A sufficiently advanced technologist
Brian Kernighan, the legendary programmer and one of the people responsible for foisting C on the world from his perch at Bell Labs, is now teaching liberal arts students at Princeton about computers (New York Times link). I don’t think many people at his level of programming would be able to step back and make computers understandable to non-professionals. If they were, I would never have been able to make a living as a technical writer. I think it’s pretty cool that he’s able to demystify them for an audience that otherwise wouldn’t have distinguished them from magic (in the Arthur C. Clarke sense).
Posted at 8:45 AM