CHAPTER 10

"A Kind of Gentleness"

p. 185

a new blog post [Nicholas] wrote took me aback: Read it here.

a developer named Sage Sharp's anguished departure from the Linux kernel development community: The full story here.

a practice called "sealioning": According to Merriam-Webster, Sealioning is:

a harassment tactic by which a participant in a debate or online discussion pesters the other participant with disingenuous questions under the guise of sincerity, hoping to erode the patience or goodwill of the target to the point where they appear unreasonable. Often, sealioning involves asking for evidence for even basic claims. The term comes from a web comic depicting a sea lion engaging in such behavior. Wikipedia's got you on this one, too.

contested adoption of the so-called "Walrus Operator": "Operators" describe or set relationships between two or more objects, simple examples being the assignment operator " = " (assign this value to this variable) and " != " (does not equal or is not the same as). The Walrus Operator, introduced to Python version 3.8 via PEP 572, is a special kind of operator called an assignment expression and gets its name from its appearance " := " . Reasons for the uncommonly bitter fight it caused among core developers (and the toll it exacted on Guido) will be explained in due course.

it took his daughter to persuade him to seek help: Patricia Torvalds is said to have been influential in getting the Code of Conflict replaced by a more conventional Code of Conduct, and is a signatory to the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto. Bitter complaints on Reddit about these developments give a flavor of this special strain of culture war. Here's the Linux Code Of Conduct, as adopted.

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He reached a point in 2016 where he, too, had to step back to seek help: As explained here.

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a claimed five million users: I heartily recommend Anna Wiener's excellent New Yorker piece from 2020, "The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News."

When the New Yorker comes calling on HN in 2020: See entry above.

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Lisp . . . retains the capacity to make even hardbitten coders smile: We recall Paul Ford's earlier assertion, in his fabulous Business Week essay "What is Code?", that "Back in the 1980s, while the Fortran programmers were off optimizing nuclear weapon yields, Lisp programmers were trying to get a robot to pick up a teddy bear or write a sonnet . . . " Well, in case that hasn't persuaded you to give away all your possessions and become a Lisp monk, Ford adds that:

Enjoying Lisp programming is like enjoying prog rock or expressionist art: if you're into it, you probably love it, and too bad about the squares who hate parentheses . . . it's as close to Zen as computing gets. Of all the languages in this essay, Lisp is the one I'd take to a desert island. It has the most to teach me about the hidden order of the universe. Not a lot of new stuff is coded in Lisp these days, cultish though it remains, but if you google for flight information, your results will probably be delivered by a system written in Lisp (and subsequently bought by Google.) The classic Lisp text is Daniel Friedman's The Little Schemer. And yet, for all this, I am reliably informed that even Lisp experienced Hackernews-style behavioral issues back in the day.

Hacker News is ubiquitous and extreme enough to attract parody from appalled senior coders: Nicholas' view is pretty typical. According to him, "I read HN because it is often a source of 'trend' related news. I also agree with your characterization. It feels like a bunch of 13-year-olds cos-playing an un-ironic fantasy of Vulcan culture from the Star Trek universe."

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Mark "they trust me, dumb fucks" Zuckerberg: For an inventory of this and other windows onto Zuckerberg's reptilian soul see "'Embarrassing And Damaging' Zuckerberg IMs Confirmed By Zuckerberg, The New Yorker," Business Insider, September 13, 2010.

