You are a stupid programmer, you can't have that

[Walter Bright]

On 8/9/2021 12:23 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> As Knuth once said:
> 
> 	People who are more than casually interested in computers should
> 	have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like.
> 	Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
> 	-- D. Knuth
> 
> That includes knowing the ugly realities of 2's complement arithmetic.

A friend mine (a very smart one) back in college one day decided to learn 
programming. He got the Fortran specification(!), read it, and wrote a program.

The program ran correctly, but incredibly slowly. Baffled, he took it to his 
programmer friend for help. The friend laughed, and said here's the problem: 
you're writing to a file in a loop:

     loop
         open the file
         append a character
         close the file

instead of:

    open the file
    loop
       append character
    close the file

My friend said he followed the spec, which said nothing at all about how file 
I/O actually worked.