What do people think about computers?

[reddragdiva]

I was reminded today of a short Perl course I did a few years ago. (And remember nothing of, of course.) It was Perl for web developers, and there was space for a couple of sysadmins.

Web developers work with programming languages. They cut and paste JavaScript and fiddle with it to get stuff working nicely on a screen. And, y'know, JavaScript is a pretty capable language if you care about that sort of thing.

One webdev achieved enlightenment. Her eyes lit up as she grasped the nature of Turing completeness, and the power of just giving a machine a set of precise worked-out instructions. "But you could write a program to do ... anything!" Yes. Yes, you could.

This person had shuffled around JavaScript for a living. She did not understand until that moment that computers would do whatever stuff you told them. That this was what she had been doing all this time.

With computers basically taking over civilisation, this leads me to wonder: what the hell do normal people think computers actually do, and how the hell do they think they do it? Normal people, I want you weighing in on this.