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Re: Who said that?



At 12:26 PM 2003.07.18 -0700, Michael Vanier wrote:
>If you've implemented it you still may not understand it.  But if you
>*haven't* implemented it there's almost no chance that you understand it.
>So implementation is necessary, but not always sufficient.

	To implement something merely requires one to translate some algorithm into concrete form; however, what if you both devise the algorithm *and* implement it?  I think that pretty much requires understanding, and this is what people are referring to in these quotes.  Speaking of which, the most concise version is:

Programming is understanding.

-- Kristen Nygaard


[However, I remembet when I was a teenager I wrote a program to devise Roman numerals algorithmically, and it worked flawlessly; the only problem was that when I displayed some debugging data it showed that the algorithm was completely wrong, it just happened to be failing in such a way that it always provided the right answers!]