Programming
I’m a professional but also a hobbyist software engineer. Here are some writings I’ve gathered around the topic.
Operating systems
Programming languages
This website
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
https://suberic.net/~dmm/projects/mystical/README.html:
I wanted to make a programming language that resembled magical circles.
When I was a CS major in the 90’s, one of my professors told me a story of his own college days, with punch-card computers. His university bought a tape reader (like, punched paper tape, not magnetic tape) to do the boot code of the computer, on the theory that tape was a little easier to manage than punch-cards for the boot (you can’t lose one of the cards, or get them out of order, etc with tape). So my prof and some of his friends start playing with the tape reader, and they realize that what controls the IO speed of the tape is actually the tensile strength of the tape – if the feeder tries to put too much force on it, it will tear the paper tape. The actual computer can read the instructions much faster than the tape can physically handle. So they got some plastic tape instead, and punched the boot code in the (much stronger) plastic tape. Then, to boot the computer, they’d feed the plastic tape through the part of the reader that actually read, bypassing the mechanical part that pulled and wound the tape, and then manually grab the other end and yank on it as hard as they could, basically starting the computer like it was one of those old lawnmowers that you pulled the cord to turn over the engine.