In his memoirs, computing pioneer Maurice Wilkes wrote of the moment in 1949 when, hauling punch cards up the stairs to a primitive computer called EDSAC in Cambridge, England, he saw the future: "The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs."  From Wilkes's epiphany to the present, despite a host of innovations, programmers have been stuck with the hard slog of debugging.  Their work is one percent inspiration, the rest sweat-drenched work; their products are never finished or perfect, just varying degrees of "less broken."

Scott Rosenberg, Dreaming in Code