Interview with Rachel Vincent

& (verbiage overflow)Wed 11 May 2016RSSSearchSubscribe

Conducted May, 2016 at the Recurse Center.

RHV: What got you started programming and why did you come back?

DPB: My mother moved me to a new school in 1975, when I was 13. There I was exposed for the first time to programming and to Latin, subjects foreign to me that I still recall today as tokens of life in a much healthier environment. The middle school computer teacher was a young woman and the class was coed. She taught us BASIC, which ran on an IBM 1130 mainframe with an “input hopper” for reading punchcards and a “lineprinter” for output; there was also a “console typewriter” for some input and output. By 15 I was stewing happily in Latin and FORTRAN IV, and remained so until I graduated. I did most of my coding using punchcards or, later, on a paper terminal connected to a PDP11, sometimes staying in the computer room into mid-evening to do so. I also owned a programmable calculator for which I could write a sort of procedural bytecode language, each code corresponding to a discrete keystroke on the calculator.

The new school adhered to the relic of a progressive educational philosophy, one of those that originated around the First World War and akin to the later Unschooling movement that now vivifies RC. Students had unstructured “lab” time scheduled every day, during which we were supposed to meet and study one-on-one with teachers, on the basis of “contracts” with each of them. But I discovered that at these times I could vanish into the library (which was enormous and boasted a complete set of Loeb Classics) or the computer room, and the Powers apparently considered me to be operating within appropriate parameters and left me alone. In retrospect, this liberty and this access to books and computers infected me with the spore of the “questing” life — the life spent in study.

So a lot of the time that I spent within the walls of my high school was invested in FORTRAN and Latin. But after graduation I abandoned them both for new loves. In college I immersed myself in Chinese language and articulatory phonetics, and after working for a while on a program to simulate the ritual of consulting the Yìjīng (“I Ching”), I gave up programming altogether. At the time I had only experienced strictly procedural programming — little more than scripting — and I had no more than the dimmest notion of basic things like time complexity and memory allocation.

Chinese and phonetics required assorted technical skills, skills I reveled in, but none of them were in any way automated. Proficiency in Chinese combined perhaps a half-dozen challenging skills involving reasoning and different sorts of memory (including kinesthetic memory and memory for pitch), and I turned out to be good at most of them; articulatory phonetics depended on one’s ear and tongue, and mine were sharp. I forgot all about procedural programming and eventually went on to graduate school to study at the feet of authorities in Chinese dialect classification, historical phonology, and general sinology (the philology of traditional Chinese literature). My dissertation advisor treated me in the traditional way of the Doktorvater that I think almost no one in the sciences and engineering ever encounters now — like a beloved child and colleague. For my dissertation research I spent a couple of years in the Chinese countryside, sometimes in places without electricity, documenting obscure dialects by hand and ear in order to study linguistic history in the region. I returned with a great mass of data, hand-written on paper, that would have to be manually collated.

My return to programming, or it would be better to say my eventual awakening to it, began when I was writing my dissertation in 1996, and got fed up with Microsoft Word. Word v5.1 did not handle the Chinese script or the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) satisfactorily, and the more advanced v6.0 would not run on my low-end laptop. I could write my own IPA font using special font-design software, but Chinese was a real headache — we graduate students passed around samizdat copies of Taiwan software and used hacks to support non-Western scripts. As a replacement for Word, I stumbled on the small application Nisus (still in production today), which supported multilingual word processing in the era before Unicode. Nisus’s search/replace tool used Perl-flavored regular expressions (regex), which I learned by trial and error and found very stimulating. Incorporated into in-application “macros”, regex let me write procedural scripts to search or edit the text files where my dialect data was stored.

But I really discovered true programming only in 2009. By then I had become a professor at a university, gotten tenure, and left my professorship after coming to suspect there must be more interesting challenges for me. I went to work in the tech industry, in a machine translation start-up, holding a responsible but relatively non-technical position. When the company closed after the 2008-9 economic collapse, Norman Kabir told me, “You should learn to code,” and being at loose ends I did, at age 47. I started learning Python, very hesitantly, dabbling with manipulating Chinese strings in Python 2, which forced me to learn about encodings. I was lucky to be taken in by Gloria Willadsen, who had founded the New York Python Meetup and was mentoring a few people at a time in Python in order to foster best practices. I felt I should try to get some sort of formal training, and so matriculated as a second-degree Engineering undergraduate at the City College of New York (“City”) in 2010. I soon decided to attend part-time, giving as much energy as I could to each class in order learn the content reasonably well (rather than skimming, as many undergraduates are forced to do). I was adjuncting to pay the bills, doing a lot of sinology and getting things published that I had had to put on hold earlier because of the academic grind, but in three years I finished the seven courses that made up the Computer Science (CS) minor, while teaching, publishing, and so on. It took me a while to find out, though, that in a CS program you learn CS, not programming. CS consists of things that are useful to programming, though. I only really started coding every day, following my own program of study, about a month before I came to RC — I was fifty at that point, at the end of 2012.


RHV: What were those “things that were useful to programming”?

DPB: The most important ones were discrete math, data structures, and algorithms. I also gained from courses in probability theory and theoretical computer science. I am not very good at math, but I worked hard and managed to do well in them. There were also two hands-on coding courses in the core curriculum, and I have come to doubt their value. For one thing, articulation between them and the more theoretical curriculum was poor.

But those first five courses I mentioned I would recommend to anyone who wanted to enrich their programming life — they have all proven deeply useful, and it’s hard to describe what a pleasure it was to study them.


RHV: What’s the most frustrating day or event you’ve ever had as a programmer?

DPB: There have been too many to name. Being frustrated is a regular part of my experience while programming.

One case that springs violently to mind happened during my last class at City, just before I joined RC — a course in Java and Android. I thought I would start learning the Android material by trying the official Google introductory tutorial. And the code it supplied didn’t work — I spent days and days and eventually identified five serious errors that had to be corrected before their code worked as prescribed. I learned a lot from the exercise, but the frustration exceeded whatever satisfaction I had. After that, I managed to write an app, but I have never felt like working in Android again. I’d rather work with tools that seem carefully maintained and documented.

