Is your compiler throwing onions in the varnish?
In a by now well-known anecdote, Primo Levi, an Italian chemist-become-writer from the early twentieth century, was reviewing how varnish was produced in an industrial facility. The recipe, involving many chemical components, included instructions to throw in a raw, peeled onion in the varnish. This was puzzling to him: he couldn’t figure out why the onion could be needed, or even how such a small amount of material could affect the resulting varnish. Nobody he asked at the factory knew why it was needed. Seemingly, it had been done like that forever.
Intrigued, he researched where this came from, and after some heavy digging, he discovered the reason: in earlier times, when varnish was produced in a less industrialized fashion, varnish-makers would throw in the onion, they would look at it, and when it become brown from being fried, they’d know the varnish was in the right temperature for the next step. When the production system had gained thermometers and automation, someone had just kept on throwing the onion out of habit, and thus it had become an ingredient of the varnish.
Compilers?
As an example of a modern varnish recipe, let’s have a look at the canonical MAX function: let’s see how you would find the maximum out of a list of numbers in any modern imperative language:
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1 2 3 4 |
max = a[0]; for (i = 1; i < n; i++) if (a[i] > max) max = a[i]; |
This loop finds the maximum value in the input array and returns it.
And you may ask, what is the problem with the above code? Isn’t it just pretty conventional code to walk an array and extract some information from it? Isn’t that how programming is supposed to be done?