OT: Happy Birthday Larry Niven

[Greg Ewing]

Jeff Shannon wrote:
> 
> Motie engineers were capable of adapting bits and pieces of
> whatever in ways that would make a human's brain explode, but
> turned out to function remarkably well.
> 
> This sounds exactly like Perl to me -- it *can* work remarkably
> well, if you're genetically designed to grok it, but for a normal
> human, it's more likely to make your brain explode.   :)

The Moties would use Watchmakers to do most of the
grunt work of Perl programming, I think.

Let a few Watchmakers loose on your Perl program,
and they'd rewrite it, the Perl interpreter and
the operating system, and rebuild the hardware
it runs on, several times over before you could
tell them to stop...

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, University of Canterbury,	  
Christchurch, New Zealand
To get my email address, please visit my web page:	  
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg