what peter bentley is saying after all is: dear, programmer, we won't need you anymore. bentley developes robots like the snakebot, which can repair themselves. he manipulates material in a way that it can reconfigure itself, builds new electronic circuits with silicium and it seems he likes "terminator II", because he belives in the power of liquid cristal.

programmers in his vision will become gardener, who breed seeds. if they are developing well, they will sell them to their audience, who than can plant them into their computing device. and who knows, if evolution goes on, maybe your word processor will develope into something else ... get a life (audio/x-mpeg, 753 KB)

a conversation with andy hunt and dave thomas, the pragmatic programmers.

'The researchers did a test. They took a nice car, like a Jaguar, and parked it in the South Bronx in New York. They retreated back to a duck blind, and watched to see what would happen. They left the car parked there for something like four days, and nothing happened. It wasn't touched. So they went up and broke a little window on the side, and went back to the blind. In something like four hours, the car was turned upside down, torched, and stripped—the whole works. (fixit)

there are ten parts to this talk, that went on from march to may 2003.

'When we say in the book, "Whenever you find yourself thinking something can't happen, put asserts in," that could be misunderstood. We're not saying you have to assert everything. We're trying to undermine the kind of arrogance of the attitude, "I've just written this. It can't go wrong." Clearly there is code, setter and getter methods for example, where there is zero point in doing asserts just as there is zero point in doing unit testing. But it's more the case that this can never happen, because this file must exist. This socket must be open. This parameter must be greater than zero. Those are the ones where maybe that arrogance isn't quite appropriate.' (assertions)

is a bug whose presence is affected by act of observing it."

The specific context was a Smalltalk-80 image on a Unix workstation. We noticed that when we left the Smalltalk image running (with the cursor over one of its windows) unattended for a long time (like an extended lunch) and returned, the system was hung and the screen was filled with a huge stack of walkbacks. Yet, as soon as the mouse moved, the screen cleared, everything came back to life, and all was well.