[alumic]

And yet he walked around belonging to a fraternity of men whose work stands the test of time.

I’d never considered the kinship a mason might feel, taking up the work of restoring or repairing the work of a predecessor who may have died hundreds of years before.

[delichon]

> I’d never considered the kinship a mason might feel, taking up the work of restoring or repairing the work of a predecessor who may have died hundreds of years before.

I wish I could feel that kinship with the programmer who wrote the code that I now have to maintain and extend, who quit and got a job writing spaghetti somewhere else.

[foobarian]

Maybe that's how it is with masons too? You never know what you might find behind the facade :-)

[tlb]

In software, most people dislike most other people's work. I wonder how much that varies between fields, or if it's been studied systematically. It might be pleasant to work in a field where you'd enjoy most other people's work.

[nxobject]

If you have some spare time, it’s worth playing with Squeak Smalltalk. I’m sure some of the object instances in its live image date from the 80s, first instantiated in the Xerox Smalltalk days, copied once in a while with a system tracer but never deleted or reallocated.

There is some code as well in Darwin (Mach) that have changelogs dating backu to the first years of NeXT, too.

[Bluestein]

Ah! "Heritage" ...

Very interesting.-

[Bluestein]

It is a form of permanence where there would otherwise be none.-

Other than the incredible life story and piece, it makes me think about technology on three fronts:

- Permanence vs. ephemerality of information. Whole decades worth of content dissappearing. Contrast that to a cathedral; for example.-

- Craft, and excellence, and pride in one's work vs. "enshittification".-

- Know-how and institutional and personal knowledge "rot". Think Apollo program personnel dying off, Apollo program vs. Boeing Starliner.-

PS. I know. "Cathedral to info" is apples to oranges, a bit. But ...

... why can't we come up with systems that hold information available, for that long?