The article describes a bad programmer as one whose programs “die young”. I would guess that Knuth is saying is that the longest one of his programs lived (was used?) for 12 years?
If that is what he meant, I presume this remark was written well in the past, as TeX has lasted way more than 12 years.
I see. I was talking about not the article itself, but this handwritten note on the front page:
> This article from Datamation is by someone from ADR - the name might be Moore. (It wasn't meant to be anonymous; that was accidental). A lot of people who knew me thought I wrote it. I wish I had!
> I particularly like his definition of a bad programmer. (My personal record is about 12 years.)
The scan comes from Knuth's personal collection scanned by the Computer History Museum. Many of the documents have similar notes by Knuth, so I assumed this was by him too. Though on closer look, I'm not so sure the handwriting is the same. (It would be ironic if a note about misattribution gets misattributed.) How do you know the note is by Chuck Baker?
It's remarkable how these papers show a deep understanding of programming 50 years ago. Even with anemic hardware, the limit is always in the programmers brain - as uncomfortable as that is to admit. Half a century of new tech and AI and the cloud etc, we still hit "terminal trauma" fairly quickly in the development cycle, almost like clockwork. All the tools and technical tricks don't seem to matter vs. our ability to hold the application in our heads.
> I particularly like his definitinon of a bad programmer. (My personal record is about 12 years.)
here?
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