Stan Kelly-Bootle was an unusual combination of a folk singer-songwriter and a computer scientist. His most famous song was Liverpool Lullaby
Oh you are a mucky kid
Dirty as a dustbin lid
When he hears the things that you did
You'll get a belt from yer dad…
The song was recorded by (amongst others) the Ian Campbell Folk Group, Judy Collins, and Cilla Black.
At the same time Kelly-Bootle followed a career as a pioneer computer scientist, on both sides of the Atlantic, and wrote several important books on computing.
He also wrote a humorous book, The Devil's Data Processing Dictionary, a witty and sardonic skit on the computer jargon and technology of the 70's and 80's. An example definition
Computer Science: A combination of astrology and numerology, but lacking the accuracy of the former and the precision of the latter.
Another example
Recursion: See Recursion
is timeless, but most of the book depends too much on vanished technology to be funny today.
I was reminded of the Dictionary when preparing for a 10-minute talk on algorithms I was giving recently. I wanted to illustrate that an algorithm that may never stop is (arguably) not an algorithm. This reminded me of Kelly-Bootle's 'Algorithm for perfecting human happiness'. In essence it was
1. Is human happiness perfect?
2. If NO, improve it and return to Step 1.
3. If YES, stop.
I ended up using the following variant from the excellent xkcd series, because it not only may not stop; it is positively guaranteed not to.
