The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question
was:
Is there a muse for programming? If so, what is her address
or phone number? Does she have red hair and big (CENSORED)?
What must I do to get her attention?
and in response, thus spake the Oracle:
"Yes, Supplicant, there is a Programming Muse."
It turns out that long-neglected documents in Greek mythology
do point to the existence of Prokeduria, the muse of
imperative programming languages. (Non-imperative programming
languages are heathen, laws unto themselves, and thus godless,
so if you need help on that one, you're S.O.L. buddy) In
fact, thee is even a Prokeduriac Oath that was taken by all
programmers of the era, a practice which I believe should be
reinstated:
"In the names of von Neumann, Wirth, Kernighan, and Ritchie,
I hereby swear to create a functional, kludge-free program.
I pledge to write readable code, utilize top-down design, and
never write routines in assembly unless I am being paid big
bucks to do so. I shall never use a linked list when an array
will do; I shall always optimize my routines whenever
possible; and I will make sure that dumb-ass users can never,
ever crash my program. I shall only pirate other people's
Numerical Recipes whenever I have number crunching to do. And
should my C shell turn into VMS, or should I know not if I am
working with a pointer or the variable it's pointing to, may
Prokeduria smile upon me, guide me, and give me inspirations,
so long as I credit her in the source code."
Since there are so many programmers nowadays, Prokeduria has
given up on helping most mortal programmers, simply because it
would take up all of her time and she'd be unable to continue
writing the Olympian OmniCompiler (c). To get her attention,
you must be in truly dire straits (e.g. an accounting database
for a Fortune 500 Corp. due tomorrow that you haven't started)
or you must be undertaking some truly Sysyphean task (e.g.
translating a Monte Carlo simulation of electron densities in
a crystal from C++ to COBOL), so if you just have a five-page
program for sophomore year data structures, forget it.
Why would you want the muse of programming to look like Peg
Bundy?
You owe the Oracle a Monte Carlo simulation of electron densities in a crystal written in FORTRAN, due tomorrow.