The Other Random Walk

Such joy is no passive delight. Keeping bees in a serious way, with concentration and art, is toilsome, sometimes exhausting, frustrating and discouraging. But it is also made the more joyous for the overcoming of all this. The image of happiness is not that of the patron of an amusement park, nor is it that of someone burdened with galling work, nor that of greed measuring up its gold. Part of the image, at least, is that of a challenge met, a purpose achieved -- and achieved with great effort.

-Richard Taylor
The Joys of Beekeeping, pages 3&4
LC 74-81458

The first run of any program is laughable: a parody of the author's intentions, a slapstick mockery of logic. Objects solemnly appear on the screen only to disappear in a fritz. The cursor runs around like a clown. Every second mouse click or text entry is answered with nonsense. Characters run rampant across the screen; beeps sound without stopping. If the programmer is lucky, the program will crash at once rather than continuing on in that humiliating state of malfunction. Then, in the next round of coding, a few small bugs are fixed, and the program runs again, only a little less stupidly this time. And the entire process is repeated over and over again--a wild run, a crash, another round of bug fixing, then another barely improved run. Until, slowly, iteration by iteration, the true face of the program becomes visible. Programming is like scultpting: the image of the running program appears incrementally, chisel cut by chisel cut, a dumb block of wood imperceptibly carved into human designs.

--Ellen Ullman, The Bug, p.72

Quantum mechanics is then brought in with a round of applause to save the day.
-H.M. Rosenberg, The Solid State, p.78