Dreamland: finding the uninitialized variable bug

Fragments of dreams about programming. I’m in bed in my dorm room and Dave Ely is talking on the phone. He’s really sneering, telling someone something about programming in a really self important way. I say “Dave, you’re an asshole,” and he hears me, so I say “Dave, please don’t kill me.”

He’s talking to John Gale on the telephone, they’re talking about eyeglasses which modify their focus dynamically while you’re wearing them. I say, “There was an article about that this month in the Scientific American.” and John says “I know,”

Then I’m in an office environment. I hear one of my coworkers say, if you can find a good Microsoft Access database programmer in one of these two locations you should hire him. Joe Parker says something about the location, and then tells me that he’s going to get two new computers and take them home, but not to tell anyone.

There’s a new programmer who is having a problem with his program, which is crashing. I ask him what language it’s in and he says C. We walk along, and I explain how programs can crash in C, by having a pointer variable which is uninitialized. Is it a string variable, I ask him? He doesn’t know. So we come back from the cafeteria, which we have walked through, and I ask to see the listing. It’s printed in extra-wide font on a dot-matrix printer, and it has numbered program lines, like 10, 20, 30, about two pages long on one of those paper rolls. Obviously it’s not C, it looks more like FORTRAN but the syntax is more like BASIC. Then I spot the problem. He’s using a variable before it has been initialized. You have to have a “SET” statement (in this language, whatever it is) before you can use the value of the variable. So I tell him that and then his supervisor is there going over the code with him, so I go off and do something else.
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