{"id":27555,"date":"2015-07-28T01:00:31","date_gmt":"2015-07-28T05:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27555"},"modified":"2018-09-18T15:33:44","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T19:33:44","slug":"qotd-master-foo-and-the-hardware-designer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/07\/28\/qotd-master-foo-and-the-hardware-designer\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Master Foo and the Hardware Designer"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>On one occasion, as Master Foo was traveling to a conference with a few of his senior disciples, he was accosted by a hardware designer.<\/p>\n<p>The hardware designer said: \u201cIt is rumored that you are a great programmer. How many lines of code do you write per year?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Master Foo replied with a question: \u201cHow many square inches of silicon  do you lay out per year?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhy\u2026we hardware designers never measure our work in that way,\u201d the man said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAnd why not?\u201d Master Foo inquired.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf we did so,\u201d the hardware designer replied, \u201cwe would be tempted to design chips so large that they cannot be fabricated \u2013 and, if they were fabricated, their overwhelming complexity would make it be impossible to generate proper test vectors for them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Master Foo smiled, and bowed to the hardware designer.<\/p>\n<p>In that moment, the hardware designer achieved enlightenment.<\/p>\n<p>Eric S. Raymond, <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6195\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Master Foo and the Hardware Designer&#8221;, <em>Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2014-08-26.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On one occasion, as Master Foo was traveling to a conference with a few of his senior disciples, he was accosted by a hardware designer. The hardware designer said: \u201cIt is rumored that you are a great programmer. How many lines of code do you write per year?\u201d Master Foo replied with a question: \u201cHow [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,41,15],"tags":[1235,92],"class_list":["post-27555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-quotations","category-technology","tag-esr","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7ar","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27555"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27556,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27555\/revisions\/27556"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}