Brings us by First Disobedience, and the Fruit—a red apple, plump, crisp and juicy.
Whether He was a Craftsman or an Engineer, just or unjust, funny or dull, signifies little:
He the Children’s Erstwhile father had been, and no uncle or brother can ever take his place.
“What’s this folly that has been given him, that he even profiles infinite loops! Isn’t this the hacker?”
J— said to them, “Only in his Own Org, among his friends and in his own home does a potboilermaker eject humor.”
—bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!
Like all ADs, and more especially those belonging to IT departments in the common SAP era, he was, to a certain off-hand, practical extent, alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own; the programmer’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with bits of ones and zeros as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic remark above, this programmer of the SPEED Product Data Management system was singularly efficient in those thousand nameless digital emergencies continually recurring in a Big Ball of Mud, upon a three or four decades’ voyage, in uncivilized and far-distant business units. For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary duties:—repairing stored procedures, tracing spurious events, reforming the shape of clumsy-built classes, inserting dialog boxes in an editor, or new ToolTips in SpdReport objects, and other miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious.
The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold, was his adjustable device-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several inputoutput devices, of different sizes, and both of plastic and of glass. Except when it wasn’t, this bench was securely positioned, 24x7, twenty-four inches above the carpet.
An entity is found too large to be easily inserted into a collection scheme, the hacker displays it on one of his ever ready output devices, and straightway reams the radius of the collection. A lost customer of strange plumage strays on board, and is made a captive: on clean whitespace, with seasharp lines of WPF code, the hacker makes a hannabarberalocking cage for two. A tester finds a bug: the hacker concocts warmsoothingsnakeoil. Steve longed for crimson stars to be painted on the bottom of every dirty editor; displaying each .xaml file on his big output device of glass, the hacker systematically supplies the constellation. A worker takes a fancy to UPPERCASE: the hacker sets the property. Another needs an Impact Analysis: the hacker, out fingers, pointing at the patient’s monitor, adjusting the refresh rate bids him be looking there; but the poor fellow unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation; taking handle of and whirling his plastic mouse, the hacker signs him to click OK, if he would have him cascade the changes.
Thus, this programmer was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent and without respect in all. Templates he accounted partial classes; workers he deemed but usernames; managers themselves he lightly held for winches to raise funds and buy time. But while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you, though you dig foundations for frameworks. Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness;—yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like, analog, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time during the midnight watch in the on-call rotation of Victor’s ship. Was it that this old programmer had been a life-long wonderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an uncast integer; uncompromised as a dynamically allocated object; living without premeditated reference to this architecture or the next. You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a virtual constructor; his brain, if he ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, Intel Inside, Shockley contrivances, assuming the exterior—though a little swelled—of a common computer; but containing, not only chips of various sizes, but also keyboard, mouse pads, mice, monitors, joy stick, programs, add-ins. So, if his superiors wanted to drive the ’tractor like a pacifier, all they had to do was turn on that part of him and the customer was pacified: or for debugger, hook him up by the eyes, and there they were.
Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, on-and-off Hohn Deere, was, after all, no mere Turing machine of automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of Agile, or a few drops of Knuth, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had abided for now some forty years or more. And this it was, this same unaccountable, Melvilling life-principle in him; this SPEEDenfreude, that kept him a great part of the time rejoycing; but only like an unreasoned wheel, which also hummingly rejoyces; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this little prince on guard there, and typing all the time to keep himself a wake: Hear Contractors Everywhere!
All professional programmers were once wonderful—although few of them remember it.
Cet aveugle se conduit fort bien lui-même avec son bâton.