Some older scientists, for example, justify their use of opaque software by pointing to the infinite regress of computer representations. After all, they argue, it doesn’t really mean much to know how your simulation is programmed if all you are looking at is a high- level computer language. The “real guts” of the…
Running programs is the whole point of programming, of course, but there is more to it. The ability to execute code makes programming a tool for thinking and exploring. When we express ideas as programs, we make them testable; when we debug programs, we are also debugging our brains.
anything labeled with the recycling code three, six, or seven goes into the trash. (In my research on BPA, I encountered a mnemonic device with the lilt of a nursery rhyme: “Four, five, one, and two/All the rest are bad for you.”)