Thorsten Ball - How can you not be romantic about programming?

There’s a scene in Moneyball in which Brad Pitt’s character, the manager of the Oakland A’s, is watching a recording of one of his players trying so hard to run fast that he stumbles and falls. Lying on the ground he’s angry at himself, because he doesn’t realize that right before he started his run he hit a home run and scored the game-winning points. Watching the scene, Pitt leans back, smiles a Brad Pitt smile and says: “how can you not be romantic about baseball?” There are moments in which I ask myself the same thing about programming. We’re programming computers. We spend large parts of our days writing down instructions for machines. Other parts of the day are spent making sure that we chose the right instructions. Then we talk about those instructions: why and how we picked the ones we picked, which ones we will consider in the future, what those should do and why and how long it will probably take to write those down. It can sound very serious and dry; a bureaucracy of compute

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• Dharmik Parmar