How can you not be romantic about programming?

Thorsten Ball · 8 Sept 2020

Thorsten Ball did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
A small amount of obscure code that almost no one understands or knows about is critical infrastructure, and removing it would cause widespread system failure.

Their wordsOthers are the golden threads of this world, holding it together at the seams with no more than a dozen people knowing about it. Remove one of these and it all comes crashing down.

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