the ideas pile (3)
on a whim I wrote the following header comment in part of my compiler:
Truly our world must be a one-dimensional precession of instructions; whether complex or reduced, Pseudocode or Intel or AT&T, yet the hardware admits not code of nonlinear form. Heed thou not the pretentions of those who advocate the program as a graph, for they may just as well claim the Earth to orbit round the Sun.
so without further ado...
The old civilization had had the foresight to preserve enough information about themselves in language-independent formats that the basic bootstrapping jobs of understanding the words and figuring out what the technology was used for were easily solved, and so what remained was understanding the processes by which the technology worked, work that required long and hard thought. The job was difficult, but also glamorous.
Because it was also known that the old ones were curious enough to research even older cultures, and hence they must have had people who did work similar to his own, those who worked in his profession liked to talk about aspects of their own work in terms of the archaeology of the past. And so it was that today he had dug up and dusted off a new stone tablet. On it was written what could only have been a religious diatribe: strongly held opinions about the way people were supposed to conduct themselves, it seemed, from a brief skimming. He knew that his grasp of some of the subtleties of the old language was rough, in no small part artificially so because he always presupposed a formal yet excited tone on all of the speech he read. Hence he read as follows:
"Long has the dispute between two parties proceeded among the minds of highest caliber which choose to work on our project, not even over which manner be the right way to make flow ideas through the product as its completed form serves us, but rather over how we must build the structure of our development that we may in no difficulty expand the work to suit anybody's need that may come along. I say now that if you choose a guaranteed success as your goal for our work, you must not pay credit to anyone who says we may sacrifice future ability to develop the work to its fullest potential in order that we may enhance productivity in the present."
After finishing he took a moment to marvel at the way the people on that ancient project must have interacted amongst themselves - certainly it would have been polished and efficient, never uncooperative, that they would architect technology of this caliber successfully.
this is pretty unpolished, since i started too late to let it roll around in my head to solidify enough before writing it down.
i was reminded as i was writing: have you guys seen this? i find pretty interesting the study of what concepts are invariants of being alive and what concepts we make up by convention.
Truly our world must be a one-dimensional precession of instructions; whether complex or reduced, Pseudocode or Intel or AT&T, yet the hardware admits not code of nonlinear form. Heed thou not the pretentions of those who advocate the program as a graph, for they may just as well claim the Earth to orbit round the Sun.
so without further ado...
The old civilization had had the foresight to preserve enough information about themselves in language-independent formats that the basic bootstrapping jobs of understanding the words and figuring out what the technology was used for were easily solved, and so what remained was understanding the processes by which the technology worked, work that required long and hard thought. The job was difficult, but also glamorous.
Because it was also known that the old ones were curious enough to research even older cultures, and hence they must have had people who did work similar to his own, those who worked in his profession liked to talk about aspects of their own work in terms of the archaeology of the past. And so it was that today he had dug up and dusted off a new stone tablet. On it was written what could only have been a religious diatribe: strongly held opinions about the way people were supposed to conduct themselves, it seemed, from a brief skimming. He knew that his grasp of some of the subtleties of the old language was rough, in no small part artificially so because he always presupposed a formal yet excited tone on all of the speech he read. Hence he read as follows:
"Long has the dispute between two parties proceeded among the minds of highest caliber which choose to work on our project, not even over which manner be the right way to make flow ideas through the product as its completed form serves us, but rather over how we must build the structure of our development that we may in no difficulty expand the work to suit anybody's need that may come along. I say now that if you choose a guaranteed success as your goal for our work, you must not pay credit to anyone who says we may sacrifice future ability to develop the work to its fullest potential in order that we may enhance productivity in the present."
After finishing he took a moment to marvel at the way the people on that ancient project must have interacted amongst themselves - certainly it would have been polished and efficient, never uncooperative, that they would architect technology of this caliber successfully.
this is pretty unpolished, since i started too late to let it roll around in my head to solidify enough before writing it down.
i was reminded as i was writing: have you guys seen this? i find pretty interesting the study of what concepts are invariants of being alive and what concepts we make up by convention.