I like detail, I’m curious, and I’m stubborn — that combination makes me willing to dig interminably for answers. It is not an unusual mix of traits but I think I have it to a severe degree, and it taints much of what I do. Among other things, it makes me slow to ask for help, to my detriment.

If I ever learn to give up sooner and ask for help, I’m sure I’ll be a better programmer. One of the signs of being a good programmer is observing yourself to be flailing. That is why programming seems much easier when you’re pair-programming, because you can see the other person flailing and then easily conclude that you, too, must be flailing. But when you’re alone, self-observation is difficult. So a day goes by and then another, and you’re still struggling, or perhaps your struggle has branched off into some sub-struggle or meta-struggle or para-struggle, or all of these at once. Pairing is much more efficient than by just a factor of two. Your learning is deeper, and there are many more lines of experience running into your mind — you are reading your partner’s body language, which includes responses to your own body language, and all sorts of useful things are happening.


RHV: How has your background in academia informed your approach to programming itself and to learning new things in relation to programming?

DPB: People often think of me as an academic who moved into coding. I don’t think of myself that way at all. The mix of traits I’ve described above — love of detail, curiosity, and stubbornness — has led me to, among other things, an academic career and coding life. But I think it has led me to each separately.

In the earlier, “typewriter age” when a lot of my learning habits were formed, it wasn’t always easy to go and simply look things up. Reference books, if you had access to them, were selective by nature, and sometimes you didn’t have access to them at all. You couldn’t necessarily just go get whatever you wanted, because you didn’t necessarily have access, and sometimes it wasn’t obvious at all where you would have to go to get what you wanted to know. That affected the kind of searching you did for information — you did not automatically assume that you could or would find it. I have the feeling these days that computational resources lead me to use my mind in ways that are different from how I did when there were only paper resources — I have the impression that paper resources required more factual and spatial memory and less reasoning and kinesthetic memory. I have an idea that programming involves, for me, nothing less than my kinesthetic imagination as a form of visualization. (Actually, I have the same experience when reading Classical Chinese.) But I’m not sure how that affects programming itself. And it’s easy to imagine today that everything you want to know is somewhere on the Internet, if you just phrase your search query the right way. I’m pretty sure that sensation, vivid as it is, is quite wrong.


RHV: Do you find parallels between programming as a practice and academic research? or life in academia in general, if not research?

DPB: I understand you’re asking about social issues rather than how we establish what is true — about the Thomas Kuhn angle rather than the Karl Popper angle. One point is that industry is a lot more hard-headed than a Humanistic department in a university. Another point concerns collaboration. And then there’s the question of power dynamics among people.

First the question of hard-headedness. College professors, especially after tenure and especially in the Humanities, often think of themselves as independent contractors — they may go for decades without any supervision or validation of their teaching and research. That is very different from the experience of most programmers in a company, where your work contributes to a collective business product and where anyone not meeting expectations may be dismissed without warning.

Teaching may sometimes require you to adhere to some external syllabus or rubric — but in my courses, from graduate school onward, I don’t think there were more than ten occasions, over about 25 years, when a visitor sat in one one of my classes to make a neutral observation of how I taught. When I ran my university’s Chinese Program I strongly encouraged all language faculty to observe each other’s classes regularly, but that was done for mutual enlightenment, not critical evaluation. In research, I never had to worry about meeting external criteria imposed by funding agencies — what few grants there were in my stone-cold fields generally went to an individual for individual work, and as a professor — in theory, at least — I had plenty of time to work on whatever I wanted. (I say “in theory” because in practice, as head of the Chinese program, I had a lot of administrative chores to discharge, and those cut into my research time.)

On the other hand, academic programs where graduate students live on funding from their professors — these are much more common in the sciences, engineering, and power-oriented fields like linguistics and education — are quite different from what I experienced in an unmodish Chinese philology program. In a hot field, there are satanic quantities of paperwork to be done, budgets to be planned and expenses justified, and a participant who fails to fulfill expectations may be sacked.

Now, as to collaboration. My academic research life was solitary, apart from fieldwork. I didn’t learn to collaborate on academic projects until after I left academia. I think collaborating on programming projects is easier — it’s certainly more accepted among engineers than in the Humanities — although it’s not easy to find coders who want to commit with whole heart to a long-term but possibly non-commercial collaboration.

Power dynamics between people seem to me about the same in both environments — there’s a lot of chitchat and wasted time, unless you take care. There are servile flatterers in low positions and stuffed shirts in high positions. There are “honeysuckles” (and other climbing creepers) at all levels. And human beings generally pay more attention to prestige and reputation than to substance.


Although you’re asking a Thomas Kuhn question, I’m more interested in the Karl Popper reading of what you’ve asked: what strategies can we use to establish knowledge? Briefly, I can think of three. First, software testing has a lot in common with hypothesis-falsification, an important feature dividing good scholarship from bad. Second, theoretical computer science seems to offer models for exploring formal symbolic systems, one of my sinological research interests — how do things like the Chinese “rime tables” (děngyùntú 等韻圖), the Chinese script, or the Gwoyeu Romaztyh 國語羅馬字 romanization system actually represent the things they do? Finally, the coder ideal of favoring “primary sources of truth”, which I discuss later on, is congruent to the practice in philology of consulting either primary or standard sources, rather than derivative works whose relationship to the originals is uncertain.


RHV: What is your approach to learning, let’s say, a new programming language, as when you had to learn Python?

DPB: When I learned regex, I did so entirely by futzing — I didn’t even know it was a real (and efficiently elaborated) system — I thought I was figuring out some arbitrary notation invented by the Nisus developers.

When I decided to try Python, I bought a couple of simple-looking books and started writing code immediately. I didn’t do a tutorial — I got reference tools and tried my hand at the code directly. Within about six months I had discovered David Beazley’s Python Essential Reference, which I carried with me all the time and read in whenever I had a free moment (just as when I was in graduate school I carried the reduced-type Tsyryuan 辭源 dictionary with me all the time and read in it constantly).

In the time since then, I’ve tried tutorials many times, but I don’t think they’ve ever worked satisfactorily for me. What they promise is attractive but I always end up disappointed.

