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

[H. S. Teoh]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2021 at 11:29:35AM -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> 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.

Hey, what better way to learn a language than to get to the very
definition of it? ;-)


> 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.

:-D

What the spec *doesn't* say is often just as important as, if not more
important than, what it does say. :-)

Reminds me of learning a foreign language by reading a dictionary... you
can learn all the words, and even consult a book on grammar, but will it
survive the first encounter with a native speaker?  ;-)  True story: one
time, I found a particular foreign word from a dictionary, and thought
that was how you referred to a particular thing.  So I used that word
with a native speaker.  He stared at me for a moment with this strange
look of incomprehension, and then suddenly comprehension gleamed in his
eyes, and with a smile he explained that this was an archaic word that
is no longer in widespread use, and that people these days use a
different word for the same thing.  He further added that if I were to
use that word with somebody younger than him, they probably wouldn't
even understand what it meant.

Such is the peril of learning a language by spec without understanding
the context in which it operates. :-)


T

-- 
Almost all proofs have bugs, but almost all theorems are true. -- Paul Pedersen