You have to cut through all that stuff, because in a way, they?re trying to create programmers in their own image; they?re trying to get you to do arbitrary things the same way they do. When you?re young, your goals aren?t as stable; you may get distracted by one thing or another. It?s like saving the best thing on my plate for last. GATES: No. I think after the first three or four years, it?s pretty cast in concrete whether you?re a good programmer or not. GATES: Math really affects computer science. Math relates very directly to programming, maybe more so in my mind than in other people?s minds, because that?s the angle that I came from. INTERVIEWER: Do you think that?s a talent? INTERVIEWER: Has anyone in particular influenced you in the way you write code? I started trying to do that with other people?s code myself. You?ve got to be willing to read other people?s code, then write your own, then have other people review your code. And John Norton from TRW, who wrote memos about people?s code-I?d never seen anything like that before. I haven?t seen much that parallels our facility, short of maybe professional training facilities.

Still haven?t got it? The brand-new $17-million stadium, its construction not quite completed, still had no name. There are still plenty of questions that need to be addressed pertaining to safety and economics, and ???? ???? negotiations between the two sides will almost certainly run into speed bumps along the way. There are a bunch of people that sell photos on the street, but then I ask them and they don’t have a website. If he?s really good, he?ll have everything at the tip of his tongue. I can talk to somebody about a program that he?s written and know right away whether he?s really a good programmer. Some of the world-class people will harp on some purely idiosyncratic detail, like how you comment the program. GATES: It will be. GATES: No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. If you ever talk to a great programmer, you?ll find he knows his tools like an artist knows his paintbrushes. Gone are the days, we used to find numbers of separated small chambers and rooms in any working floor.

Such data analysis does influence when and who a team buys in the transfer market and for how much, but given that some of the football clubs are bank rolled by some of the world’s billionaires there’s still a lot of ego in the transfer market. A lot of great programmers programmed when they were in their teens, when the way you think about things is perhaps more flexible. It?s amazing to see how much great programmers have in common in the way they developed-how they got their feedback, and how they developed such a refined sense of discipline about what?s sloppy and what?s not sloppy. In this respect, you will have to do some research into how many goals each soccer league produces on average over a season. “I love the new format of the playoffs because it allows for more teams to compete for the World Series which then keeps fans invested in the season for a longer duration,” Sam Craig, ?22, said. A lot of people would say, “I want days and days to read this.” A really good programmer would say, “Let me take that home with me. People will still design algorithms, but a lot of the implementation could be done by machines.

It?s tempting to just start typing the code in, but there?s nothing worse than typing in a routine just to get the results, and then realizing that all the hard stuff still has to be written. People still get great satisfaction out of the fact that a compiler, like the C compiler, still can?t write code as well as a human being. You can?t let little idiosyncrasies get in the way of getting that feedback. If it can?t be pinpointed definitively? Back to BP with the foul balls it is. You have to just concentrate on the code and relate back to programs you?ve written. I think I improved dramatically as a programmer between 1975 and 1980. In ?75, I would have said, “Hey, watch out, I can do anything.” I really thought I could, because I had read so much code, and I never found a piece of code that I couldn?t read very quickly. To this day, I can go to the blackboard and write out huge slabs of source code from the Microsoft BASIC that I wrote ten years ago. There?s no one at Microsoft who was just kind of mediocre for a couple of years, and then just out of the blue started optimizing everything in sight.