As I observe myself, it seems I combine two activities when I learn. One is to dabble and try things out with my own paws, sometimes indulging in compulsive-looking repetition. The other is to sketch out a kind of system that encompasses what I am learning. I sorely need system, but apparently I also need to organize it myself. I’ve often tried using pre-fabricated schemata for what I’m learning — that was true in my study of Chinese historical phonology and Chinese medicine, too, in earlier lives — but it always turns out that I can’t do much with a systematic scheme unless I’ve composed it myself.


RHV: How has academia affected your approach to programming itself?

DPB: The effects of my scholarly life on my approach to programming are a problem for me. I’ve tended, when left to myself, to work in the domains of expertise in which I made my original academic career. Those domains still interest me very much, even though I don’t make a living in Chinese any more. I mean questions involving Chinese diction or the ordering of sound in Chinese literature — these interest me a lot, and computers can spare me vast amounts of benumbing, repetitive manual labor and answer my questions efficiently. So the kinds of projects that tend to attract me in practice are ways of making manual work efficient, not the sorts of things that fill other programmers with awe at my craftiness.

I would have been wiser, in my second batch, to break away from my expertise and maybe even from every language and tool I was now familiar with, and to dedicate those three months to working in ways new to me — say, only with images, or only with color and shapes. That would be an act of self-fertilization, manuring my own roots. Partly, I return to sinology problems because there are so many sinological questions that I’m still interested in asking, and of course you can learn a lot even by writing code to support an expert domain, rather than just solving puzzles in which you don’t have an emotional investment. But it isn’t healthy that I’ve rarely broken out of my home domains — it means that I’ve tended to let my past interests inform my present work, and I’m now certain I’ve done that too much.


RHV: Are you still getting a lot out of projects like that — are you holding yourself up to where you could be if you did these very different things and seeing that you’re not still growing as a programmer because you’re working in this one sphere, or are you still growing as a programmer even though you’re working in this one sphere, and that’s why you’re loath to jump out.

DPB: There are several factors to think about: growth overall, growth surrounding familiar tools, and growth in non-programmatic matters supported by programming.

Yes — at this stage of my life as a programmer, in order to grow most overall I must work in some language other than Python. It’s like walking in New York — it’s enormously stimulating but if you want it to remain so over time, at some point you have to start varying your paths. If you’ve been up and down all the long north-south streets, at some point you have to start walking across the island the short way. That’s one aspect to the situation you’re asking about: recognizing the need to wrench oneself into a new paradigm so as to grow in a different way than one has before. RC wisely advises junior programmers to get control of one language very thoroughly, first of all. But exactly when to take on another language is harder to decide.

The BASIC and FORTRAN and bytecode-language that I studied in childhood and the regex-macros that I found myself writing in my thirties share a purely procedural style. It’s possible to write Python the same way, as a scripting tool or with functions (the FORTRAN I learned had “subroutines” rather than named functions). Even in object-oriented style, it’s common for Python methods to be basically procedural, internally. More abstract styles of coding — recursion, higher-order functions, asynchronous execution with callbacks — are possible in Python, but it isn’t clear to me how often they are necessary in the service of your average, practical use case. I have no facility with mathematical puzzles or abstract board games, nor even much interest in them, and I think the puzzle-and-game mindset draws some people to abstract styles of programming much earlier in their coding education than happened in my case.

But that is not the only dynamic in play. Working in corporations for the last year and a half, I’ve learned a lot of tools new to me. Even in Python, I’ve learned some tools and techniques that you tend not to learn when you simply “learn Python” proper. I’ve also learned production tools that I think must be almost impossible to learn outside of a working production environment. That’s another aspect to the situation: I’m certainly growing as a programmer, even though I’ve continued working in Python. I think it would have been out of character for me to have gone on quickly to another language after Python. I tend to perfuse myself with whatever I study. When I imagine myself as a complex computer program, I think of this trait as a depth-first search algorithm.

A third dynamic is this: my research projects are all cases of application; the code is not the important thing. So the code is often much simpler than what I write when learning an algorithm or a new tool, and with good reason: I’m pursuing a different kind of discovery. The research problem isn’t usually so much hard as it is tedious, and the computer lets me answer some questions by doing repetitive tasks for me — something I couldn’t feasibly do by hand. That makes possible kinds of research of great interest to me, but in those cases I’m learning more as a sinologist than as a programmer. With the computer I can pose questions that I couldn’t have posed before, or anyway couldn’t have answered. For instance, there are questions about Chinese usage and prosody that I thought of in the 1980s and only recently became able to answer because I can code. So that’s another aspect to the situation: some of my growth is as a sinologist, and that’s acceptable to me. I think I am in the minority among engineers I know, in or out of the RC clan, in maintaining a life-activity whose level of complexity is that of a career, yet intrinsically apart from programming. I learned to code in the service of that activity, and it’s necessary for me to continue to grow in it.

In sum, I think I’ve delayed one kind of growth that is important to me and that RC considers distinctive of the experience here, but I’ve grown nonetheless in other respects that are considerable — it hasn’t been a waste to have proceeded the way I have, but I find the pressure within me to learn more abstract styles is getting strong.


RHV: You have done two batches at RC. Before your first batch, what were your expectations of what RC would be like?

DPB: Actually, I now realize that I had no idea what I was walking into.

I would summarize the issues as: meetup culture, skill-level and pairing, generational differences, community, and socialization. And the greatest of these was socialization.

Meetup culture. I heard about RC in mid-September of 2012, after the media blitz surrounding the Summer ‘12 batch. I had to wait two and a half months for the application-window to open and then applied, with no way to estimate my chances of getting in — I assumed the application queue would be mobbed with the kinds of people I met at the various coding meetups. It was not. But meetups were the only model I had, apart from the ACM club at City College, for how programmers might interact socially while also technically. The model was no use. RC turned out to be entirely different.

Skill-level and pairing. I knew that batchlings would be at different levels of skill and that mine would be relatively low, and I also thought there would be a lot of interaction between batchlings of different levels — there was much less of that than I expected. I did much of my work alone, rarely pairing. I remember that I felt both surprised and intimidated by some of the pairing that I observed between some parties from the very first day on — it involved people not just sitting together but sometimes located in different parts of the room yet still working together and calling out to one another. It seemed ostentatious to me. In practice it was harder than I expected to get people to pair with me during my first batch.

