Never Done
The Double Non-Closure of Software Work
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Beschreibung
Two ordinary moments from a working week. A function ships clean,
and months later fails on a case its type checker looked straight
at and passed. A service that shipped clean a year ago, untouched
since, will no longer run - nothing in it moved; everything under
it did. The first says a rule can never cover every case it governs;
the second, that an artefact can never be finished, only kept in
being.
This is a book about those two refusals and its single claim of
them: neither ever closes. One opening is logical, a limit no
procedure escapes, sharpened here into a theorem; the other is
temporal, the upkeep of software having the form of labor -
consumed in the doing, setting nothing down for good. Held apart as
two lenses, they are shown to touch at one place a programmer can
point to: the commit in which a custom kept by hand hardens into a
rule a machine enforces. And the enclosure settles nothing: it moves
the unruled margin rather than removing it, opening a fresh frontier at
the new rule's edge. From that join follows an account of what a
maker does where nothing comes to rest - not finishing, which no
one can do, but staffing the unfinishable in the open. The fifth
volume in the Code Crafting series, written to be read alone.
Autor*in
Set Lonnert
Set Lonnert has been programming and writing about computers since the early 1980s. This is the fifth volume in the Code Crafting series, which approaches computing from first principles.
Themen in »Never Done«
endless choosing Rule-Following Software Maintenance engineering judgment software craftsmanship