An Ode to the Exacting Pedantry of Computers

The very first computer programming class I ever took introduced me to the idea of there being different kinds of numbers, like integers, floats, and doubles (it was a C++ course). “You mean, when I assign a variable, I have to say up front what kind of number this is?” It was such an odd concept to me. A number is a number. Why do I have to say it’s this kind of number or that kind of number? I dropped out of that class. A few years later, I decided I wanted to try programming again. So I took another intro class. This time they were teaching with Python instead of C++, so you can imagine my excitement to learn that I didn’t have to think of numbers in this way anymore! It felt like the computer was meeting me partway. Over time, I came to learn how pedantic computers are. They require a kind of exacting precision in saying what you want them to do. And they’ll only ever do exactly what you tell them to do, nothing more, nothing less. If there was a bug in your program, that wasn’t…