a thing I realized recently is that _why's disappearance ends up making his work more "Poignant" - the tech stuff washes away, but the story lives on. In that sense, it's a success.
if you look at old technology, the descriptions and documentation tend to outlast the artifacts. I like to imagine us as stage performers - any given implementation of a Shakespeare play only lasts a couple hours, but the structure of it is timeless. Perhaps we should all be writing more, implementing less.
also, it's always good to consider what fame is, and what it does to people. In an attention economy, we imagine that fame is wealth - but it's clearly not so straightforward
Permanence is a major theme of _why's work. Some of his final tweets were about comparing computer programs to works of literature, specifically Kafka. A longer meditation on this appears in this work.
Kafka asked his friend Max to burn all of his works and not have them published, but he was betrayed, and so we have Kafka's books.
_why burned his own works, but thanks to git, we were able to posthumously un-burn them.
And then this work was temporary, and what I did was make it permanent. Again.
Most of _why's projects don't really work on modern hardware, or with up to date compilers, or up to date versions of Ruby. Yet we can still read this book today.
a thing I realized recently is that _why's disappearance ends up making his work more "Poignant" - the tech stuff washes away, but the story lives on. In that sense, it's a success.
if you look at old technology, the descriptions and documentation tend to outlast the artifacts. I like to imagine us as stage performers - any given implementation of a Shakespeare play only lasts a couple hours, but the structure of it is timeless. Perhaps we should all be writing more, implementing less.
also, it's always good to consider what fame is, and what it does to people. In an attention economy, we imagine that fame is wealth - but it's clearly not so straightforward