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Anyone can code

Our goal in this chapter is to convince you that writing a program is easier than writing a piece of text, such as a paragraph or essay.

— ROBERT SEDGEWICK and KEVIN WAYNE,
Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach (2017)

A REVIEW OF

GO, DOG. GO!
BY P.D. EASTMAN

CENTRAL QUESTION:
How does one learn to be a reader?

Year of book’s publication: 1961; Other books published in 1961: Catch-22, Franny and Zooey, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Mother Night; Number of different words used in book: seventy-five; Occurrences of the word dog (or dogs): sixty; Name of series: Beginner Books; Other books by author in the Beginner Books series: Are You My Mother?, Sam and the Firefly, The Best Nest, Flap Your Wings; Tagline of series: “I can read it all by myself”; Representative sentence: “Three dogs at a party on a boat at night.”

— Introduction to a review by Rachel Z. Arndt of Go, Dog. Go! in The Believer (2014)


It’s debatable whether writing a program is easier than writing a piece of text. Imagine the myriad of texts and programs that can possibly be written! Deceptively simple classics like Go, Dog. Go! and Pong might seem easy to write, while works like TeX and Finnegans Wake clearly reflect the hard work of master craftsmen.

Some programs like ‘Hello, World!’ usually are easy to write. But producing something of substance and doing it well — whether it’s composing music, lyrics, a poem, a useful program, or a delicious recipe — often requires significant effort and skills acquired over the course of years of focused practice.

Of course, anyone can practice. But . . .

Jon Bentley probably hit the nail on the head when he once was asked why literate programming hasn’t taken the whole world by storm. He observed that a small percentage of the world’s population is good at programming, and a small percentage is good at writing; apparently I am asking everybody to be in both subsets.

— DONALD E. KNUTH, “Interview with Donald Knuth” (2008)