Thursday, March 11, 2010

Same solution to all problems

Listening - actually ignoring - the parliamentary debate on reservation, I felt that the only solution our politicians could see for any social ill was reservation!

I was reminded of the following comments by Dijkstra's in Humble Programmer
"""
I have run a a little programming experiment with really experienced volunteers, but something quite unintended and quite unexpected turned up. None of my volunteers found the obvious and most elegant solution. Upon closer analysis this turned out to have a common source: their notion of repetition was so tightly connected to the idea of an associated controlled variable to be stepped up, that they were mentally blocked from seeing the obvious. Their solutions were less efficient, needlessly hard to understand, and it took them a very long time to find them.
"""

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