Generational differences. That I would be older than most batchlings, I expected — actually, I was the oldest person to attend RC up to that point (though I’ve since been bested). I don’t remember being fazed about that at all — for the previous three years I had been taking college classes, and I was used to being around much younger people. The average undergraduate in my classes at at City was, I suppose, about 20, with a few people up in their thirties; the average age at RC was around 28, and the range in my batch was around 20-48, not including me. But an interesting difference was that at City, the professors (ages around 30-60) were my social peers — I could talk to them about grading policies and pre-tenure strategies and handling plagiarism, even though technically I was studying under them as an undergraduate. In that environment the young were my fellows, but as undergraduates our relationships were subtly competitive and we had relatively little interaction with one another, even though I joined the ACM and served as chapter secretary for a year. At RC, however, the young are my social peers and collectively we are each other’s teachers and students.

There are sometimes small accommodations of attitude that the young and I have to effect in order to “make room” for each other — it’s useful for me to remind myself that doing so is as much my responsibility as theirs. Certainly, it’s been an education and a privilege to enter a peer-group that includes many, many batchlings half my age.

Another aspect of the age issue is that, when I entered, neither RC nor I had any idea how hard it would be for someone senior in years and work-experience, but junior in coding, to be taken seriously for jobs in the tech industry. However, to any fellow “old” people reading this (especially career-changers over 45) — my advice is that persistence is much more effective than despair. It’s also more pleasant, for us and for others.

Community. The chat-client Zulip (then called Humbug) was not introduced until my first batch. Having a really good internal chat-client enabled the kind of communication that made the community possible, so at the time of my first batch I didn’t expect, and even RC’s founders didn’t yet realize, that the community would turn out to be the crown jewel of the whole RC movement.

Socialization. I didn’t anticipate how much I would become socialized as a programmer. I had no idea there was even any need for that to happen. But it turned out to be my primary area of growth during my first batch. I don’t mean I didn’t also learn a lot of skills — I learned to write tests, I learned to write SQL properly, I learned how to use an API, how to scrape websites, how to use a range of libraries; I learned a little JavaScript and did a bit of SICP in Racket. I took part in code reviews with Zach Allaun — he even let me sit in on reviews he did of other people’s code, a great education all by themselves. But the primary thing that happened in batch was that I began to think of myself as a programmer, and to understand what that meant. That did not happen during my three years of study at City; it didn’t happen when I was writing FORTRAN in high school — I wasn’t aware till some time after my first batch at RC ended that there exists a “programmer” mindset and that a person could adopt or cultivate it, that there were things you had to make your mind do in order to learn and adjust to this work and its culture — and to realize that I had already begun doing so. I had imagined that I was going to RC to learn new programming methods or improve at those I already knew, and while that certainly happened, it wasn’t nearly as important as my socialization.

RHV: You mentioned that you cultivated the mindset of a programmer in your first batch. How would you describe that mindset?

DPB: Programmer culture expresses itself through many memes (in the original, Susan Blackmore sense of the word). Some of those I became alive to through RC are best practices, prototyping, openness to jargon, and avoiding tertiary sources of information. Two of those can be covered quickly. First, best practices. Python has exceptionally well-described norms, but during and after my first batch I gradually caught on to the fact that the several facilitators who specialized in it had different coding habits. The lesson for me in that was to look to the prescriptions and the practice in Python’s docs and sourcecode, rather than to trust the expert advice I got from anyone, albeit given in good faith. Second, prototyping. Because RC is a learning rather than a production environment, it was useful to set a project aside as soon as I had “made the point”, rather than trying to bring it to a perfect state. One of the things RC seems less suited to is learning production techniques. Thinking of my projects as sketches rather than finished works has been helpful for making the most of limited time during batch.

Jargon. During my first batch I made progress overcoming the psychological obstacle of jargon. One of the signs that you are not yet socialized as a programmer is a feeling of unease when trying to draw breath in the terminological miasma of modern coding life. I learned to do this by noticing technical jargon, recognizing it as jargon, and remembering it, even if I didn’t yet understand it. Sometimes, when I now encounter a new term, all I really have time to do is to make a note of it and its context — as though I were encapsulating a function’s state-environment in a closure — for later reconstitution.

A lot of programming terminology is arbitrary. There is almost no way the name of a language or framework could be otherwise, and in our time these things are burgeoning like strains of bacteria in a damp, dark place. But even when a term has a straightforward motivation, that motivation tends to be hard to retrieve without special knowledge, and so transparency is defied. Think of “currying” a function — it is named after a mathematician and has nothing to do with putting a horse’s hair in order or making an egg more interesting. Think of a “lambda” function — it was meant presumably to suggest the initial l (Greek λ) of logical, in lambda (= logical) calculus.* And why do you suppose time complexity is represented with a “big O”?**

[* A comment by Lindsey Kuper let me to an unsourced remark by Henk Barendregt ("The Impact of the Lambda Calculus in Logic and Computer Science", The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 3/2 [June, 1997]: 182), to the effect that λ was an accident propagated from to ⋀x to λx. I'm dubious, as the circumflex was common in the era of lead type, and it's hard to imagine it not being to hand or being hard to position. Also, I think it was rare to use recognizable letters without their standing for a word in someone's mind.]

[** I've given my thoughts about the origin of 𝑂() in a review of Roger Hart's The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra (Journal of the American Oriental Society 131[4; January 2011]: 652-655), p. 654.]

Using jargon is a sociolinguistic tactic for delimiting an in-group from out-group, so with that in mind, junior programmers should exert themselves to neutralize this obstacle. I began to be aware that this was possible for me during my first batch, and that doing so was part of the programmer mindset.

Avoiding tertiary sources. Another aspect of programmer culture is to avoid derivative sources of truth, even when they are convenient, and to prefer secondary and primary sources when feasible. I did not really start to understand this point until my second batch, and it has only been in the past year that I have come to feel it in my marrow.

