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Comment by yareally | Hacker News Reader

I am guessing I am not the only one to find how much this parallels some of the comments we leave in code due to venting/frustration or for other random reasons. Perhaps in another 1000 years someone will be going through ancient source code to find similar comments.

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In another 1000 years, your hard drives will be unreadable.

You imply that conventional hard drives are the only storage mechanism that exists. It's a valid point, but there are ways to keep data around. The monks of 500-1000 years ago were writing books that were meant to be kept for a long period of time, so they were already thinking past their own lifetime (even a monk's comment in the article mentions that).

My hard drives of less then a decade ago are already unreadable, but my code is still around.

Now I'm imagining an artisanal service that prints out all of your code- or at least the ones your take pride in the most- then illuminates it for you, before binding it. Now that's a coder's heirloom.

It would be majestic if it weren't so absurd. Who's written anything worthy of that treatment? I think this is why literate programming interests me. Almost none of the code written today is worthy of being a real cultural artifact, or even a family heirloom.

It would be fun to simultaneously confuse future archeologists and preserve code in hardcopy for their edification.

I agree it would be fun, and I probably spend too much time worrying about future archeologists, I just think it would be nice if we had some code that was worthy of the honor. Practicality seems to demand that code be functional first and beautiful a very distant second, despite all the talking and blogging to the contrary.

There must be some code worthy of this, though ... isn't there anything open-source-ish known for its beautiful code?

TeX, maybe? Additionally, there would be a certain delight in handwriting an illuminated manuscript of code that is meant for typesetting ... :)

I would say that a Lisp64 implementation could attain that. Elegance of original thought leading to elegance to implementation.

Who's written anything worthy of that treatment?

Almost - not who but _why.

MINIX has already had a fair amount of its code already in print. Then again, it was a teaching tool in the first place so that was by necessity.

If the new version can be The Standard for real time OSes with simplicity and security as priorities, then it could also go in print.

http://www.minix3.org

But Google's will still work. :)

It turns out it's a hell of a job to go through and figure out what to delete. It's far cheaper to just buy more disks and continue expanding the storage system and never delete anything...

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