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He grinned at me.

"You're very strange," I said.

"I used to think that was a compliment," he said. And his pleasure vanished.

It was at that moment that I thought there might be a bit more to Brian. Yes, he was weird. Yes, he barely belonged to this world. But a part of him knew all too we…

Twenty years before my meeting with the vice president, I was a communist. I joined an underground party. I took a nom de guerre. If I had been clever enough to write a bug fatal to world banking, I would have been promoted to party leadership, hailed as a heroine of the revolution. [...]

Now th…

The problem is that coding isn't fun if all you can do is call things out of a library, if you can't write the library yourself. If the job of coding is just to be finding the right combination of parameters, that does fairly obvious things, then who'd want to go into that as a career?

There's t…

I don't know why I had those two convictions. I arrived at BBN with no skill per se, but I had those principles in the back of my head for some reason. I thought I ought to be able to understand anything and it shouldn't be so hard. I found that even for the time-sharing system and the IMPs—for all…

[...] the other guy was programming the way he had wanted to program but with a different spin. So he saw what happens when one very intense, very good programmer doesn't segment it down. You get one very long program—it's not that the program was spaghetti code but there were just so many levels o…