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From: usenet@abnjh.UUCP (usenet)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Superstition in Programmers
Message-ID: <348@abnjh.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 29-Dec-83 11:50:43 EST
Article-I.D.: abnjh.348
Posted: Thu Dec 29 11:50:43 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Dec-83 00:46:09 EST
References: <2656@yale-com.UUCP>
Organization: ATTIS, NJ
Lines: 43

<<>>

>>While this is a glaring example, I've seen others.  In only 30 years, this
>>field has created more than its share of taboos, unjustified beliefs, and
>>religious sentiments.  My own feeling is:  Any rule or rule of thumb that
>>you can't provide good reasons for is probably at least partly wrong.\
>>
>>							-- Jerry
>>					decvax!yale-comix!leichter leichter@yale

I had a friend once, who always said he was going to write a paper
called "Superstition in Programmers" for publication in the psychology
journals.  The story goes that one of BF Skinner's grad students got
bored with using rewards to teach increasingly complex behavior
patterns to pigeons, and wondered what would happen if the pigeons
were rewarded at random, instead of systematicly.  What he found out
was that pigeons are very inclined to generalize from very little
evidence, and that such generalizations are hard to get rid of.
Specifically, if a pigeon got 'rewarded' (by chance) for standing on
one leg in the corner of its cage, it would spend a lot of time
thereafter standing on one leg in the corner of its cage.  The grad
student dubbed these behaviors "superstitions", and published a paper
titled "Superstition in Pigeons".

My friend's thesis was that programmers are not alot smarter than
pigeons, and if the computer rewards them once (by 'correctly' running
their program) for some bizarre behavior (like using a case statement
to add one to a number between ten and fifteen) then they will spend a
lot of time repeating that behavior, against all protestations of
their co-workers who are afflicted with a different set of superstitions.
My friend pointed out that two rich sources of such behaviors are compiler
and operating system bugs.  Programmers find out about a bug, and
devise a "workaround" for it, then continue to use the (complex and
inefficient) workaround long after the original bug has been fixed.

I wonder if this discussion has any relation to the discussion going
on in another newsgroup about people's tendency to find patterns in
sequences of random numbers.

		Rick Thomas
		ihnp4!abnji!rbt
		    or
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