Date: Fri, 30 Aug 85 00:20:43 EDT
From: Keith F. Lynch <KFL@MIT-MC.ARPA>
Subject: A NEW and IMPROVED contest
To: stev@seismo.CSS.GOV
Cc: BANDYKIN@MIT-MC.ARPA

    Date: Thu, 29 Aug 85 23:20:24 EDT
    From: Stev Knowles <stev@seismo.CSS.GOV>

    with all this talk about self destructive habits, lets have a CONTEST!!!
    who has the most excessive SELF-DESTRUCTIVE habit?

  I do!

1) I stay up late at night reading various bizarre mailing list such as this
   one, and sending long incoherent messages.  As a result of this, I don't
   get enough sleep, I get to work late, and I am half asleep while at work.
   So I am likely to be fired, or worse yet, screw up the project I am
   working on.  I don't think I am allowed to tell you what I am working on,
   but it's something that ought not be screwed up.

2) I send messages that get most of BandYKin upset at me.  So far, I have
   managed to alienate the smokers and the women.  Next week, I will
   attack the nonsmokers and the men.  At this rate, the next bAndYKiN
   party will be a necktie party, with me as guest of honor.

3) I have decided to tell you what I am working on.  After all, if you
   can't trust a multi-network sattelite-redistributed archived usenet-
   gatewayed ARPAnet mailing list with who knows how many recipients,
   some of them minors, females, smokers, drug fiends, sex-starved-
   hackeroids, and NSA monitors, who CAN you trust?
     You have heard of SDI (aka Star Wars)?  And how many people despair
   of the possibilty of debugging the 42 trillion lines of code that it
   has been mathematically proven will be necessary in order to shoot down
   all of the bad guys missiles?  Well, a well known result of computer
   science is that the reliability of a program varies inversely
   with the number of programmers involved in writing it.  So the DoD
   decided SDI would be most reliable if it was written by a single
   programmer.  To make a long story short, my proposal to the top
   secret RFP was chosen because 1) I was single and 2) I was willing
   to work for minimum wage and ARPAnet access.
     Also, I work fast.  It has been widely reported that the average
   professional programmer generates only about 100 lines of code per
   day.  I generate about 10,000 lines of code per day.  I could program
   even faster, but I type with just two fingers.  Besides, my terminal
   has a flakey RETURN key.
     It's really not that hard to do.  I just write modular code.  I
   had SDI nearly finished in FORTRAN-77, but DoD insisted that I do it
   in ADA instead, so I have started over.
     Ada is pretty simple and is really modular.  Here is the main program.
   It took me just 15 seconds to write and debug.

procedure SDI is --Program by Keith Lynch, August 1985.  If you find this
   WIN:          --program useful, please send $5.00.
      while there_is_a_missile_aimed_at_us_or_our_allies loop
         shoot_it_down;
      end loop WIN
   end SDI;

     Now all that remains is for me to define the boolean function
there_is_a_missile_aimed_at_us_or_our_allies and the procedure
shoot_it_down.  See how easy it is?  Only 11,999,999,999,994 lines
to go.
  I am writing it on an APPLE-][ in UCSD-ADA.  It runs fine except
when it has to do real number arithmetic.  Doing an average cosine
takes ten to fifteen minutes on the APPLE.  I'll just have to make
sure SDI doesn't use any trig.
  But I am afraid that my lack of sleep may influence the accuracy
of my code.  Not that I ever really makke typing mistakes, btu ti
never hurts to be safe.  After all, if SDI fails, think how many
floppy disks we will have wasted for nothing!
  (I hereby certify that I am not an employee of the Moral Majority,
the Immoral Minority, the Catholic Church, or any other weird cult.
I am a loyal worshipper of the One True Jim Jones KoolAid God.)
  So, do I win the first prize?  Huh?
                                                                ...Keith