
Robert Morris: All About Programming - avsaro
http://paulgraham.com/aap.html
======
allendoerfer
> My father tried to interest me in programming somewhat before high school;
> it didn't work, and I didn't continue then.

I suspect, that it almost never works that way. Learning programming or
hacking as a child is all about figuring it out on your own, doing something,
what your parents or your teachers can not understand, defining your own
identity.

That is why I doubt that all the programs in the US, which try to teach
children programming, will work. They might teach some concepts, but in the
end i fear, that they will hinder the children to aspire a career in the
field. I see a bad parallel to beauty contests, were parents try to live their
dreams through their children.

Of course it is never black and white, but I think you have to be ultra
careful with stuff like this. I think naturally interesting, open platforms
are a better way to get children to dig deeper. Minecraft is a perfect
example.

~~~
3pt14159
My mom taught me programming as a 6 year old almost 25 years ago. I went on to
study it at college night school from 10 to 14 and held a job before
graduating high school programming ASP, JS, and MS SQL.

Sometimes parents can teach their children things _and_ have it stick.

~~~
fit2rule
Yeah, not everything involving generations is so myopic. My kids, 7 and 4, are
absolutely entranced by computers and love to sit down at our old-school 8-bit
battlestation and bash things out. The elder has figured out how to do his
maths homework on it, and the younger has become an expert at loading files
and running them. None of this would be possible if I hadn't encouraged them
to investigate computers by setting up the battlestation in the first place ..
I think the key to getting kids interested in programming is to understanding
cyclomatic complexity in the first place, and not introducing them to things
that will overwhelm their interest. In the case of our 8-bit machines, which
are still fully functional programming devices, we seem to have met the sweet
spot .. lets see if in a couple of years we upgrade them to a Linux box and
compilers and so on. I'm fairly confident this will happen .. at least in the
case of the 4 year old, whose affinity for the subject seems to be being
amplified by observing daily his elder brothers' competence and confidence as
they discover - together - new things.

~~~
nazka
I will be very interested if one day you write about it. How you "designed"
the right battlestation (not too hard, but still challenging enough for their
age), and how you get them interested while avoiding not to over push them.

Really cool!

~~~
fit2rule
Actually I didn't have to do much beyond setting up the machines (in our case
an Oric-1/Atmos) and getting the means together to load the old software
archives on it.. once that was ready and booted, the kids just took over. It
turns out that 8-bit computing is really accessible to little kids, just like
it was for me in the 80's, and while that may have changed with the current
generation: the old machines still live!

;)

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bcd21
"Not wanting to look like a loser to the people I most admired, I was pretty
late in admitting the obvious about math."

Don't understand this part, what's the obvious thing about math he was late in
admitting? Were the Bell labs people right in his opinion or not?

~~~
Gyonka
I think he means the Bell Labs people were wrong, i.e Robert Morris did not
enjoy math, for him it was about the programming. He later mentions that it
was tough keeping in touch with the people at bell labs after ignoring their
advice about math.

I THINK. You're right, it's a bit unclear.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
This was my interpretation as well.

------
tim333
Took me a couple of minutes to figure who Robert Morris was so to save others
the effort:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris)

~~~
esonderegger
I just finished reading The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll this morning (And I
highly recommend it!). In the Epilogue, Stoll writes about the Morris worm and
briefly mentions:

(Harvard student Paul Graham sent him mail asking for "Any news on the
brilliant project")

When I read that, I wondered if that was THE Paul Graham.

~~~
endgame
Seconding this recommendation. I found a copy, used, at random for 50c. FIFTY
CENTS. Easily the greatest enjoyment/price ratio of anything I own.

Have you read his later book, /Silicon Snake Oil/? It's interesting how wrong
he ended up being about a lot of things.

~~~
wwweston
Dead wrong about e-commerce and eBooks and good number of other things to
boot.

On the other hand: "The truth is no online database will replace your daily
newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer
network will change the way government works.""

He's _partially_ wrong -- we have online newspapers, online education
resources that are better than nothing, and some political action via web-
shared activity.

But in spirit, anybody who's been paying attention to journalism is worried
about whether we even care to subsidize a healthy fifth estate anymore (or
just want more listicles and cable news), even Khan Academy isn't a substitute
for a competent teacher, and politics is still driven by the overriding
incentives and foibles of human nature.

