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Tim Powell was the third man on the Hyperion job. He was built like a football tackle and thought of himself as the programming equivalent of one. If you asked him which part of the software he was responsible for, Tim would look away and blush. If you pressed the point, he would say, “If I do my job well, you’ll never know about it.”
The computer programmer creates the only path available to the computer user; the effect of his decisions on others is masked by their abstraction.
Clark liked to say that human beings, when they took risks, fell into one of two types, pigs or chickens. “The difference between these two kinds of people,” he’d say, “is the difference between the pig and the chicken in the ham-and-eggs breakfast. The chicken is interested, the pig is committed. If you are going to do anything worth doing, you need a lot of pigs.”
Why do people perpetually create for themselves the condition for their own dissatisfaction?
