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Mar. 31st, 2012 02:57 pmSome thoughts from a Facebook conversation:
A friend posted a link to the story of Mel, about a legendary programmer back in the '50s: http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
He commented: There are probably three, maybe four people on my list who will understand this entire tale, but more who will appreciate most of it. Programmers recognize the skill of a true master with The Story Of Mel. (Usenet, 1983.)
Me: I apprecite the majority of it. Somehow, it makes me think of the story of John Henry versus the steam hammer, you know?
Him: I think I can see your point. The machine code wizard versus the compiler.
Me: Yes, just so. Someone who was was at the pinnacle of human achievement in a limited field. Mel with his bare-metal coding on a machine that was relatively simple enough that he really could know nearly intuitively how the entire thing worked, arguing that no machine can optimize code as well as a human being who really knows the system.
And while John Henry's and Mel's methods both fell to the passage of time as their fields of expertise evolved and grew into things that are simply too complex for any one person to know or do that well, there's something really admirable about someone who managed to climb, in their individual ways, very near to the peak of human individual achievement. People talk about Ben Franklin as the last Renaissance Man; that after him, it just wan't possible for one person to have familiarity with the entire scope of human knowledge because there was too much of it. John and Mel are a bit like that I think.
Maybe it's a sort of democratization of labor and production. Technology became good enough that the legendary skill of an individual expert became much less significant next to the capacity of the average person to produce much more efficiently than they could before. Those individual experts who represent the last, best examples of their kind are all the more appealing for that it's now next to impossible, and perhaps even unnecessary, to be one.
It makes me think, too, of the transition from coal to diesel. Union Pacific built these superlatively powerful, staggeringly large Big Boys in the '40s, and in only fifteen or twenty years, they were gone, replaced by diesels. But for that brief juncture where the world had a place for them, they were the indisputable kings who everyone else looked up to.
Edited to add: Huh. It just dawned on me that this man was programming at a point in time that actually *overlapped* with the end of the age of steam, if only barely. Now that's kind of amazing.
A friend posted a link to the story of Mel, about a legendary programmer back in the '50s: http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
He commented: There are probably three, maybe four people on my list who will understand this entire tale, but more who will appreciate most of it. Programmers recognize the skill of a true master with The Story Of Mel. (Usenet, 1983.)
Me: I apprecite the majority of it. Somehow, it makes me think of the story of John Henry versus the steam hammer, you know?
Him: I think I can see your point. The machine code wizard versus the compiler.
Me: Yes, just so. Someone who was was at the pinnacle of human achievement in a limited field. Mel with his bare-metal coding on a machine that was relatively simple enough that he really could know nearly intuitively how the entire thing worked, arguing that no machine can optimize code as well as a human being who really knows the system.
And while John Henry's and Mel's methods both fell to the passage of time as their fields of expertise evolved and grew into things that are simply too complex for any one person to know or do that well, there's something really admirable about someone who managed to climb, in their individual ways, very near to the peak of human individual achievement. People talk about Ben Franklin as the last Renaissance Man; that after him, it just wan't possible for one person to have familiarity with the entire scope of human knowledge because there was too much of it. John and Mel are a bit like that I think.
Maybe it's a sort of democratization of labor and production. Technology became good enough that the legendary skill of an individual expert became much less significant next to the capacity of the average person to produce much more efficiently than they could before. Those individual experts who represent the last, best examples of their kind are all the more appealing for that it's now next to impossible, and perhaps even unnecessary, to be one.
It makes me think, too, of the transition from coal to diesel. Union Pacific built these superlatively powerful, staggeringly large Big Boys in the '40s, and in only fifteen or twenty years, they were gone, replaced by diesels. But for that brief juncture where the world had a place for them, they were the indisputable kings who everyone else looked up to.
Edited to add: Huh. It just dawned on me that this man was programming at a point in time that actually *overlapped* with the end of the age of steam, if only barely. Now that's kind of amazing.
