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Koans to Hack By
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the
power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing
spoke sternly: ``You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling
it with no understanding of what is going wrong.'' Knight turned
the machine off and on. The machine worked.
One day a student came to Moon and said, ``I understand how to
make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count
of the pointers to each cons.'' Moon patiently told the student
the following story:
``One day a student came to Moon and said, ``I understand how
to make a better garbage collector...
he sat hacking at the PDP-6. ``What are you doing?'' asked
Minsky. ``I am training a randomly wired neural net to play
Tic-Tac-Toe.'' ``Why is the net wired randomly?'' asked Minsky.
``I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play.''
Minsky shut his eyes. ``Why do you close your eyes?'' Sussman
asked his teacher. ``So the room will be empty.'' At that
moment, Sussman was enlightened.
Greenblatt. As they spoke a Multics system hacker walked by.
``Is it true,'' asked the student, ``that PL-1 has many of the same
data types as Lisp?'' Almost before the student had finished his
question, Greenblatt shouted, ``FOO!'' and hit the student with a
stick.
A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was
eating his morning meal. ``I would like to give you this
personality test,'' said the outsider, ``because I want you to be
happy.'' Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it
into the toaster: ``I wish the toaster to be happy, too.''
A man from AI walked across the mountains to SAIL to see the
Master, Knuth. When he arrived, the Master was nowhere to be
found. ``Where is the wise one named Knuth?'' he asked a passing
student. ``Ah,'' said the student, ``you have not heard. He has
gone on a pilgrimage across the mountains to the temple of AI to
seek out new disciples.'' Hearing this, the man was Enlightened.
A famous Lisp Hacker noticed an Undergraduate sitting in front
of a Xerox 1108, trying to edit a complex Klone network via a
browser. Wanting to help, the Hacker clicked one of the nodes
in the network with the mouse, and asked ``what do you see?''
Very earnesty, the Undergraduate replied ``I see a cursor.'' The
Hacker then quickly pressed the boot toggle at the back of the
keyboard, while simultaneously hitting the Undergraduate over
the head with a thick Interlisp Manual. The Undergraduate was
then Enlightened.
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