I am a software engineer, and have been for most of my life.
One afternoon I was thinking about my tendency to obsess over minor technical details. I'm not alone in this tendency, but I have no doubt that many others — even some in my profession — view it as a peculiar form of madness. What metaphor, I wondered, could possibly convey why it was so difficult to let go of seemingly-trivial issues?
As it happens, I'd recently been discussing Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach with a friend. It was that book which introduced me to Zen kōans.
Thoughts collided, and the first of these pseudo-kōans was born. Consider it an experiment: an attempt at merging vocation and avocation. //
Although the title of this collection is a rather obvious play on The Gateless Gate (a historically important collection of Zen kōans), please note that the offerings here are not Zen kōans, nor do I intend any disrespect to practicioners of Zen Buddhism.
Here’s a very 1960s data visualization of just how much code they wrote—this is Margaret Hamilton, director of software engineering for the project, standing next to a stack of paper containing the software: //
As enormous and successful as Burkey’s project has been, however, the code itself remained somewhat obscure to many of today’s software developers. That was until last Thursday (July 7), when former NASA intern Chris Garry uploaded the software in its entirety to GitHub, //
But as the always-sharp joke detectives in Reddit’s r/ProgrammerHumor section found, many of the comments in the AGC code go beyond boring explanations of the software itself. They’re full of light-hearted jokes and messages, and very 1960s references.
One of the source code files, for example, is called
BURN_BABY_BURN--MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE
TC BANKCALL # TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPEthat one in the cornerSilver badge
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Re: Makes you proud
The one that gets me is when you find and fix a long-standing bug in some code and wonder how in hell it managed to keep going in its original state for so many years!
You have to tread carefully around those sorts of bugs, just in case it turns out to be a Schroedinbug - and you have just observed that, unfixed, it can't possibly work. Which collapses its wave function and, through spooky action at a distance, every running copy of that program will suddenly stop working!
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