Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

"Well, it has them, it's just that you don't know what they are." It was the mostprofound thing Gerry Sussman had ever heard. And Minsky continued, telling himthat the world is built a certain way, and the most important thing we can do withthe world is avoid randomness, and figure out ways by which things can beplanned. Wisdom like this has its effect on seventeen-year-old freshmen, and fromthen on Sussman was hooked.But he got off on the wrong foot with the hackers. He tried to compensate for hisinsecurity by excessive bravado, and everyone saw right through it. He was also, bymany accounts, terrifically clumsy, almost getting himself flattened in a bout withthe robot arm which he had infinite trouble controlling and once he accidentallycrushed a special brand of imported Ping-Pong ball that Gosper had brought intothe lab. Another time, while on a venture of the Midnight Computer WiringSociety, Sussman got a glob of solder in his eye. He was losing left and right.Perhaps to cultivate a suave image, Sussman smoked a pipe, the utterly wrongthing to do on the smokeaphobic ninth floor, and one day the hackers managed toreplace some of his tobacco with cut-up rubber bands of the same approximatecolor.He unilaterally apprenticed himself to Gosper, the most verbally profound of thehackers. Gosper might not have thought that Sussman was much of a winner at thatpoint, but he loved an audience, and tolerated Sussman's misguided cockiness.Sometimes the wry guru's remarks would set Sussman's head spinning, like thetime Gosper offhandedly remarked that "Well, data is just a dumb kind ofprogramming." To Sussman, that answered the eternal existence question, "Whatare you?" We are data, pieces of a cosmic computer program that is the universe.Looking at Gosper's programs,Sussman divined that this philosophy was embedded in the code. Sussman laterexplained that "Gosper sort of imagined the world as being made out of all theselittle pieces, each of which is a little machine which is a little independent localstate. And [each state] would talk to its neighbors."Looking at Gosper's programs, Sussman realized an important assumption ofhackerism: all serious computer programs are expressions of an individual. "It'sonly incidental that computers execute programs," Sussman would later explain."The important thing about a program is that it's something you can show topeople, and they can read it and they can learn something from it. It carriesinformation. It's a piece of your mind that you can write down and give to someoneelse just like a book." Sussman learned to read programs with the same sensitivitythat a literature buff would read a poem. There are fun programs with jokes inthem, there are exciting programs which do The Right Thing, and there are sad