The Evolution of a Programmer

I’m not a programmer – at least, not now. When I was in junior high, I wrote an accounting assistant application for the Apple ][e (essentially a forms processor that printed out the results of various calculations in the blank boxes of different tax forms). When I got to high school, I discovered girls and cars and that was the end of my programming career. Still, I found “The Evolution of a Programmer” pretty amusing.

My evolution ended here:

  program Hello(input, output)    
    begin      
      writeln('Hello World')    
    end.

although I’m sure that some would argue that it ended at this level:

  mail -s "Hello, world." bob@b12
  Bob, could you please write me a program that prints "Hello, world."?
  I need it by tomorrow.
  ^D

It is reassuring to think that Elliot has some better skills than those implied by the Evolution. Perhaps we could pit him against a few other CEO’s in our industry in an Executive Hackathon