Why did why the lucky stiff quit? (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Why did why the lucky stiff quit? (2013)

kevinw.github.io

31 pointsdallagi4 comments

_why returns, as whimsical and obcure as ever. this was a great write-up, and now I want to read the book. My favourite quote from the book:

What if Amerika [the novel by kafka] was only written for 32 bit PowerPC?

I sometimes wonder the same sort of thing, when crafting software for iOS or other platforms doomed to obsolecence by the exigencies of capitalism - all that is solid melts into air, and while much of the data or content we produce will probably last centuries and remain decipherable, I'm not so sure about the code.

I read the book in one go on a SFO-CDG flight (plane flights are one of the rare times where I actually dive in my Dropbox folder full of random PDFs that I save over the years). I really enjoyed it. Many people will find things to hate in it, and it's not about programming that much as it is about making things and being a creator. But I really liked it.

More than anything, I absolutely love the pure happiness, joy, love and soul _why put in everything he did. That's the most inspiring to me.

This, and "A computer program will never live as long as the trial" remind me of a comment by Godfrey Hardy in A mathematician's apology:

"Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. 'Immortality' may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean."

Are you equating computer code with scientific or mathematical works?

That seems akin to programmers calling themselves 'engineers' to me - more pretension than reality. Some code will probably survive this age (some as ephemera, some because it was so elegant as to approach pure maths), but much of it is as ephemeral as the hardware it is written for, and I suspect that which does survive will arrive in the future, like the works of Archimedes, because it was recorded as part of a theory to be studied (e.g. in books teaching principles of programming), or because of happenstance and being stored with other records - as ephemera and historical curiosity rather than because it is valued. Of course some will survive, and some will be highly valued, but I suspect a limited amount.

In addition, I do think it is rather myopic of Godfrey Hardy in the above quote (or _why in the one you have cited) to view mathematics as somehow more fundamental than culture or vice versa – both are valued, and both will be preserved to some extent and translated into future languages and systems of thought. I preferred _why's more specific quote about PowerPC because it points out that much programming work will be ephemeral on the order of decades because of the nature of the systems it runs on - obsolescence is built in by the corporations who control much of our digital landscape. Some of that has changed with open source, but bit rot will doom code which can't be run any more due to missing dependencies, and when it can't be run, what's the point?

I'd say a potboiler novel from today has more chance of surviving one century intact than the code which powers most startups or runs in most of the apps we use day to day.

PS A mathematician's apology sounds interesting, I haven't read it and must look it up. Thanks for the tip.

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