Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

Seibel: Yet lots of people have tried to come up with languages or programming systems that will allow “nonprogrammers” to program. I take it you think that might be a doomed enterprise—the problem about programming is not that we haven't found the right syntax for it but that people have to learn this unnatural act. Steele: Yeah. And I think that the other problem is that people like to focus on the main thing they have in mind and not worry about the edge cases or the screw cases or things that are unlikely to happen. And yet it is precisely in those cases where people are most likely to disagree what the right thing to do is. Sometimes I'll quiz a student, “What should happen in this case?” “Well, obviously it should do this.” And immediately someone else will jump in and say, “No, no, it should do that.” And those are exactly the things that you need to nail down in a programming specification of some process.