Why Computers?
This is an essay I wrote for the Michigan Tech Leading Scholar Award scholarship. I’ll probably be posting other essays as I write them.
Why computers?
I’ve been programming since I was six years old. I started with Liberty BASIC on an ancient Panasonic Toughbook that my Dad gave me. Ever since then, I’ve been learning every language I could get my hands on, writing everything from games to text editors. I love it. And despite all of this experience, I’m still a terrible programmer.
Computers are insane. They are insane because they are always right. And they are insane because they’re right even when they give you the wrong answer. The structure of a computer is so perfect that it will always give you exactly what you ask for. The problem with that is that humans don’t always know how to ask, or even what they’re looking for. A computer could care less WHAT you meant to ask, it’ll go ahead and continue working with incorrect instructions. It won’t ask “Did you mean to divide by zero?” or “Are you sure you meant to launch that rocket?” It’ll just go ahead and do it, no matter the consequences. It was only following directions, after all.
The result of this is that humans can never hope to entirely understand computers. No matter how good you get at programming, you’ll still be terrible at it. This is nobody’s fault, it’s simply a fact that computers and humans think in completely different ways. It’s extremely difficult to translate between the two, and that’s what the whole of computer science is based on. Trying to take a human’s idea of how something should work, and translating that into something that a computer can understand. We’ll never be completely successful at it, because the fact remains that humans make mistakes, and computers don’t care. A computer’s thought process is always perfect, and ours is not. No matter how hard you work to make that piece of code ABSOLUTELY PERFECT, it won’t be. There’s always something you can’t forsee. But it doesn’t matter, because, as the last 60 years illustrate, these things hardly have to be perfect to make a difference.
The fact that these devices are too complex for us to completely understand is what makes them so powerful. Because although we can never write a perfect program, we can get better at it. And as we get better, as programs become more reliable, more complex, computers will become even more useful. There are an infinite number of possibilities in this field. That’s why I love it. I want to be able to take an idea and turn it into something not quite perfect, knowing that I’ll always have the opportunity to expand it and make it better. I want to start every day knowing that my field has changed and there are exciting new things to learn. I want to be one of the people making those changes. I want to become the best terrible programmer the world has ever seen.
