Programmer’s lament

“Since I’ve violated the Golden Rule of Helping Friends with their PC Problems and attempted to help a friend with his PC problem, expectedly wiping out his hard drive in vain, I had many opportunities to explain the Programmer Paradox: how can a programmer fail to make a computer do as he wishes? While the difficulty of debugging a program without the source proved hard to explain to laymen, I think I’ve found a metaphor that does a good job. A programmer is to the blue screen of death what Mikhail Kalashnikov is to a loaded AK-47: just as helpless a victim as any other mortal, except for having a profound understanding of the mechanisms of his execution.”

– Yossi Kreinin