|
Knuth has an interesting take on this, as he learned by reading programs. He claims if the programs he first saw were too good, he wouldn't have bothered with programming:
https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006/blob/master/R... "I read the manuals that came from IBM, and it had; the manuals had example programs in there, and I thought of better ways to write those programs. I thought of, you know, well, okay, this program works, but if you did it this way, it would be even better. And so that’s given me some confidence that maybe I had a talent for programming. Now, if the manual hadn’t had these bad examples in it, I probably would not have gotten interested in programming, because I wouldn’t have this confidence, and I would have been scared and say, oh, I would never think of this.But the fact is, the manuals were pretty stupid, and that’s what gave me the confidence that I should think a little more about programming, because I might be, you know, I might be good at it." |