Many years ago at Tymshare, Inc, I was asked one day to interview Malcomb Atkins. I had never heard of him before, and nobody mentioned to me that he was blind. So at the appointed time, I went to the lobby and was astonished to see Mr. Atkins complete with red-tipped cane and seeing-eye dog.

Too embarrassed to say anything, I led him back to my cubical where we conducted the interview. I began by examining his resume, and asked some questions about a few projects that he had worked on. But finally I could not contain my curiousity any longer.

"Excuse me for wondering", I asked, "but how is it that you can actually write programs when you can't see?"

"It's not so bad when you've grown up with it," he replied, "and I've been blind since birth. Uh, would you like me to write something?" he said, as he groped toward my console. I helped him sit down and he positioned himself in front of the terminal.

"You said that you're using UNIX on this project?", he asked. I reaffirmed that we were. He asked if he was at the dollar-sign prompt. I told him he was in the editor, but that the file was unimportant and he could quit out. "Vi?", he asked, and I said, "No, I use EMACS." Quick as a flash he typed control-X control-C, and asked, "Now would you like the program to do?"

"Uh," I said, "why don't you write a little hello-world in C that..., well..., writes out something to a file?"

He started at once. Back in the EMACS editor, he wrote out several #include statments, and a "main()", complete with argc, argv. Then he wrote "FILE *fpout; char c_test]80]".

Ah ha! That's what I had been waiting for: he had mistyped the brackets on the array!

But at the same instant that I noticed this, the dog barked out "arf! arf!", and the blind programmer slowly back-spaced until the dog barked out "arf!" Mr. Atkins then carefully typed "[80]", and finished the program with only one further error, which the dog also helped him correct.

"That's totally amazing", I said, "Your dog can recognize mistakes in C? It's incredible!"

"Yeah", said the blind programmer, "but he can't design worth a damn."

The rest of the afternoon I could hear exactly who was interviewing Mr. Atkins, by the sounds of "arf! arf!", sometimes near, sometimes far, coming from one cubical or another. Now anybody who believes this story needs a subscription, pronto, to the Skeptical Inquirer: http://www.csicop.org/si