Some of our new tools/resources are making a bigger difference than others;
some are just cosmetic changes.

~~~
michael_nielsen
Stoll has written a lovely 2010 mea culpa:

[http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-
on.html#c...](http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-
on.html#comment-723356)

Quoting:

"Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995
howler.

Wrong? Yep.

At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary
on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.

Gives me pause. Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my
lines in my 4th grade play. Misidentifying a Gilbert and Sullivan song while
suddenly drafted to fill in as announcer on a classical radio station. Wasting
a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury’s orbit using an infrared
system with a noise level so high that it couldn’t possibly detect ‘em. Heck –
trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven (a quarter century later,
there’s still a smudge on the kitchen ceiling)

And, as I’ve laughed at others’ foibles, I think back to some of my own
cringeworthy contributions.

Now, whenever I think I know what’s happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be
wrong, Cliff…

Warm cheers to all,

-Cliff Stoll on a rainy Friday afternoon in Oakland"

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galori
Can someone translate?

Might be some good wisdom in there but that is the most convoluted, badly
written several paragraphs I've seen in a while. Maybe they're taken out of
context or something or assume some knowledge that is missing?

~~~
sushirain
In sum, he never saw programming as work. Graham wrote that if you feel that
what you do is not "work", then it indicates that what you do is a good career
choice. But Morris says that even if someone explained it to him, he wouldn't
have been able to grasp it back then. It took him a long time to realize that
programming was more important to him than math, because of social pressure.

------
jarcane
I stayed away from pursuing programming as a vocation for almost 15 years.

I intuitively knew as a child that there were parts of programming and using
computers which "weren't work" for me, but also very much ones that were, and
I foresaw the probability that I might cease to enjoy the "not work" parts
after being ground down by too much work.

As I come back to it now, I still think that. Increasingly I think it really,
genuinely, depends on the style and language of programming you take up, and
what you do with it. When I code in something like Lisp or Haskell, it doesn't
feel like "work," it feels like problem solving. I tend to focus on CS topics
as well; I built a VM, and a couple of programming languages, because they too
were fun to think about, not work.

For me, I have progressively gravitated to more and more expressive languages,
while moving away from more imperative ones which descend into repetitive
"design patterns". I burned out quickly on the world of web programming, which
inherently seems to require a whole lot of tedious yak shaving if you're
flying solo.

Of course, the flipside which anyone bothering to read this may already be
hastening to chastise me with is that none of this is likely to necessarily
lead to actual employment.

Someone has to do the "work." And the amount of "work" to be done is a lot
greater than there are people who don't find it work, which is why there will
always be a lot more demand for that. In part I suspect this is because some
kinds of "work" are self-replicating (Java programming begets the need for
more Java programmers ...), but I nonetheless find myself fearing that my
chosen "not work" is merely a fool's fantasy; and I occasionally have guilt
complexes about "why am I not just learning JavaScript so I can at least get a
gruntwork job at Rovio or somewhere" ...

~~~
pakled_engineer
I took a major pay cut so I wouldn't have to work with certain popular
commercial languages ever again, and now enjoy working in a small studio where
we create DSLs in Scheme. Every week I discover something new about Lisp and
then use it on independent hobby projects, whereas before I didn't even want
to look at a computer after work.

~~~
bojo
If you don't mind offering up the information, where do you work? Or at the
very least, what field do you work in? That sounds extremely fun.

~~~
pakled_engineer
Small stealth mode startup in Vancouver, Canada that does custom DSLs for the
oil & gas industry. I found the job on my local CL, they were advertising
looking for anybody who had read SICP, or had experience doing functional
programming. It doesn't pay a lot but enough to live comfortably while single
plus I get to hack around in Scheme all day, though now they want me to learn
Haskell too.

I work 6hrs a day usually and spend the rest of time experimenting with my own
DSLs for future side projects or enjoying life whereas before I'd go to work
before the sun came up, work in a windowless office under constant
unachievable deadlines then leave at night. I had money but no life.

~~~
gwern
A job for the oil & gas industry which requires SICP level coders which
doesn't pay well? I'm not sure what to think - that that industry really
doesn't pay well, or that you need to read patio11's guide to salary
negotiations.

~~~
Gracana
He explains that he's happy and says he lives comfortably. Why is that not
enough?

