Talk is cheap, show me the code ...

For quite a few days, this was my favourite one-liner. Supposedly said by Linus Torvalds, this statement for me carried the true attitude of a programmer. Someone who loves coding, and doesn't care for much else. It's the I-don't-care-for-the-world attitude that struck me, much like Eminem, to whom I listen a lot.

Then the other day, Pascal told me that he was preparing for his project demonstration (he has implemented a chess game playable over a network with his friends). The code was in Java, and they spent an entire day preparing for the 'big day'. It seems they were coaching themselves to explain their code to the instructor. This seemed unnecessary to me, I told him - 'Function is more important than form'.

What went wrong here?? I myself can't understand it, on one hand, I believe in 'Show me the ...', on the other, I advised Pascal to not give the code much importance. What part of me was right? Any suggestions?

What separates us from chimps ...

How many of us CREATE algorithms? Most of us have learnt how to FOLLOW algorithms ... in the lab - we follow the procedure, to make our own website - we go and follow a tutorial, to write a program - we follow the alogrithm, in fact, we can collect reams of knowledge and follow the algorithms within to create things which may seem new, but which in fact are nothing but a recreation of someone else's ideas.

Which makes those that create algorithms really special. People like Djikstra and Knuth and others. This does not mean we should not study algorithms, rather, we should study them as foundations for creating our own.

Which is again why the open source movement is important. Here, people are recognised for their work, not companies. Algorithms are recognised, not products. Take the GNU/Linux system for example. All the credits are in the right place ... you want to know who implemented what part in the kernel, go have a look at the sources. How I pity those at Microsoft ... even though someone might have done something really important in the OS, no one will ever know.

Creator? Or Createe?

Ever wonder why people do some things? It amazes you sometimes, the way people make decisions. What is right or wrong anyway? Who decides them? It always turns out that whatever is right is usually what suits you best, caring little about others.

Why, some people would say, hasn't God made all the choices for us? It's all there in the [your-favourite-holy-book]. Well, there again we have something debatable. Did God create humans, or did humans create God? Maybe we had some Neanderthals who couldn't understand Nature around them, so they cooked up a story about some super being that made all the explanations really simple. And thus God was 'created'.

Or maybe it was God who got bored with all the emptiness, and created us in his pass-time. Which REALLY explains why we all are far from perfect ...

Me and exams ...

What is it with exams, anyway? They just keep coming. They keep lurking round the corner, and pounce on you when you least expect it. It's bad, you know, you are just about getting into the scheme of things, and the semester is gone.

I had just started to make progress on some of the more interesting stuff that I do at home. But the darn exams. Had to start studying sometime though, I was just dreading WHEN the time would arrive.

Just started ...

Just started blogging ... all the fun begins in a few hours from now ....