Quality

Thanks so much to everyone who has submitted a solution to the 128-bit Programming Challenge.

I want to mention two things that are particularly touching. First, of course, is the quality of postings. When the last little challenge went round the blogs, there was nothing particularly odious about the responses, but there was little of value in the aggregate. That’s no smear on the respondents, it has a lot to do with the nature of the question.

With this challenge, I had an agenda. No, nothing to do with civil disobedience or freedom to watch movies you so-called purchased or rented on the operating system of your choice. My agenda was to demonstrate that the quality of responses is 100% driven by the quality of the challenge. When I saw the furor over the “illegal codes,” the challenge was a natural follow-up.

Thank you so much for reminding me how much tasty meat there is out there.

One more thing…

Now the second thing was very interesting. I checked my stats this morning, and at that time there were forty submissions, more or less. And there were thirty-five clicks on the link to The Essential Turing. So just as many submissions as click-throughs. And you know what? This is maybe even more interesting than the number of submissions.

Not because of the fifty cents or so in gift certificate money I will get from aggregate sales of the book. But because that particular book is one that appeals to people who are deeply, deeply interested in issues like Computability and Cryptography.

Issues touched on by the challenge, of course. And that’s also part of the point: the challenge is only peripherally “show off your coding chops.” At a deeper level, the challenge asks you to think about the relationship between programs and the data they produce.

I see the market for developer books following the same path as the market for developer tools: There is an increasing priority on “quick results”… I am as addicted to IntelliSense as the next guy. But I do believe this stuff come with a tradeoff. To some extent, the increasing emphasis on getting quick results comes at the expense of “deep understanding”. I define deep understanding as the knowledge of how stuff works “under the hood.”

Honestly, if you sit down to maximize sales on a page about a programming challenge, there are thousands of better choices. Most of them will be specific: books about a specific language outsell books about programming in general. But what can they tell us about programmers? Little of interest. Just that people skimming a site like reddit who are curious about a “programming challenge” are interested in books about specific programming tricks.

But when you put a book about Alan Turing’s work on the page, we find out that thirty-five people out there are interested in his work. And roughly the same number of people sat down to write code, debug, and submit code that is much more challenging than the code for the other programming problem.

I find that inspiring. Alan Kay lamented how few people know of Doug Englebart’s work. What I can say today is, there are almost as many people who are interested in the deep issues in computing as there are who have a bias for action and writing code. We just have to put that opportunity in front of our fellow programmers, and they will respond.

Thanks.  ¶ 5:58 PM