In those pages I first met the ideas that would
mold my professional career and the people who would become
my colleagues, mentors, and heroes.

remain particularly proud of “Multidimensional Divide-and-Conquer” (April 1980), summarizing my Ph.D. thesis, and “A Locally Adaptive Data Compression Scheme” (April 1986) with Daniel Sleator, Robert Tarjan, and Victor Wei, introducing a method for compressing text files.

Programming has been very, very good to me. I wrote my first Fortran program as a junior in high school in 1969 and have now followed my bliss in this field for almost four decades. Programming has provided a livelihood, intellectual challenge and reward, deep friendships, and numerous joys indescribable. Of all the good things that have happened in my career as a programmer, though, one of the best was and is writing the “Programming Pearls” column in CACM beginning August 1983. These columns presented neither new research nor systematic reviews of the field. I would later describe them as “programming pearls whose origins lie beyond solid engineering, in the realm of insight and creativity.” For the most part, they were fun stories of how clever colleagues had phrased and solved programming problems, not infrequently discovering that “we have met the enemy, and he is us.” When Peter Denning graciously offered me the opportunity to write the column, he pointed out that each of my scribblings would land on “the 70,000 most important coffee tables in the world of programming.”

The best columns were the ones in which master programmers shared helpful insights with their colleagues. In March 1984, Bob Martin’s “The Back of the Envelope” showed how even small estimates are useful in designing big computer systems. The September 1985 column “Bumper-Sticker Computer Science” collected aphorisms sent in by readers; among them are these timely gems:

• The sooner you start to code, the longer the program will take (Roy Carlson);

• Allocate four digits for the year part of a date: a new millennium is approaching (David Martin); and

• Pi seconds is a nanocentury (Tom Duff).

I enhanced and collected 13 of the columns into the book Programming Pearls in 1986 and a second edition in 2000. We published a second collection called More Programming Pearls: Confessions of a Coder in 1988. The books have sometimes been used in schools, but their most important readership has always been working programmers who want to learn more about their craft.

I have long been resigned to the fact that whether I like it or not (fortunately, I usually do), I will almost always be introduced in computing circles as “Jon Bentley, who wrote ‘Programming Pearls’ in Communications in the 1980s.” I remain deeply grateful to Peter Denning and Stuart Lynn who first proposed the column, to my colleagues and managers at Bell Labs who supported the work, to the programmers who contributed so much of the column’s best content, and to the readers of CACM who frequently took the time to say thanks.

When I first read CACM in 1972, I was young, and it was old. Now the tables have turned: I am an old computer programmer, and it remains fresh and vital. It has done this by sticking to its primary mission: communicating appropriate content to the members of the ACM. If it stays this course, I am confident that its second half century will be as much fun and as fruitful as its first. ^c

JON BENTLEY ( [e-mail]) is a research scientist in the Software Technology Research Department of Avaya Labs Research, Basking Ridge, NJ.