Essay 47 Code Is the Ultimate Junior Developer

With the advantages we’re afforded in our medium, it’s quick to forget how remarkable code is.

For the time being, forget about the latest jQuery plug-in or Rails patch. Instead, imagine if the great mathematician, Carl Frederick Gauss, had the benefit of a programming language at his disposal back in the 18th century.

What Gauss Could’ve Done with Code

As a famous story goes, one day in grade school, Gauss’s notoriously lazy teacher had the entire class sum all the integers from 1 to 100 in hopes of keeping the class occupied for a long while. Much to the teacher’s chagrin, the young Gauss came back to his teacher after only a few moments with the right answer: 5,050.

How did he come up with ...

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