Code is not literature (2014)
There&#x27;s a distinction I&#x27;ve noticed ever since university CS:<p>The code-starers and the experimentalists.  When debugging, the code-starers would, well, stare at the code and try to reason this out logically.  There will be statements such as &quot;this cannot be the case, because ...&quot;.<p>The experimentalists would <i>run</i> the program with variations in input and code and observe the effects in order to figure out what was <i>really</i> happening.<p>As you can probably tell, I am an experimentalist, and I find the code-staring approach puzzling:  (a) the world is not as you expect it to be, so reasoning about what can or cannot be the case is of limited use, as your reasoning is evidently faulty (usually assumptions).  (b) there is a real world you can ask questions, why would you not want real answers??<p>Philosophically and historically, I consider the move towards empirical science (Bacon etc.) probably the greatest advancement humanity has made to date.  It certainly is dramatically more effective than any other method of separating truth from non-truth we have, whereas scholasticism...