I work with fixing specialised software and hardware.
I belive that there is truth to the Tom Knight and the Lisp machine koan. Several times per year I bill customers for doing this.
If you’ve not heard it before:
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine
by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
I work with fixing specialised software and hardware.
I belive that there is truth to the Tom Knight and the Lisp machine koan. Several times per year I bill customers for doing this.
If you’ve not heard it before: A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
Like, the novice was unsuccessfully getting the machine to work, and then when Knight did the same thing it worked?
Exactly.
Holy Baader–Meinhof, Batman! I just found out about that 2 days ago
https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html