A thought from <antirez> in an essay on the struggles of an open source maintainer (paraphrased a bit):
Sometimes I believe that writing software, while great, will never be huge like writing a book that will survive for centuries. Not because software is not as great per se, but because as a side effect it is also useful... and will be replaced when something more useful is around.
We write most software with a particular use in mind, so it is really only fair to compare it to non-fiction books, which also have a relatively short shelf life. To be fair, though, not many fiction books survive for centuries, either. Language and fashion doom them almost as much as evolving technology destines most software to fade away within a generation, and a short generation at that.
Still, I won't be surprised if the DNA of Smalltalk-80 or some early Lisp implementation lives on deep in a system that developers use in the 22nd century.
At one point in the novel "Outline", by Rachel Cusk, a middle-aged man relates a conversation that he had with his elderly mother, in which she says:
I could weep just to think that I'll never see you again as you were at the age of six -- I would give anything, she said, to meet that six-year-old one more time.
This made me think of two photographs I keep on the wall at my office, of my grown daughters when they were young. In one, my older daughter is four; in the other, my younger daughter is two. Every once in a while, my wife asks why I don't replace them with something newer. My answer is always the same: They are my two favorite pictures in the world. When my daughters were young, they seemed to be infinite bundles of wonder: always curious, discovering things and ideas everywhere they went, making connections. They were restless in a good way, joyful, and happy. We can be all of these things as we grow into adulthood, but I experienced them so much differently as a father, watching my girls live them.
I love the people my daughters are now, and are becoming, and cherish my relationship with them. Yet, like the old woman in Cusk's story, there is a small part of me that would love to meet those little girls again. When I see one of my daughters these days, she is both that little girl, grown up, and not that little girl, a new person shaped by her world and by her own choices. The photographs on my wall keep alive memories not just of a time but also of specific people.
As I thought about Cusk's story, it occurred to me that the idea of "her and not her" does not apply only to my daughters, or to my wife, old pictures of whom I enjoy with similar intensity. I am me and not me.
I'm both the little guy who loved to read encyclopedias and shoot baskets every day, and not him. I'm not the same guy who walked into high school in a new city excited about the possibilities it offered and nervous about how I would fit in, yet I grew out of him. I am at once the person who started college as an architecture major -- who from the time he was eight years old had wanted to be an architect -- and not him. I'm not the same person who defended a Ph.D. dissertation half a life ago, but who I am owes a lot to him. I am both the man my wife married and not, being now the man that man has become.
And, yes, the father of those little girls pictured on my wall: me and not me. This is true in how they saw me then and how they see me now.
I'm not sure how thinking about this distinction will affect future me. I hope that it will help me to appreciate everyone in my life, especially my daughters and my wife, a bit more for who they are and who they have been. Maybe it will even help me be more generous to 2019 me.
In an answer on Quora from earlier this year:
There are several modern APL-like languages today -- such as J and K -- but I would criticize them as being too much like the classic APL. It is possible to extract what is really great from APL and use it in new language designs without being so tied to the past. This would be a great project for some grad students of today: what does the APL perspective mean today, and what kind of great programming language could be inspired by it?
The APL perspective was more radical even twenty years ago, before MapReduce became a thing and before functional programming ascended. When I was an undergrad, though, it seemed otherworldly: setting up a structure, passing it through a sequence of operators that changed its shape, and then passing it through a sequence of operators that folded up a result. We knew we weren't programming in Fortran anymore.
I'm still fascinated by APL, but I haven't done a lot with it in the intervening years. These days I'm still thinking about concatenative programming in languages like Forth, Factor, and Joy, a project I reinitiated (and last blogged about) three summers ago. Most concatenative languages work with an implicit stack, which gives it a very different feel from APL's dataflow style. I can imagine, though, that working in the concision and abstraction of concatenative languages for a while will spark my interest in diving back into APL-style programming some day.
Kay's full answer is worth a read if only for the story in which he connects Iverson's APL notation, and its effect on how we understand computer systems, to the evolution of Maxwell's equations. Over the years, I've heard Kay talk about McCarthy's Lisp interpreter as akin to Maxwell's equations, too. In some ways, the analogy works even better with APL, though it seems that the lessons of Lisp have had a larger historical effect to date.
Perhaps that will change? Alas, as Kay says in the paragraph that precedes his challenge:
As always, time has moved on. Programming language ideas move much slower, and programmers move almost not at all.
Kay often comes off as pessimistic, but after all the computing history he has lived through (and created!), he has earned whatever pessimism he feels. As usual, reading one of his essays makes me want to buckle down and do something that would make him proud.