Finding an Elephant

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 11

The son of a friend of mine found this item on the Internet. I therefore have no knowledge of its provenance. I am responsible for the bits on APL and J.

A study was done to find out the different methods computer programmers use to solve problems. The study consisted of taking different programmers to South Africa and telling them to go and find an elephant.

The COBOL programmers immediately adopted a simple strategy; they took a picture of an elephant, faced east and started walking. Each time they encountered an animal they compared it to the picture, and if it did not match they tossed it aside and kept walking. When they came to an ocean they took one step north and started back to the west, repeating the algorithm with each ocean. The more experienced programmers placed a known elephant in Cairo to keep themselves from walking off into the Mediterranean.

The Assembly Language programmers used the same method as their COBOL brethren, but executed it on their knees — insisting it was more efficient that way.

The Database programmers hired thousands of natives at enormous expense, and gave them all a picture of an elephant and sent them running off in different directions. Some of the things they brought back did indeed resemble elephants.

The Artificial Intelligence programmers sat down and developed a complex and complete definition of what an elephant was, and what were its attributes, and the procedure one would follow to create a mathematical ratio of “not an elephant at all” to “absolutely an elephant” for any one animal. At no time did they actually attempt to find an elephant.

The Object Oriented programmers went to the library and took out the book “Finding Kangaroos in the Australian Outback”. They carefully changed every occurrence in the book of the words “Australia” to “Africa”, and “Kangaroo” to “Elephant”.

Because of the power of their language the APL programmers only needed one instruction to find all of the elephants at once. The instruction was: Africa ∊ Elephant.

Two J programmers, who claim to be reborn APLers, unfortunately took a wrong fork and were never seen again. A planned search had to be aborted as no further J programmers could be found.