On Friday, 27 March 2015 at 04:35:17 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 3/26/2015 8:53 PM, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
It's also the view of Feynman, not to mention many great minds
of the past. Ie
it is limiting to insist on data before forming a strong
opinion about something
(which is not to say that one may not change one's mind in the
face of contrary
data).
Feynman's books are all worth reading, even if you have no
interest in physics. His attitude about things is just a marvel.
I once had a roundtable discussion with the question "if you
could resurrect any historical figure, who would it be?" I
nominated Feynman, and that pretty much ended the discussion
:-) nobody could think of anyone more appropriate.
So yeah, I definitely take inspiration from him.
Richard P. Feynman
“Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer
from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers
now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes
completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you
*play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches
- if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you
do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate
things if you are clever enough, on one machine.
After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying
any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was
going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring
out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X,
and then it would start and it would print columns and then
bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically
by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one
operation.
Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if
you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease -
the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he
got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented
the thing.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!:
Adventures of a Curious Character
tags: computers, humor, programming
;)
