Pete Simon

Programming requires an insane amount of patience.

Imagine you’re speaking to a machine that wants to fuck-up in the most incomprehensible ways. The computer is just that: a fuck-up machine, but it’s so well built that it will continue to run so it can fuck-up again.

Actually, it’s coldly effecient at fucking up, like a Terminator unit that is build in so  its arm joints can only punch inward and toward the face.

But the computer’s mistakes are entirely self-serving. Like a goth-kid writing encoding his diary so no one, probably not even his future self, will ever read his innermost thoughts; similarly the computer keeps most of its issues to itself, whereby you must keenly decipher of a set of erratic, and mostly alien behavioral patterns to figure what is out going on. In computing, this is called debugging, and requires even more patience than programming.

Unlike the goth-kid, the computer won’t cut itself, but it will bleed memory until it has none and locks up like an epileptic fit. This is normal and should be expected.

Far from being sympathetic, whenever the computer errors, it does so in the most callous way — but not in the same resentful way of teenagers, where there’s a strong undercurrent of pubescent angst; it’s more like a drunkard when it errors.

It behaves terribly for a unbearable stretch of time until it blurts out something unconscionable, then it passes out. Similarly, the computer will engage in the most egregious mismanagement of assets, spending recklessly on loose processes and consuming unseemly amounts of information until it can no longer hold it’s data/liquor, at which point it will vomit chunks of unparsed text onto the screen without an iota of concern for your sense of decency. It leads a hugely irresponsible existance and will make no effort to improve.

Putting up with a sob drunkard friend is an accurate way of describing a job in computing; the shit you put up with on a daily basis, the verbal (beeping) abuse you endure because you see *some* semblence of worth in keeping the sumbitch around, because the human being you are cannot simply Give Up on another destitute soul; that’s the person<->computer relationship without the human to relate to.