Twenty “why” posts from this blog:
- Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity
- Why 90% solutions beat 100% solutions
- Why Unicode is subtle
- Why programmers write unneeded code
- Why care about spherical trig?
- Why Shakespeare is hard to read
- Why are bad guys so interesting in novels?
- Why proof by pattern of examples doesn’t work
- Why Ruby is a good language for DSLs
- Why SQL failed
- Why is TeX so popular in Germany?
- Why microarray study conclusions are so often wrong
- Why technical arguments get heated
- Why there will always be programmers
- Why so few electronic medical records
- Why heights are normally distributed
- Why heights are not normally distributed
- Why computer scientists count from zero
- Why functional programming hasn’t taken off
- Why Mr. Scott is Scottish
18. Programmers count from zero because on most architectures comparing variable with zero is faster than comparing with any other number. A lot of bugs come out of ‘off by one’ errors – precisely because computer scientists don’t find counting from zero natural.