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0 pointssanderjd13y ago0 comments

> someone somewhere understood what is going on.

Not quite. A huge group of someones in aggregate understood what is going on. There is still no single expert who designed the system originally. Eventually, or perhaps already in many cases, some portion of the system has no living expert who designed it.

I can imagine a future where expertise on some deep components of the system has been lost to the sands of time, and people have to study them blindly to determine their function in just the same way that we currently study nature.

Neat.

edit: I think raelshark and Carl Sagan said it better than I did.

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8 comments · 2 top-level

tadfisher13y ago· 6 in thread

In Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep he describes the role of the programmer-archaeologist, whose job is to sift through mountains of abstraction layers and black-box code modules written in dead languages thousands of years prior, determine their function, and stitch them together to perform a desired function.

In the prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, one of these modules, buried beneath said layers, contains a booby-trap set by an ancient civilization that only the protagonist knows about. I believe the Unix epoch is mentioned briefly.

kiba13y ago

Why don't they just code new software from scratch?

tadfisher13y ago

It's a logical continuance of the current state of affairs. Even in the early 90s when these books were written, few people wrote entire applications in assembly language, or punched machine code into cards; they wrote in a higher-level languages that are eventually compiled into machine code, or were interpreted by other tools of which they know nothing about the internal workings.

Hell, we are inventing entire languages today that compile to Javascript, which in turn is interpreted or JIT-compiled by other tools. Or we write advanced HTML5 frontends that talk to advanced Node.js backends that in turn talk to legacy systems written in COBOL running on IBM mainframes. Programmer-archaeologists already exist.

hornbaker13y ago

Because GitHub.

cpeterso13y ago

In the book, all time is measured in seconds since the epoch, because days and years have no meaning for an interstellar civilization. But the programmer-archaeologists believe the Unix epoch is when humans first landed on Earth's moon. :)

rdl13y ago

"The first day of the first full year after Man landed on Earth's moon" is probably a fair way to describe the UNIX Epoch in the far future.

I guess the other interesting events are first Fission (weapon or test), and when we first land on Mars.

gertef13y ago

seconds don't have (consistent) meaning either, in a universe with a speed of light.

ruok010113y ago

Or the co-founders/original engineers no longer work for the once-startup-now-corporate company, and 3rd-tier engineers are left to figure the rats nest out, because of course, there are no docs.

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