A Mad Scientist's Disconnect

A long time ago, I had a friend who was a coding wizard. If you had a programming question, he had an answer -- always solid, always insightful. We called him the mad scientist, because he could disappear for days (literally) and emerge from the wilderness bearing miracles.

One day he said with great animation and a broad smile stretching from ear to ear, I have written a program that will do anything.

He was our mad scientist. Who were we to doubt him? We stood there waiting for his elaboration, for clearly he made his statement in the form of a question, waiting to supply the details. He stood there looking at us.

So we asked for the details. And he showed them, sitting down at his workstation as we peered over his shoulders watching him type at the keyboard. After hitting the return key, he pushed back and let us appreciate his creation.

It did nothing. It just sat there, cursor blinking. He stared at us with a look of Well? on his face.

Well? we asked him.

So he turned back to the workstation, the smile still on his face and typed a few characters more

printf( "foo bar baz\n" );

and he quickly pushed back again.

Instantly, these words appeared on the screen

foo bar baz

See? he asked. It will do anything.

A mad scientist has a different way of looking at the world, spinning inside his or her own model of reality for most of the time, popping out only infrequently to project it onto those standing nearby. To us, do anything was a tall order, and he knew it. To him, it meant compile and execute any syntactically valid program I type at the keyboard.

He revelled in the disconnect as we rolled our eyes.

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