write "hello, world" and get instant
gratification in 5 minutes. The time required for that gratification increases
as you go on. One of the reasons why people switch programming languages, is
that they are trying to re-create the quick gratifications of learning the
simple things all over again.

~~~
d0mine
You could use the test driven development to regulate an interval between
gratifications (the interval depends on granularity of your tests; more
granularity corresponds to shorter time intervals).

Thus you can build a giant system and get instant gratifications every 5
minutes if you'd like to.

~~~
RobGR
But any programmer smart enough to design such a system, would not get the
gratification, because they would see through it, just as playing for hours in
a computer game that you wrote is torture, but playing someone else's can be
deeply absorbing.

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biohacker42
As a professional software engineer with a CS degree working in bio-
informatics, I've had to deal with far too many brilliant scientists (but not
computer scientists) who like to program.

They are without question brilliant people, but the code they produce is like
the code I remember from the worst cs students from my days as a CS tutor.

A great mind with no formal programming training can code - but oh the horror,
the horror...

~~~
lallysingh
I've seen men use database access libraries in lieu of arrays, leading to
minutes of runtime that should've been ~5000 clock cycles.

 _shudder_

~~~
biohacker42
I've seen Chemistry PhDs try to store the rational numbers in a database.

Yes that meant that 99% of the database entries were Null.

No they didn't know what a "one to many" relationship is. No they didn't
realize or care that anything compared with Null is neither True nor False but
Null.

Sure there was a way to get what they wanted with no Nulls and a database the
fraction of the size, but they didn't care, they had PhDs.

------
tdavis
_It was a classic addiction: prolonged frustration, occasionally rewarded by a
briefly glowing fix of achievement._

When you put it like that, I guess I have another addiction. I've been sitting
around waiting many a year for someone to finally just say to me, "You don't
really know what you're doing, do you?" So that I could reply, "That's what
makes it fun!"

The frustration caused by it is probably why I smoke so damn much, though. Oh
well, better frustrated than bored.

~~~
alex_c
I don't remember exact instances, but I'm pretty sure I get to say that at
least once a year.

------
yan
My guilty pleasure is evolutionary biology.

~~~
dcurtis
I remember the very first time evolutionary biology made complete sense to me,
back in high school. I remember when I first made the connection between the
theories on how amino acids are formed and the way DNA is constructed and
replicated. If you take that basic evolutionary premise, and you just
extrapolate it to larger scales, it makes perfect sense and explains the way
biological systems build on each other.

The aha! excitement of that discovery was so powerful, and not unlike the aha!
I get when I finish writing some good code and watch it work for the first
time.

The human body is just a machine in nature, after all, and DNA is sort of like
its software.

~~~
d0mine
Evolution as bootstrapping an interpreter for DNA code is an interesting idea,
but I wonder how deep the analogy goes. There must be some simple biology fact
that invalidates it.

~~~
Herring
You've seen the article "DNA seen through the eyes of a coder"?

~~~
pchristensen
<http://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/>

------
jwilliams
Richard Dawkins wrote an evolutionary program for "The Selfish Gene". It drew
these tree like graphs and evolved them over time according to some
evironmental parameters (can't remember exactly. Was a preference for certain
angles in composition). Very interesting. Was facinating at how "biological"
the end products were. They were very reminicient of forms in nature.

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stcredzero
Reminds me of the old Lazarus Long quote: "Writing is not necessarily
something to be ashamed of but do it in private and wash your hands
afterwards."

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edw519
_occasionally rewarded by a briefly glowing fix of achievement_

I guess that's what happens when you do it just for yourself. (Why else would
you write a word processor, lanugange, or translator that's already been done
so well?)

OTOH, find someone who actually needs something and write it for them.

In this way, programming can be a lot like sex. The "glowing fix of
achievement" seems to last much longer when you do it with/for someone else.

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imaginario
I can't imagine Zizek playing C&C

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Allocator2008
Dawkins rules. "The Selfish Gene" I think is one of the books which has had
the most influence on me. That, and perhaps, "A brief history of time". I also
am interested in genetic algorithms, a sort of "interface" between computer
science and biology. In addition, the link to biology is further enhanced by
viruses and spiders, and in more ways than just their names. :-)

