Comunications of the ACM highlight the student enrolment crisis. But isn't it so hard to understand why the perception is negative?

What's the experience most people have with computers? They're promising machines, but often cease to work without apparent reason. No one seem to able to fix the problem, restart the program, kill it, or reboot are the only remedies. Mysterious behaviour coupled with having to press the reboot button doesn't inspire confidence that these computer programmers know what they're doing.

And it's not just my windows XP subnotebook that loses its wireless network all the time. Sometimes you can disconnect and reconnect, often you have to reboot. Or its get a blue screen. Reboot again.

It's not just Microsoft. The kids notice that FireFox keeps eating its memory and needs to be restarted now and then. A friend installs Ubuntu, and now his laptop locks up regularly, requiring a hard reboot. I lose my wireless on Ubuntu after a few sleeps and/or Microsoft VPN connects, and need to rmmod/insmod the relevant kernel modules.

Computing is just an unstable mess. And programmers must take the blame for that. But until the time programmers stop using pointer based languages and manual memory management, forget about progress in this area. It's time for the humble programmers that admit they can't be trusted with certain technologies.