One of our goals as coders is to try to formulate a model of how any particular tool works. What are our options for that? Exploring the tool first-hand is a common way to form that model. Native docs are an important source, although they are secondary — as are comprehensive reference works. A more difficult way, but a powerful one, is to examine the tool’s own source code — source code is the ultimate definition of what a piece of code does, so this is the most direct path we have to forming our model.

It’s common for programmers, when they’re puzzled about something, to turn first to derivative sources on sites like StackExchange or Quora, where you can read answers, and sometimes very good ones, to your questions. Googling an error message is a very common first step in debugging. But while going to a derivative source often gets you an answer quickly, it’s also the worst option from the point of view of learning, because you can get an answer without, usually, contributing to your intellectual model of the tool. (Blog posts can be an exception to this.) Part of what I understand as the programmer’s mindset is to cultivate the discipline of playing with the tool using your own hands, consulting the docs, and perhaps reading the sourcecode — all before visiting derivative sites. Learning from primary and secondary sources is easier now than it once was, because there are now REPLs and code sandboxes for many languages; many libraries and applications now have open-source code. Among secondary sources, man pages go back a long way, but now we can also read docs on the web or packaged into apps for mobile devices; there are also GUI-based doc-readers.


An aside: How about a “locked-box Recurse Center”, an “RC @ Sea”, where the participants would have no access to the Internet for, say, a three-month batch. We would have only source code for the tools we chose to bring with us, built-in documentation for those tools, and each other to consult if we wanted to understand something. No StackExchange or other third-hand sites — in fact, even at second-hand, ideally nothing further-removed from the code itself than built-in documentation. The goal of this disciplined exercise would be to cultivate resourcefulness.


RHV: Why do you choose to program?

DPB: I don’t think I choose to program; I usually have something within me that just has to come out. I don’t choose to write prose, either. There seems to be a kind of compulsiveness involved. Neither the code nor the prose necessarily comes out easily, sometimes I can’t get into the state of mind to do it, or get the “things” to form correctly, but there are these “things” that have to come out and eventually they do.


DPB: What’s your goal in doing this?

RHV: My goal in doing this is to collect as many different origin-stories of people, as programmers, of the RC community, as possible. Because I think that in the scheme of communities of programmers we have a lot of very interesting ones, and it would be very nice to share them because I feel that programming still has a mystique about it — it seems that programmers are sort of “other’ — they’re often lumped in with “genius astrophysicist” and things like that: “I could never do that.”

[end]



