Problem - Kevin Tafuro

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition
Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
Foreword
There is a humorous, computing-related aphorism that goes like this: “There are 10
types of people: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.” Besides being
amusing to people who understand number representation, this saying can be used
to group people into four (or 100) categories:
• Those who will never quite get the meaning of the statement, even if it is
explained to them
• Those who need some explanation, but will eventually get the meaning
• Those who have the background to grasp the meaning when they read it
• Those who have the knowledge and understanding to not only see the statement
as obvious, but be able to come up with it independently on their own
There are parallels for these four categories in many different areas of endeavor. You
can apply it to art, to cooking, to architecture...or to writing software. I have been
teaching aspects of software engineering and security for over 20 years, and I have
seen it up close. When it comes to writing reliable software, there are four kinds of
programmers:
• Those who are constantly writing buggy code, no matter what
• Those who can write reasonable code, given coaching and examples
• Those who write good code most of the time, but who don’t fully realize their
limitations
• Those who really understand the language, the machine architecture, software
engineering, and the application area, and who can write textbook code on a
regular basis
The gap between the third category and the fourth may not seem like much to some
readers, but there are far fewer people in that last category than you might think. It’s
also the case that there are lots of people in the third category who would claim they
are in the fourth, but really aren’t...similar to the 70% of all licensed drivers who say
xiii