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by Bluestein
643 days ago
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> People aren't incentivised to write code that somehow carries true legacy the same way that a master mason will want their work to be a legacy for decades, if not centuries. You raise a great point. Methinks there's a pernicious "assumed ephemerality" of software systems that has a "flywheel" sort of effect in that loop, creating sinks, which, thus, "enshittify".- I honestly wonder what it would look like if software were "set in stone", and the assumptions were reversed. You were building systems for the ages, and ever and ever ... |
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And yet there is software that has stood the test of time. It might not be pretty from a purely ideological or aesthetic perspective, but it lays the foundation of many great things. Consider something like Numpy. The internals are a multi-decade boondoggle of graduate level python code, Lovecraftian Fortran that causes you to take psychic damage just by looking at it, and random hacks that some disgruntled researcher submitted at 10pm on a Sunday after an all weekend marathon to get his stuff finished on time.
But so much good stuff was built on this pile of bad code, because it is not the concrete code that is ultimately of value and worthy of admiration, but the concept. The implementation is sort of secondary. So perhaps it's the ideas and the concepts that have legacy in computer science, code is just a carrier. The same way that genes are the definition of the human race, an individual human is just an ephemeral implementation of those genes. It is the genes where the miracle happened really and which gave rise to beings that are self aware (to quote Richard Dawkins).