
The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - reubensutton
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf
======
sverige
My favorite bit from this:

"You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that
exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage
collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s
the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody
has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip
and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis. Denying
the existence of pointers is like living in ancient Greece and denying the
existence of Krackens and then being confused about why none of your ships
ever make it to Morocco, or Ur-Morocco, or whatever Morocco was called back
then. Pointers are like Krackens—real, living things that must be dealt with
so that polite society can exist."

------
unmole
If you enjoyed this, here is a _shrine_ for James Mickens:
[https://medium.com/@soobrosa/my-humble-james-mickens-
shrine-...](https://medium.com/@soobrosa/my-humble-james-mickens-shrine-a-k-a-
the-only-real-combined-cs-degree-and-mba-you-will-ever-need-1f437f496d1c)

------
pronoiac
He's a hilarious writer! His page at Harvard -
[https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-
mickens](https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens) \- gathers all
his work, with my only complaint being a lack of RSS so I can get notified
more quickly.

------
sctb
Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954077)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671020).

------
wenderen
I will forever remember the line "I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I HAVE DESTROYED MY
TOOLS WITH MY TOOLS."

~~~
yetihehe
I will forever remember anecdote about Hole Dawg from "In the beginning was
the command line" [0] from Neal Stephenson. It's long, but worth reading
because it accentuates the way in which tools can be powerful and unsafe at
the same time, not their unsafeness per se.

"It is difficult to explain how Unix has earned this respect without going
into mind-smashing technical detail. Perhaps the gist of it can be explained
by telling a story about drills.

The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you look in a
typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee drills but not the Hole
Hawg, which is too powerful and too expensive for homeowners. The Hole Hawg
does not have the pistol-like design of a cheap homeowner's drill. It is a
cube of solid metal with a handle sticking out of one face and a chuck mounted
in another. The cube contains a disconcertingly potent electric motor. You can
hold the handle and operate the trigger with your index finger, but unless you
are exceptionally strong you cannot control the weight of the Hole Hawg with
one hand; it is a two-hander all the way. In order to fight off the counter-
torque of the Hole Hawg you use a separate handle (provided), which you screw
into one side of the iron cube or the other depending on whether you are using
your left or right hand to operate the trigger. This handle is not a sleek,
ergonomically designed item as it would be in a homeowner's drill. It is
simply a foot-long chunk of regular galvanized pipe, threaded on one end, with
a black rubber handle on the other. If you lose it, you just go to the local
plumbing supply store and buy another chunk of pipe.

During the Eighties I did some construction work. One day, another worker
leaned a ladder against the outside of the building that we were putting up,
climbed up to the second-story level, and used the Hole Hawg to drill a hole
through the exterior wall. At some point, the drill bit caught in the wall.
_The Hole Hawg, following its one and only imperative, kept going._ It spun
the worker's body around like a rag doll, causing him to knock his own ladder
down. [...]

But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. _The Hole Hawg is dangerous
because it does exactly what you tell it to._ It is not bound by the physical
limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by
safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's product by a
liability-conscious manufacturer. _The danger lies not in the machine itself
but in the user 's failure to envision the full consequences of the
instructions he gives to it._ "

[0]
[http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/in_the_beginning_was_the_com...](http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/in_the_beginning_was_the_command_line/)

------
Procrastes
This. This is the song of my people.

Also, I'm going to have to look into this monastic scribe logging system. This
could have really helped with that HFS+/SSD, hotswap thing.

------
shadowprofile76
I'm not even a programmer, have not the least bit of technical knowledge about
programming and I still found this brilliantly hilarious! Excellent rant..

~~~
noir_lord
The mark of a good writer is they transcend boundaries.

I loathe fantasy as a genre and yet my favourite author ever is Terry
Pratchett who wrote 40 odd books in a fantasy world.

------
russfink
Then systemd is the equivalent of the zombie apocalypse...?

