<story><title>Joe the office mate</title><url>https://github.com/lukego/blog/issues/32</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>apo</author><text>&amp;gt; Joe wrote amazingly simple programs and he did so in a peculiar way. First he wrote down the program any old way just to get it out of his head. Then once it worked he would then immediately create a new directory program2 and write it again. He would repeat this process five or six times (program5, program6, ...) and each time he would understand the problem a little better and sense which parts of the program were essential enough to re-type. He thought this was the most natural thing in the world: of course you throw away the first few implementations, you didn&amp;#x27;t understand the problem when you wrote those!&lt;p&gt;I thought I was the only one who did that.</text></comment>
<story><title>Joe the office mate</title><url>https://github.com/lukego/blog/issues/32</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_hardwaregeek</author><text>A little selfish of me, but I&amp;#x27;m very sad I never got to meet him. Programming is in a rather unique state where most of the foundational people are kept alive in living memory. There&amp;#x27;s people who can recount working with Dijkstra, or Dennis Richie or Joe Armstrong. Heck, there&amp;#x27;s probably some people who can remember Von Neumann (Peter Lax?). I really hope we can keep these memories alive. There&amp;#x27;s nothing really comparable for other fields. Nobody alive today can remember working with Gauss or Riemann.&lt;p&gt;This may be a gross exaggeration, but I believe we&amp;#x27;ll look back on programming during the mid to late 20th century like we do for physics in the early to mid 20th century. We&amp;#x27;ll marvel at the amount of talent alive at the same time.</text></comment>