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  24. “Our Kind of Story”
  25. Revisiting the Taiwan national anthem
  26. Review of Button, Phonetic Ambiguity in the Chinese Script
  27. Importing Modules under Pytest
  28. Two Git Accounts on One Computer
  29. Pytest parametrization — passing multiple data-items to a single test
  30. Markdown Basic References
  31. Two Curious Things about screen.width and screen.height on Mobile Firefox and under iOS.
  32. Where Do I Stand on Digital Advertising?
  33. Progressing to the Next Level after Two Years at Hacker School
  34. Health Insurance $5,600/year ⇨ $12,600/year to Keep Our Doctor
  35. Always Use Dry-run Options If Possible
  36. Basic Interaction with Man-pages
  37. Taiwanese Cantillation Prosody and the Standard Tradition of Regulated Verse
  38. Automated Transcription of a Lyric’s Melody
  39. Quote-Unquote: Quick Python Conversion to and from URI Standard Format
  40. Literate Code in Crista Lopes’s Exercises in Programming Style
  41. Special Computer Help for an Uncooperative Person in Need
  42. Richard Bellman on Multistage Decision Processes
  43. Contradictory Advice from Kenkō about Studying after Mid-life
  44. Deceit for my Mother’s Sake
  45. New York State’s Law on Intercoms
  46. Our Relationship with Unwelcome Callers
  47. Reasons to Keep a Landline Phone
  48. Chinese (Pinyin) Tone Marks on Macintosh
  49. Suicide by Holding the Breath in the Greek Classics
  50. Transcribing a Solo Voice Recording to Western Musical Notation
  51. Surprise Text Message Sent by Google Voice
  52. Trimming a Git Repo before Moving It to GitHub
  53. The Sage Chilōn on Gesticulation
  54. Examining the Identity of a “Whole-Sliced” Python Sequence
  55. Pagerank after Completing the Move of My Blog
  56. Haydn on Originality
  57. Stages of Life
  58. Linguistic Naturalism in Behavior-Driven Development
  59. Some Advice on Interviewing in China
  60. The AARP on Ageism
  61. The Cash Value of a Lost Moment
  62. How Did 釁 Get Into My Computer? A Talk at CSTUY
  63. I Knock My Head on the Ground: Review of Richter, Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China
  64. Two Pair of Suspenders Back to Amazon
  65. Knuth on the Direction of the Tree in Computer Science
  66. Py3K Versions of Networking Programs for the Rhodes and Goerzen Book
  67. A Fake Monk in Times Square
  68. Werner Herzog on the jungle’s “articulate obscenity”, “misery”, and “sort of harmony of collective murder”
  69. Hacker School and How we Learn
  70. Hacker School Sees “The Internet’s Own Boy”
  71. Two Chinese manifestations of black cardamom
  72. A natural-language URL shortener
  73. Recovering Web and Search visibility after Leaving WordPress
  74. Greedy evaluation in Python's default dictionary
  75. Trying to Change Google Pagerank after Moving my Blog
  76. Ensuring my blog is indexed by Google, using Webmaster Tools
  77. 'Dependency' in programming means the opposite of its traditional meaning
  78. Experimenting with a Site-Analytics Tracker
  79. Unexpected Behavior from the Python 3 Built-In Hash Function
  80. Rote learning and programming
  81. r0ml on the workspace-based, image-oriented programming paradigm
  82. In technology, knowing your vulnerabilities is a desirable strength
  83. The Lingering Puzzle of yán 焉
  84. My grandmother’s diaries
  85. Scholarly Presentation: Arousing something other than polite interest
  86. Friedrich Gulda's Beethoven
  87. Reaction to Jaron Lanier Talk at Cooper Union
  88. Yuen Ren Chao on Chanting Chinese Poetry
  89. The legal requirement of having a camera inside a NYC taxicab
  90. This blog has moved
  91. "Web of Trust" in Chinese and Japanese
  92. Taking the larger view of frustrations with technology
  93. Reflecting on Bernard Baruch, on the need for character and thinking
  94. Dinner with a Bletchley Park cryptographer
  95. Karl Popper on conflict between your basic assumptions and those of your interlocutor (1965)
  96. My Hacker School Pairing Interview
  97. Thirty political parties fielding candidates in New York City this election
  98. The world's only speaker of standard Mandarin in 1923
  99. Data within literal curly brackets using Python format()
  100. The Imperative Style in Commits and Docstrings
  101. Git overwrites file metadata including creation and modification date
  102. Two complaints and one word of praise about GitHub Flavored Markdown
  103. Lǐ Bái on time (8th century)
  104. Two bits of trivia from the Institute for Advanced Study
  105. Karl Popper against foundations of knowledge (1965)
  106. George Orwell on falsification of fact (1946)
  107. Loss of innocence for "ggg"
  108. George Orwell against uniformity of political principles (1946)
  109. Library technology at the Institute for Advanced Study
  110. Richard Feynman on scientific integrity (1974)
  111. Richard Feynman on ignorance of science (1964)
  112. Tense in Git Commit Messages
  113. A better plan is needed for transporting equipment in the subway
  114. "Premature optimization" as phrased by Musashi
  115. Finding and returning zero or one of a marked sub-expression in Python regex
  116. A faster Python sort
  117. A question about time complexity when testing membership in a Python nested sequence
  118. Rendering a matrix as a linear array
  119. Attempting a generic SQL INSERT statement in Python
  120. Welsh bwg 'bogey': an alternate proposal about the origin of "computer bug"
  121. Using python str.format(*args) when the cardinality of *args is unknown
  122. Compelled by forces I can no longer resist…
  123. Highlights of the July, 2013, NY Tech Meetup
  124. Review of Zádrapa posted
  125. Now filtering (> /dev/null) some spam before it reaches the Gmail Spam folder
  126. Isaac Newton, creationist
  127. Freeman-Halton 3x3 exact test
  128. Conjure me: reentering the zone of proximal development
  129. Python extend() without a list comprehension
  130. The name "Hacker School"
  131. The benefits of Hacker School
  132. Another two subway rules of thumb illustrated
  133. Short-circuiting and (and ==) instead of if in Python
  134. Quintilian on time and study
  135. Kenkō on time and study
  136. George Orwell on keeping a diary to cultivate dispassionate thinking
  137. A bon mot of Quintilian on theory
  138. Growth of outlook at Hacker School
  139. Nakamoto Satoshi, the name of Bitcoin's inventor
  140. The psychology of pairing and code review at Hacker School
  141. Computer science and rugelach
  142. Is Hacker School like graduate school?
  143. Why do I work so hard at Hacker School?
  144. Hacker School compared with studying computer science at City College
  145. Differences between code and natural language
  146. Hacker School after six weeks
  147. Pairing at Hacker School
  148. The Norman Manchu dictionary has reached Seattle
  149. Jerry Norman's Manchu dictionary has appeared
  150. Two things I am thinking about as Hacker School begins
  151. The white powder on the pages of library books
  152. Non-math uses of LaTeX
  153. Hacker School
  154. Hacker School (dojo/recruiter for programmers) begins in four days
  155. Dependencies for scipy and matplotlib not handled by pip
  156. The National Do Not Call Registry no longer works well
  157. Early evidence of a dislike of Christmas music?
  158. Plinyesque Christmas wishes to all
  159. Getting the Android GridView sample code to work
  160. A small triumph of explicitly readable code
  161. Godfrey Reggio on technology in life (2002)
  162. Max Weber: "science is the affair of an intellectual aristocracy" (1918)
