Eventually, though, I learned to submit. I let myself drift into the computer, to remember the math I know, the things I understand about types and categories and lists and syntax. Sometimes bugs cause error messages to pop up; sometimes they cause the program to give up the ghost and quit suddenly; sometimes they get caught in terrible loops and fill up the memory and choke all the resources of the computer until it has to be restarted. That’s called a stack overflow. Sometimes a request goes too hard, for example, calling itself so many times that the stack, which is a finite resource, fills up and can’t take it anymore. Hence the name of the website Stack Overflow, where programmers go to answer questions and help each other solve bugs. It’s the 62nd-most-visited website in the world, trailing Craigslist by a few spots.
+Eventually, though, I learned to submit. I let myself drift into the computer, to remember the math I know, the things I understand about types and categories and lists and syntax. Sometimes bugs cause error messages to pop up; sometimes they cause the program to give up the ghost and quit suddenly; sometimes they get caught in terrible loops and fill up the memory and choke all the resources of the computer until it has to be restarted. Sometimes a request goes too hard, for example, calling itself so many times that the stack, which is a finite resource, fills up and can’t take it anymore. That’s called a stack overflow. Hence the name of the website Stack Overflow, where programmers go to answer questions and help each other solve bugs. It’s the 62nd-most-visited website in the world, trailing Craigslist by a few spots.
Randomly selected item from Stack Overflow, to give you a taste of programming: