The woman who wasn't insulted, the lord who accidentally unearthed the political stone, the scary that was always there and no Santa-Moroze whatsoever.
This article started out as a comment, on his lordship the crypto-alchemist's blog (again) ; but it became an article once it got to discussing who gets to call who bitch when and why etcetera.
[...] The principal idea which stays with me is that source code -- along with, perhaps, many of the (by)products of "engineering" in general -- is so shitty mainly because it lacks (among others) clarity, that is, the property of being built upon clear concepts, themselves constructed upon priors which (among others) leave no room for ambiguity.
Abso-fucking-lutely, that's precisely what it is.
There's a mismatch which arises naturally (tho I suspect it's also cupidlyi promoted by the bureaucrat class) whereby origins are factually important, and their effects less important by degrees as you move downstream from the origin ; whereas seriousness as a personal investment and psychological deployment is least at the onset and by degrees increases over time. The end result is that most of the human effort in software is applied to the least important bike sheds, and least of the human effort goes in the only place where it should have went to begin with.
The necessary cause for which this problem arises naturally is that software is [the foremost embodiment of] abstraction, and abstractions, not being physical, do not exist until they're actually written down ; as such there's nothing there to anchor the preponderence of effort, there's nothing to work with at the onset thus no work is done with it. But, as hanbot very aptly points out, the negative space's still very much part of the abstractionii, which simply means that as downstream development (in the positive) unearths more upstream negative space, effort is to be diverted towards it. This is the profound meaning, and the only anchor, and absolutely the direct cause of the republic's long-held stance that there's no possibility of anything apolitical, this very thing here. As further development downstream evinces more of the negative space that was always there silently, thought must be given to these questions, "what was always there silently in the first place". Listen to Naggum :
some day, I hope you will start to listen to people who have worked with Free Software for the better part of a decade and have wondered (1) why people get much enthused but then leave disappointed and disgruntled, (2) why free software programs gain a very high quality as long as the goal is very clear, and (3) why it then goes on to accrete crappy features nobody needs but are fun to add by the less competent people who are unable to accept that an idea has fully matured. (watch GNU ls acquire "human" sizes, for instance: multiples of 1000, instead of 1024.)
And say it with me now!
"ls was never supposed to have fucking alt-sizes baked in"
"says who ?"
"that's it, you're out of the band!"iii
It's what it is.iv
———- Cupidity, it's a thing. [↩]
- Think along with me now : how often have you heard, in your "professional" life I mean, "the big boss" let's call it participate in some meeting whereby one of the few women there makes some excellent point and his response is "nice going, " ?
Aren't you glad <blink> still exists, by the way ? But leaving aside that in the mickey-mouse alt-reality artificially maintained at great (if sulphurously disavowed) expense for the needs of overgrown twelve year olds women aren't even chattel property in the first place -- it'd de-actualize way too many utterly baseless, completely spurious feelings of adequacy and well being. Think ye if you will : women aren't property in your dreamworld so that no powerless boi feels his powerlessness, and you think she's being insulted ? When I climbed in the girl-only subway car underneath Cairo it wasn't the girls' modesty that was being insulted ; it was every 30something virgin dweeb out there's spurious feelings of adequacy that took a bath.
Leave all that aside, and consider what's on point here : negative space very much is part of any abstract construction, from blueprints and plans to social arrangements. And you're aware of this, too. You well know saying "good job" is just as much a part of the proceedings as not saying "bitch", right ? So then why do you go around pretending you don't know this ailleurs ? You evidently know it here, what happens ?
I'm not even kidding, this needs an absolute, correct and complete response. Why ? [↩]
- Sorry, it's an obscure in-joke of a group of people twenty years ago that doesn't even include me. "Your hair's too big" & "you fucked my sister" also figure. It's all about Robert Smith, the famous wrestler promoter (though seen through rather Morissey lenses). What can I say, you had to be there -- as it's apparently nowhere else. [↩]
- And yes, this is also why it's better to be right than proper. Great fun has been had with filthy girls -- or what's your preferred epithet for the opposite of propriety ? [↩]