~~~
gwern
Because if he's making a below-market salary as it sounds like, he could be
doing better. With a higher salary, he could have more savings, more security,
more easily afford a family or the things he wants, donate more to charity,
spend more on personal hobbies, etc. Money has many uses.

And I could ask you the same question: the startup founders and oil industry
would live comfortably enough if they made a little less and paid him better;
why is that not enough? Why should they be making more?

------
GuiA
_> The idea that one should ask questions about one's own life (e.g. your
"What seems like work...?") and act on the answers was completely alien to me
in those days, and I doubt I could have absorbed any wisdom in this
department._

That resonates deeply with me. Until my early 20s, I was terrible at absorbing
any form of wisdom from anyone. I just went ahead forward into whatever
interested me, with no regard for what anyone would have to say about it. I
was fortunate enough to be born with a brain that worked fairly well and
allowed me to get away with this behavior for the longest time.

It is for this reason that I consider my time in grad school as mostly a
failure - I joined at 19 as a PhD student and left 2 years later with a
Master's degree, leaving the PhD for startups, and in those 2 years I didn't
achieve anything that I'd consider interesting work (completely by my own
fault). Even worse, my immaturity resulted in me making very little of the
absolutely brilliant advisor I had (the perfect combo: a researcher whose
early work pioneered a new field and gave him enormous peer recognition, but
who was still early enough in his career that he had plenty of time to devote
to his students), who had high hopes for me that ended up completely
unfulfilled.

It was only after a few years of working in the real world with some very
smart (and some very dumb) people, getting yelled at, seeing friends get fired
(I never got fired myself although I came close a few times), and a few other
similar experiences that I realized that indeed my life would be much improved
if I stopped and recognized that some people do have words of wisdom that hold
value for me. Psychedelics and traveling the world+meeting people who had it
way worse than me yet achieved way more with what they had also contributed
significantly to my maturing - the rewards of it being that I now am starting
to enjoy an amount of success, clarity, and reward in my work that would have
been unconceivable 6 years ago (although it still feels like most of the road
is ahead, as it should).

For those reasons, it feels like advice such as the one given by PG is lost:
the people who need it most won't really get the importance of what he means,
and the people who will get it can do so because they've already internalized
it.

All that being said, I look forward to 5 years from now, when I will say
things about my mid-20s similar to what I just said about my early 20s :)

~~~
auggierose
I advice you to stay away from the psychedelics. Trust me, this is an advice
you can't afford not to believe until it is too late.

~~~
lumpypua
You've clearly been burned. That's fine, but tell us your story rather than
giving some vague advice devoid of context.

~~~
lgieron
My friend's mental health was seriously and irreversibly damaged by a one time
adventure with psychedelics... Apparenty, non-negligible (over 1%?) portion of
the population reacts this way.

~~~
shutupalready
I know a kid whose throat swelled up, couldn't breathe for several minutes,
and suffered brain damage after a one time incident of eating peanuts...
Apparently, non-negligible (over 1% [1]) portion of the population reacts this
way.

Lesson for everybody: Don't eat nuts!

[1] [http://www.mountsinai.org/about-us/newsroom/press-
releases/r...](http://www.mountsinai.org/about-us/newsroom/press-
releases/rate-of-childhood-peanut-allergies-more-than-tripled-
between-1997-and-2008)

Your argument against psychedelics is not persuasive in the manner presented.

~~~
lgieron
It depends on how much risk averse you are - I know that, for me, trying out
psychedelics is not worth the 1% risk of going into psychotic breakdown, being
admitted to psychiatric ward or even messing myself up permanently. For others
it might be worth it.

------
quaunaut
This is one of those places where I've been really conflicted for as long as
I've been back with programming.

Right now, I'm going with the path that not only makes more money(and thusly
induces less stress), but also has a higher probability of making people's
lives better, through the kinds of things I want to put my time and effort
into being focused around enabling people to create their own jobs.

Yet I know __extremely __well what I want to do, what makes me happy. It will
make some others happy, but a significantly smaller number. It certainly won
't change lives for the better. But doing it would make it so the things I
think about in the margins of my mind, all day and night, for as long as I can
remember, are what I spend my life working on.

In essence: I can't tell if it's a better idea to do what makes me happy, or
what makes others' lives better.

~~~
nileshtrivedi
Given that money has a time value, it makes sense to do the latter in your
early years and gradually tilt the balance towards the former.

------
aditya
typo: absorbtion should be absorption

