I do not think this essay adds to the pile, or violates _why's privacy. It's musings on _why's work, particularly his most recent work, trying to understand _why as an artist, and the author of this piece is then trying to apply that understanding to his own life.
If he just wanted privacy, why did he "disappear" in such a dramatic fashion, that he had to know would attract a lot of attention? Why did he then mysteriously "reappear" with a cryptic printer spool on his webpage?
> My programs would never live as long as The Trial. A computer will never live as long as The Trial.
I realized this, independently, years ago and it shook me down to my boots. I was working on something, I don't even remember now what it was, some client project probably, and I happened to glance over at the stack of books on my desk, one of which was a 2nd edition camel book, and suddenly, there it was: that book had outlived probably every single line of code I had written when it was published.
A book about a programming language that -- unfortunately -- was rapidly being pushed into the museum of computing history would outlive most of the code written by anybody that ever read it.
I couldn't write any code for a few days. It seemed pointless.
Eventually I came to a new understanding with software development. It's like spending your life making Buddhist sand mandalas. You spend your days, hunched over a table, moving one little bit at a time, and if you're lucky, you create something beautiful, and a short time later someone else will come along and sweep it away and start making something else in its place.
It helps to be concerned less about the code itself than about what it does for people. Sand mandalas give people an experience, and so does code: code today helps people communicate, relax, learn, or spend their lives making other things. There is a little bit of legacy in that at least, though nothing that anybody will ever remember you for.
Programming is still an important part of me. I still try to write artful code. I still feel a little bit of revulsion when staring at bad code (or, worse, intentionally bad code). But I don't view it as my life's work anymore. Software will never be my magnum opus, if I am lucky enough to ever make one.
Anyway, _why was one of the most beautiful things ever made by a programmer.
But code is written in an entirely pragmatic environment. That means its value changes with time.
But we don't treat novels as pragmatically. If all its references are out of date, we simply excuse that problem by saying the book exists in history. Also, we don't have people running around re-writing novels. I don't doubt for a moment that Kafka's works could be improved if it was "open-sourced" and edited collectively.
And fiction is "code" for humans. The basic design of a human doesn't change nearly at all compared to computers. So instead of optimizing novels for humans with new features or faster processing, we hang on to some of them because particular "code" or life lessons need to be learned by a new generation.
9 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 29.6 ms ] threadCan't we just leave him alone? Does it really matter?
Sounds like an attention seeker to me.
I realized this, independently, years ago and it shook me down to my boots. I was working on something, I don't even remember now what it was, some client project probably, and I happened to glance over at the stack of books on my desk, one of which was a 2nd edition camel book, and suddenly, there it was: that book had outlived probably every single line of code I had written when it was published.
A book about a programming language that -- unfortunately -- was rapidly being pushed into the museum of computing history would outlive most of the code written by anybody that ever read it.
I couldn't write any code for a few days. It seemed pointless.
Eventually I came to a new understanding with software development. It's like spending your life making Buddhist sand mandalas. You spend your days, hunched over a table, moving one little bit at a time, and if you're lucky, you create something beautiful, and a short time later someone else will come along and sweep it away and start making something else in its place.
It helps to be concerned less about the code itself than about what it does for people. Sand mandalas give people an experience, and so does code: code today helps people communicate, relax, learn, or spend their lives making other things. There is a little bit of legacy in that at least, though nothing that anybody will ever remember you for.
Programming is still an important part of me. I still try to write artful code. I still feel a little bit of revulsion when staring at bad code (or, worse, intentionally bad code). But I don't view it as my life's work anymore. Software will never be my magnum opus, if I am lucky enough to ever make one.
Anyway, _why was one of the most beautiful things ever made by a programmer.
But we don't treat novels as pragmatically. If all its references are out of date, we simply excuse that problem by saying the book exists in history. Also, we don't have people running around re-writing novels. I don't doubt for a moment that Kafka's works could be improved if it was "open-sourced" and edited collectively.
And fiction is "code" for humans. The basic design of a human doesn't change nearly at all compared to computers. So instead of optimizing novels for humans with new features or faster processing, we hang on to some of them because particular "code" or life lessons need to be learned by a new generation.