A Personal Pantagraph

Programming used to be about moving bits, so programmers memorized the power of 2 and ASCII or EBCDIC. Then it was about control flow, and programmers learned how to loop over an input deck and perform an operation for each element of the deck (and how to handle the pesky EOF case, which may force you to read twice from the file). Then it became about data structures, and programmers learned how to build their own linked lists of records, trees of records, traversals, and so on. But advances in programming languages and environments have made most of that knowledge obsolete, even dangerous. Today, programming is about design and architecture. But are advances in frameworks making this knowledge irrelevant as well?

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How could we get it more wrong! Recently, I’ve been reading or rereading classic science fiction stories. And I ran into The Quest for Saint Aquin, a short story by Anthony Boucher that first appeared in 1951. Although not evident at first, the story has all to do with robots and how we will interact with them. I think it nailed many of the concepts, but it fails an interesting test. Read the rest of this entry »