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Keep your coding skills relevant for the next 200 years.
Programming is in my blood. My father was a programmer; so was the father of my father. My surname can be translated as “he who blows thunder into the machine”.
Earlier this year, I had the privilege to attend the Alternative Programming Symposium. The invitation arrived not by e-mail, but by TCP packet; a clear sign that I would be surrounded by scholars and gentlemen.
I hope this article will inspire my fellow programmers to avoid bad practices and, shall medicine provide immortality, to prepare for an eternity of job market security.
Part 1: Minimalist programming.
The keynote talk was about minimalist programming.
Minimalist programming is so minimal that there’s no programming language, compilers, documentation, or software tooling. It’s so minimal that any phrase of the form “minimalist programming is X” is automatically invalid because it would defeat the required minimality. This makes for a very lean development workflow.
Minimalist programming was developed by making a statistical analysis of the most common programming tasks, and assigning to them the simpler symbols. A web server — the most common task — is represented by a dot:
// run a web server
.