  163. First day of Android coding: two problems solved
  164. Black optimism explained
  165. Talking across the pre- and post-computer border
  166. Getting used to the disappearance of old institutional models
  167. Anything less than perfect is a failing grade
  168. Recovering from hurricane Sandy
  169. Max Weber on meritocracy in academia (1918)
  170. Our state of things in New York right now (after hurricane Sandy)
  171. Max Weber on the "strange intoxication" of a passionate vocational devotion (1918)
  172. LaTeX's extract package, used for isolating the contents of environments and commands
  173. Fellini movie "Broadway Bomb" being filmed in my neighborhood
  174. Does Apple view an "iPhone" phone number as something different from a "mobile" phone number?
  175. Columbia University Libraries finally removing the card catalog
  176. One more rule of thumb for the New York subway
  177. Two further rules of thumb for the New York subway
  178. Two inches taller in two years
  179. Alternate ways to say "pop" and "push" in computer science
  180. Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites at the Dell' Arte Opera Ensemble
  181. Andrew Nathan on Doh Chull Shin on Confucianism and Democratization (2012)
  182. Proofreading poorly OCRed material
  183. New York State redistricting maps on line at CUNY's Center for Urban Research
  184. Karl Berry on free software (2005)
  185. The SEC on the utility of Python as a secure and accessible tool for generating official reports (2010)
  186. Hill Country
  187. Yogurt whey-starter pickled (soured) mackerel
  188. Images (figures) on facing pages in a LaTeX document
  189. Just what is being centrally limited in the "Central Limit Theorem"?
  190. Reloading modified code when using the Ipython interactive shell
  191. Alistair Cooke on H. L. Mencken's typing (1956, 1977)
  192. Jerry Norman (1936–2012)
  193. Ptisan issues
  194. Elia Kazan on the need for selfishness
  195. "Neither side took prisoners" — Japanese and American atrocities in the Pacific theater of World War II
  196. Surprise! You have a different Congressman now but no one thought you needed to know.
  197. Another notice of the bureaucratization of academia
  198. Bogusław Jackowski on "worldwide licensing madness" (2008)
  199. Accommodating the Chinese hunger for official seals on official documents.
  200. Bond Street and a story about a smartphone
  201. Another bond to Apple is lost as MobileMe Sync is discontinued
  202. Charles Ives (1874–1954) on his life in business (1933)
  203. "Taikonaut" and the new Cold War
  204. James Lang on improving understanding and retention by increasing "cognitive disfluency" (2012)
  205. Lǔ Xùn 魯迅 (1881–1936) on the truth behind Confucian morality (1918)
  206. Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) on cars (1963)
  207. Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) on success in the arts (1963)
  208. Chinatown breakfast offerings
  209. Zed Shaw on why to use C (2011)
  210. A step in my Chinese education
  211. Age and the MBA
  212. Useful Python time formats for dealing with HTTP headers
  213. An encounter with Google's security rules
  214. HTML headers for keeping track of updated webpages
  215. William Hung 洪業 (1893–1980) on Confucianism (1980)
  216. David Daniels on one's "other voice" (1998)
  217. Elia Kazan and questions of betrayal
  218. Advice on preparing herring
  219. Two limitations of call-forwarding on Google Voice
  220. Student protests in Montréal and thoughts about tuition
  221. Call-screening in Google Voice has a problem
  222. Cortlandt Alley's Chinese name
  223. Chinatown shorthand
  224. "Download statusbar" add-on for Firefox
  225. The ceremonial gateways of Montréal's Chinatown
  226. Nailset = chasse-clou
  227. Restaurant Mai Xiang Yuan [Màixiāngyuán cānguǎn 麥香園餐館] in Montréal
  228. A bon mot of Peter Carey about reviews of one's work (2012)
  229. A bon mot of Peter Carey about New York (2012)
  230. Identifying the active bridge adapter for use with a headless virtual machine on VirtualBox
  231. Doubts about l'affaire Chén Guāngchéng 陳光誠
  232. Military officers who cannot count
  233. Parallel text and vocabulary in LaTeX
  234. A stricture on Google Voice
  235. Resolving VirtualBox error VERR_INTNET_FLT_IF_NOT_FOUND
  236. Ubuntu 12.04LTS (Precise Pangolin) on VirtualBox
  237. Recordings for Classical Chinese
  238. Arthur Luehrmann on "computer literacy" (1972)
  239. The origin of the symbol Θ (big theta) in asymptotic notation
  240. Being censored in China
  241. The experience of learning vim commands
  242. How should I rate this movie on Netflix?
  243. Netflix miscalculation — Hugo
  244. Curious vim behavior: treats date range as subtraction
  245. Alexandra Lord on the myth of the academic career (2012)
  246. Elia Kazan on getting along in society (1974)
  247. ssh unavailable over Amtrak's wifi network
  248. Tricked again by Python's mutable objects
  249. Is blocking ads theft of service?
  250. A poor analogy on intellectual property rights
  251. A mutton chop at Keen's Steakhouse
  252. An anecdote about William Hung (Hóng Yè 洪業, 1893-1980)
  253. Sorting a list of Unicode strings in Python, case-insensitively and ignoring diacritics
  254. Avoid deleting the contents of a file in Python through sloppy use of "write" mode
  255. Reloading a Python module after modifying it
  256. Frank Mittelbach on documentation (2006)
  257. Frank Mittelbach on collaboration (2006)
  258. Frank Mittelbach's "moral obligation" license for the LaTeX multicol package
  259. Keith Whalen records scales and patterns from the Slonimsky Thesaurus
  260. Calligraphy in Chinatown
  261. Manchu dictionary done
  262. Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) on the damage done by immaturity in politics
  263. Gotham breakneck to Chinatown
  264. Calculus III progresses
  265. Some Western recipe-names as transformed by the Taiwanese linguistic experience
  266. Class war against the banking and financial industry
  267. Avoiding the Emailyama
  268. Adblock Plus is the most useful piece of shareware I've ever had
  269. A less painful way to install Adblock Plus filter-subscriptions in Firefox
  270. Tales from Calculus III
  271. Jack Cheng on "the technology I grew up with" (2012)
  272. Distribution of fonts: competing models are coexisting
  273. MoinMoin for notebook-wiki (and WordPress, you are trying the patience of my affections)
  274. generate native MATLAB code from finished figures, for study
  275. Quintilian on laziness and difficulty in one's studies
  276. Guide to Gwoyeu Romatzyh 國語羅馬字 (tonal spelling for Mandarin)
  277. Guide to the radicals of the traditional Chinese dictionary
  278. Origins of the Mandarin Phonetic Symbols (注音符號/ㄅㄆㄇㄈ)
  279. Installing UCC certificate for multiple domain names hosted virtually on a single server
  280. QuickTime Pro easily concatenates .m4v video files
  281. Columbia to Chinatown walk, 20120122
  282. A local custom without the corresponding exotic saying in rural Taiwan
  283. HTTPS being rejected at Yahoo hosting
  284. Classical Chinese syllabus posted; using Landslide for markdown-to-HTML5
  285. Phonosymbolism, etymology, and the nebulous Chinese word family
  286. Simple meal at Shui Mei Café (嘎嘎叫, 67A East Broadway, NYC), formerly So Go Café)
  287. Are cell phones and bananas radioactive?
  288. LaTeX and electronic documents
  289. New definition of “algorithm”
  290. Materials used in paper bank statements
  291. Finally making progress with Vim
  292. Kenneth S. Wherry on American influence in China (1940)
