Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Read Online Free Page A

vigour.  He told her to try and enjoy herself, so she kicked him.  This did something to bring a brief glimmer of pleasure into her glum evening, but it didn’t last.  Her father briefly shared with the table at large his feelings about baby-sitters who let people down, but nobody felt able to run with the topic.
    ‘A major season of Buxtehude,’ resumed the Director of Music, ‘is of course clearly long overdue.  I’m sure you’ll be looking forward to remedying this situation at the first opportunity.’
    ‘Oh, er, yes,’ replied the girl’s father, spilling his soup, ‘er, that is... he’s not the same one as Gluck, is he?’
    The little girl kicked the table leg again.  When her father looked sternly at her, she put her head on one side and mouthed a question at him.
    ‘Not now,’ he insisted at her as quietly as he could.
    ‘When, then?’
    ‘Later.  Maybe.  Later, we’ll see.’
    She hunched grumpily back in her seat.  ‘You always say later,’ she mouthed at him.
    ‘Poor child,’ murmured Reg.  ‘There isn’t a don at this table who doesn’t behave exactly like that inside.  Ah, thank you.’  Their soup arrived, distracting his attention, and Richard’s.
    ‘So tell me,’ said Reg, after they had both had a couple of spoonsful and arrived independently at the same conclusion, that it was not a taste explosion, ‘what you’ve been up to, my dear chap.  Something to do with computers, I understand, and also to do with music.  I thought you read English when you were here -- though only, I realise, in your spare time.’  He looked at Richard significantly over the rim of his soup spoon.  ‘Now wait,’ he interrupted before Richard even had a chance to start, ‘don’t I vaguely remember that you had some sort of computer when you were here?  When was it?  1977?’
    Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind of electric abacus, but...’
    Oh, now, don’t underestimate the abacus,’ said Reg.  ‘In skilled hands it’s a very sophisticated calculating device.  Furthermore it requires no power, can be made with any materials you have to hand, and never goes bing in the middle of an important piece of work.’
    ‘So an electric one would be particularly pointless,’ said Richard.
    ‘True enough,’ conceded Reg.
    ‘There really wasn’t a lot this machine could do that you couldn’t do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble,’ said Richard, ‘but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim-witted pupil.’
    Reg looked at him quizzically.
    ‘I had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply,’ he said.  ‘I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I’m sitting.’
    ‘I’m sure.  But look at it this way.  What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?’
    This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.
    Richard continued, ‘What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.  That forces you to sort it out in your own mind.  And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas.  And that’s really the essence of programming.  By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself.  The teacher usually learns more than the pupil.  Isn’t that true?’
    ‘It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils,’ came a low growl from somewhere on the table, ‘without undergoing a pre-frontal lobotomy.’
    ‘So I used to spend days struggling to write essays on this 16K machine that would have taken a couple of hours on a typewriter, but what was fascinating to me was the process of trying to explain to the machine what it was I wanted it to do.  I virtually wrote my own word processor in BASIC.  A