This looks a lot like the CS-expert version of what happens to people who take the realization that, despite four thousand years of work, epistemology can tell them strikingly little about how it is that they manage to fumble through their day at all, much less how to do so better, particularly hard. I saw a few cases in college. Some get over it, some start trying to formalize things in terms of deductive logic, no to much because deductive logic is anything but painfully unsuitable for the purpose; but because it at least promised the ability to make absolutely valid statements about the pitifully few things it could be applied to.
This guy is a genius. “The Night Watch” is also an absolute must-read:
One time I tried to create a
list<map<int>>, and my syntax errors caused the dead to walk among the living
There’s a lot more Mickens tech-comedy genius. Look for the linkbundle “I have written several humor columns for USENIX’s online magazine!” near the bottom of his CV and click away – I especially love “The Slow Winter”, which is linked to by the word “columns”
This is Powerful Truth.
Just dropped him a line mentioning his fame and to see if he can pop over! May be a few days before he gets it though.
He’s clever, but while IANAITP, I was trained in this stuff back when computers ran on cheese, so I know just enough to tell this is satire and not engineering. But he certainly comes off sounding like Food Babe - “If I can’t pronounce it then my computer shouldn’t run it.”
IAAITP, and I still run on cheese, and I would say it’s both. In any case it’s brilliant!
Mickens is amazing, I periodically re-read his Login;Logout; columns to get me through the day in the bit mines.
He did an AMA on Reddit for MLK day, 3 months ago.
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