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LamdaMOO was a typical MOO: LambdaMOO turns out not to have been the first or even most important MUD. The concept originated in the unlikely environs of Essex, the southernmost part of East Anglia, England's east-facing, unglamorous but also magical and intense equivalent to, say, New Mexico; begetter of founding father Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln's family and many of the original flock of American pilgrims (Lincoln, Boston and Norfolk are all here); stomping ground of the Witchfinder General and tribal queen Boudica, whose army of the Iceny tribe almost chased the Romans out of Britain, not to mention sundry Viking kings whose burial ships and attendant hoards are still dug up from time to time. There, in 1978, at the University of Essex, one of the strikingly modernist, brutalist "plateglass" universities built in the UK during the 1960s—and soon known for the rebelliousness of its students—a computer science major named Roy Trubshaw took inspiration from a series of text-based fantasy games developed at MIT and the University of Illinois to create the first multi-user platform. One of Trubshaw's favorites among the single-user games was called Zork, often referred to as "Dungeon"—hence the whimsical-seeming continued designation of this platform as "Multi-User Dungeon" (MUD), even though many MUDs have had nothing to do with wizards or sorcery (and have sometimes been geared to worthy real-world purposes.) Meeting a need, MUD1, as it became known, caught on fast and soon spawned other MUDs built on the same language and logic, which Nicholas and I would follow. Trubshaw's proto-social network-cum-game initially ran on the university's own computer system, but soon opened to other institutions on the UK's JANET academic network (from 2-8am and through weekends, when serious computing had stopped) prior to becoming the world's first multi-user computer fantasy game in 1980 when Essex connected to the ARPANET. Trubshaw and the fellow students who pitched into his effort wrote in assembly language, before converting to BCPL, a precursor to C. Naturally, we used Python.

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LambdaMOO is still going: There is also an active BayMOO in the San Francisco Bay Area.

a LamdaMOO Programmer's Manual survives online: The LambdaMOO Programmer's Manual was published by the community's founder Pavel Curtis in 1997 and has constituted the blueprint ever since.

they are nothing more nor less than primitive social networks: Reams of academic research was conducted into the functioning of these proto social networks. Sadly, no one outside academia paid attention. Much of what we needed to know in preparation for the arrival of Facebook was hiding in plain view.

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obscure late sixties to early seventies English musical outgrowth called the Canterbury Scene: For anyone interested, Canterbury is a sleepy town on the southeast coast of England, close to the nearest point to France, famous for the magnificent Canterbury Cathedral, HQ of the Anglican Church. Beginning in the late sixties it somehow produced a stream of extraordinary bands, among them Soft Machine, Caravan, Gong and Camel—essentially inventing Prog Rock. Good places to start are with Caravan's timeless The Land of Grey and Pink, or in a more bracing, jazzier mode, Soft Machine 2 or 3.

as Governor Jerry Brown once put it, "Where ya gonna go?": More detail on his thinking here.

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supporting a local big business tax to deal with the homeless problem: This is of course Mark Benioff. See The Guardian, "Salesforce CEO: tech billionaires 'hoard their money' and won't help homeless." Or for a slightly more jaundiced view of the CEO (or more nuanced, depending how you see these things,) Wired, "The Gospel of Wealth According to Mark Benioff."

'When Sagar's company decided he should pick up Python . . . he did it in a week: Seeing this, Nicholas notes, "To be fair, that's like asking a cellist to learn to play fretless bass. They're VERY similar instruments and the cellist already has a bunch of important musical context and physical skill they can easily transfer to the bass."

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Say player KingGeorgeV has just entered our Limerick Lounge: Anyone who saw The Crown will know that King George V did indeed have a fondness for limericks. Just ask the Old Countess of Bray.

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as Ben Franklin would have agreed: In the founding father's words, "Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." Franklin said this in 1789, suggesting that life has remained at least 2/3 constant for almost 250 years.

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I look up some of Beck's talks and find a charismatic speaker: I especially enjoyed this talk from 2020 on "Continued Learning: The Beauty of Maintenance". Incidentally, I did reach out to Kent Beck.

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fired for offering solutions: This is Kent Beck's claim in the Being Human podcast (#23), entitled "Leaving Facebook with Kent Beck."

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My guess is that the only unusual thing about the subjective hierarchy Beck describes is that . . . he has been self-aware enough to observe it: Beck ends "My Mission" with some wise and necessary advice, which could apply to almost anything of any substance. He says:

There are ways my mission began the day I walked out of my first college CS course grumbling, 'I'm going to change how people do this.' However, the whole picture only came into focus after decades of detailed work. That's what I'd recommend to you if you're beginning your career (you know, the first decade or two.) Instead of coming up with high-falutin' words, write more programs. Once you have enough puzzle pieces, then you can arrange and rearrange them and see what picture pops up.