Armstrong: Well, as an undergraduate some of the courses involved writing programs and I really enjoyed that. And I got to be very good at debugging. If all else failed, I would debug people's programs. The standard debugging was one beer. Then it would go up—a two-beer problem or a three-beer problem or something like that.

Seibel: That was in terms of how many beers they had to buy you when you debugged their program?

Armstrong: Yeah, when I fixed their program. I used to read programs and think, “Why are they writing it this way; this is very complicated,” and I'd just rewrite them to simplify them. It used to strike me as strange that people wrote complicated programs. I could see how to do things in a few lines and they'd written tens of lines and I'd sort of wonder why they didn't see the simple way. I got quite good at that.

Armstrong: Yes. Why this is I don't know. The funny thing is, if you give two programmers the same problem—it depends on the problem, but problems of a more mathematical nature, they can often end up writing the same code. Subject to just formatting issues and relabeling the variables and the function names, it's isomorphic—it's exactly the same algorithms. Are we creating these things or are we just pulling the cobwebs off? It's like a statue that's there and we're pulling the cobwebs off and revealing the algorithm that's always been there. So are we inventing a new algorithm or are we inventing a structure that already exists? Some algorithms feel like that. I think it's more the mathematical algorithms. I don't get that feeling when I'm implementing a telephony protocol or something. That's not a statue that I'm pulling the cobwebs off.