Here’s a great bit from this month’s Crypto-Gram:

Those who calculate chances may perhaps find that not one death (or the destruction of one house) in a hundred thousand happens from that cause, and that therefore it is scarce worth while to be at any expense to guard against it. But in all countries there are particular situations of buildings more exposed than others to such accidents, and there are minds so strongly impressed with the apprehension of them, as to be very unhappy every time a little thunder is within their hearing; it may therefore be well to render this little piece of new knowledge as general and well understood as possible, since to make us safe is not all its advantage, it is some to make us easy. And as the stroke it secures us from might have chanced perhaps but once in our lives, while it may relieve us a hundred times from those painful apprehensions, the latter may possibly on the whole contribute more to the happiness of mankind than the former.

—Benjamin Franklin, on his invention of the lightning rod

Isn’t it crazy how people wrote back then? I think I could have gotten along well with it.

Occasionally I see an absurd discussion like this one continue to drag itself out and I feel sort of guilty for writing one of the big “minimalist” things. The point of writing less code is not to conserve memory or cycles or soothe some “first thing we’ll do, let’s purge all the libraries” fetish. The point is to only write what you want to express. If a feature would require that to get lost in a bunch of dreary nonsense, then it’s not worth it. If there’s a library you can call that lets you say the what and not the how, then it is.

More importantly if there’s a standard program that you can call that’s the same standard program that everyone has agreed on for decades and that saves you from implementing a protocol which you are obviously not smart enough to implement on your own, then you just shut up and fucking call it. And if that causes you to realize that your program is pointless, don’t write it.

Not writing it is the least amount of code you can produce. And that is the best possible thing you can do. That’s what this unix thing is all about. Those who do not understand it are condemned to reimplement it, poorly.

Overheard is on NPR right now. “What are those things on, er, I don’t watch TV...” “Sitcoms?” “Yes, that’s it.”

I miss the Left Foot Living Review.