I’ve wanted to cite this passage a few times now, but I can only find the essay in PDF form. So I’m just going to put the passage here, so I can point back to it in the future.
Geeks, if people regularly joke that they couldn’t understand what you do for a living, consider pointing them to this description of the process of writing a program to accomplish a specific task. There’s a lot of debate on Lambda the Ultimate about whether the authors are joking. For the record, I don’t think they are, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t intentionally being funny.