there  could  be  snakes  in  here

(c) Ian Baker (2012) PHP, the language which runs 80% of the known internet , is renowned for its fundamentally poor design . The language began as a few little functions letting non-programmers manage rudimentary web forms. But it has expanded into the 7th most popular language there is, a very fast , mature object-oriented thing which tries hard to manage its primary burden: itself . (Much of the horror has been patched over since PHP5 , I am told by grizzled veterans.) The lead dev at my work, who's spent 10 years with it, admits that it " keeps you on your toes ". (However, one would prefer that one's tools were transparent, an extension of the arm.) Neal Stephenson notes that source code comments (the backstage cribs of your software) read like the terse mutterings of pilots wrestling with the controls of damaged airplanes. The general feel is of a thousand monumental but obscure struggles seen in the stop-action light of a strobe. This struggle is th...

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony. Since we can't extract beauty from life, let's at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life. I often wonder what kind of person I would be if I had been protected from the cold wind of fate by the screen of wealth... to reach the tawdry heights of being a good assistant book-keeper in a job that is about as demanding as an afternoon nap and offers a salary that gives me just enough to live on. I know that, had that non-existent past existed, I would not now be capable of writing these pages, which, though few, I would have undoubtedly have only day-dreamed about given more comfortable circumstances. For banality is a form of intelligence, and reality, especially if it is brutish and rough, forms a natural complement to the soul. Much of what I feel and think I owe t...

Breaking Smart, 'Season' 1 (2015) by Venkatesh Rao. A grandiose and low-res narrative covering all of history from the perspective of technology (or, rather, the perspective of the tech industry (or, rather, of the solutionists )) in 30,000 words. Rao is one of the big in-house theorists for Silicon Valley*, and this is reflected in his contagious enthusiasm for just how much is becoming possible so quickly, the degree to which this time actually is different ("Software is eating the world"). Second half of this season attempts to generalise software engineering ideas - Agile , forking, sprints and all that - to all human endeavour (...) As a simple example, a 14-year-old teenager today (too young to show up in labor statistics) can learn programming, contribute significantly to open-source projects, and become a talented professional-grade programmer before age 18. This is breaking smart : an economic actor using early mastery of emerging technological levera...