  293. Propagation of a meme and a metameme
  294. Against the single time zone
  295. Hamish Milne on transcriptions of Bach (2005)
  296. Choosing a suitable site for fieldwork, and working with illiterate informants in China
  297. Yuen Ren Chao (1892–1982) urging Americans to resist Chinese telephantasmia (1921)
  298. The brown German flour of Przasnysz
  299. Recollection of the traditional bagel in central Poland before World War I
  300. Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) on doing good work (1978)
  301. Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) on the "dictatorship of technology" (1978)
  302. Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) on ideological enslavement (1978)
  303. Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) on law (1978)
  304. Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) on responsibility and a "post-democratic" system (1978)
  305. Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) on "opposition" and "dissident" (1978)
  306. Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) on ideology (1978)
  307. 'Factorial' in Chinese (jiēchéng 階乘/阶乘)
  308. Leibniz’s theodicy, dynamic programming, and strategies for learning
  309. Emanuel Derman and Paul Wilmott on mathematical models and self-delusion (2009)
  310. Y. R. Chao and Henry Sheffer added to the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  311. Two more rules of thumb for the New York subway
  312. Math in the Movies
  313. Jim Coplien on reflection and problem-solving (2011)
  314. Richard Feynman on practical applications of the theory of gravitation (1964)
  315. Karl Popper on understanding a problem (1963)
  316. Galileo on "reason conquering sense" (1632)
  317. Apparent error in Python's priority queue and heapq
  318. Literacy book finally out
  319. Y. R. Chao on his dissertation (1974)
  320. Doctoral pedigrees
  321. Lack of stable sort in Python's priority queue
  322. Suitable pots for making turmeric tea
  323. Neuro-plasticity and strategies for improving cognitive functioning: "The Brain Fitness Program" (2007)
  324. Code-switching between comfortable cognitive aptitudes and the main aptitudes used in math and coding
  325. Wishes for the Orthodox Nativity Season (began 15 November this year)
  326. Two rules of thumb about transportation in New York
  327. Pípá yā 琵琶鴨 (Frisbee Duck)
  328. Testing the reliability of the Python priority queue
  329. Edsger Dijkstra on programming as an intellectual discipline (2001)
  330. Edsger Dijkstra on the name of the field Computer Science (2001)
  331. Edsger Dijkstra on anthropomorphizing computers (2001)
  332. Edsger Dijkstra on mastery of one's native tongue as a vital programming skill (2001)
  333. Edsger Dijkstra on the origin of his shortest path algorithm (2001)
  334. Efrem Podgaits's New York Mass (2001)
  335. Anecdotal report on experimenting with creatine as a study aid
  336. "Suppose" for math proofs, in LaTeX
  337. A rule of thumb in teaching
  338. Graphing flowcharts and automata in LaTeX
  339. Perception of time and suspension of finality (studying math)
  340. Suddenly perceiving the cantus firmus in a Bach chorus
  341. Two of Elvira's arias from Don Giovanni
  342. Identifying robots among human beings
  343. Apparent misspelling in LaTeX command set: \guillemotleft and \guillemotright
  344. Table of contents in a LaTeX book: make the TOC entry different from the actual chapter headings in the text
  345. Competition and sharing in academia
  346. Kuhn and Popper
  347. Herb Gross's calculus lectures
  348. The abbreviation UTC as an acronym
  349. Clyde Haberman on validating one's authenticity as a New Yorker (2011)
  350. The era of lost words
  351. Never odd or even
  352. William Deresiewicz on multitasking and solitude (2009)
  353. Bjarne Stroustrup's advice to up-and-coming programmers (2008)
  354. Chet Ramey's advice to up-and-coming programmers (2008)
  355. Bjarne Stroustrup on the name C++ and common criticisms of the language
  356. Steve Bourne, advice to up-and-coming programmers (2009)
  357. Alfred Aho on the origins of awk (2008)
  358. Leslie Lamport on thinking first and on commenting code (2007)
  359. Pens of choice for linguistic fieldwork
  360. How I learned LaTeX
  361. Some bons mots from Edsger Dijkstra (1984)
  362. Non-paean to Steve Jobs
  363. Annotations of Cormen et al.'s algorithm for a Red-Black Tree (delete and delete-fixup functions only)
  364. John McCarthy on "Generality in Artificial Intelligence" (1987)
  365. Brian Kernighan's summary thoughts on scripting languages
  366. Changes to the inventory of IPython magic commands (v. 0.10 to 0.11)
  367. One man's calm reflection on Java-think in Python
  368. mdfind as a substitute for locate on Mac OS X
  369. Reconsider P. T. Barnum's reputation
  370. LaTeX macro for circling answers on math problem sets
  371. View of the Mariana Trench
  372. Simulating private variables in Python
  373. Choice of formats for basic code documentation
  374. Dennis Ritchie on Computer Science and Commerce (1984)
  375. Inconsistent results of the same seed in random.seed() on different Python installations
  376. An opinion on vi configuration
  377. The virtue of Vim (or: why I do not remap copy and paste)
  378. Shark fin and the economics of Chinese "face"
  379. Two funerary practices and the end of a good story
  380. An important skill for instructors
  381. p::c
  382. Twice-a-day mail delivery
  383. Portmanteau characters in Chinese (abstract)
  384. A math professor I enjoyed
  385. The state of my Netflix patronage
  386. Longevity vs. versatility of code
  387. A new kind of noise in the subway
  388. Router VI is dead
  389. Tinker Tailor remake
  390. Automated upward pricing spiral
  391. Break-in?
  392. Telephantasmia, one of the great gifts of Chinese culture
  393. September 11th sensations
  394. Whether to take a small loss or consent to the devaluation of the US dollar
  395. City checkpoint chaos
  396. Continuing opportunity for techno-elitism
  397. A worry of Donald Knuth's
  398. An opinion of TeX
  399. Advice on teaching English in China if you lack a TEFL degree
  400. "The Highline" Park
  401. Plutarch on the sensitivity and versatility of the human mind
  402. Plutarch's praise of the "fox" temperament
  403. Unagi hitsumabushi 鰻櫃まぶし
  404. My mother and me, at work on the Early China index, 20110526
  405. juémíngzǐ 決明子 tisane
  406. Brillat-Savarin on the pleasures of the fast
  407. University of Maryland, (College Park) general education rated D in a national survey
  408. The EMACS meta key and the standing desk
  409. A rule of thumb in choosing one's tools
  410. Dr. Johnson on the "fox" temperament
  411. Carl Elliott reviews Ginsberg, Fall of the Faculty (WSJ)
  412. Hard copy vs. electronic copy
  413. Deborah Ball's article on the opposition to standardizing the Romansh language (WSJ)
  414. Boris Veytsman's review of Kottwitz, LaTeX Beginner's Guide
  415. Why even 212 phone numbers calling in-area have to dial 212 first
  416. Dr. Johnson on keeping a diary
  417. Against object-oriented design (except in scripting languages)
  418. Worrying about inadequate memory to hold program and debugger (1973)
  419. Consequences of a compiler defect
  420. The Internet and scripting languages
  421. Newton's own suffering at math
  422. Fresh turmeric-root tea
  423. Appreciation of awk
  424. "Computer Science, Modern Languages Most Gender-Polarized Majors"
  425. Food issues during the Siege of Leningrad
  426. Starting a blog