The yearning in this essay for an era of wise craftsman-philosophers building architectural monuments for the ages is just fantasy. It never was and never will

The yearning in this essay for an era of wise craftsman-philosophers building architectural monuments for the ages is just fantasy. It never was and never will be. I remember great pieces of software from before the Internet era. The grammatical tense that applies to them is "past". They are dead and gone and only exist as "hey, remember Code Warrior?" "remember the LISP Machine?" "remember Lotus Notes?" Millions and millions of dollars, hours, lines of code all just gone. They live on as inspirations but not as artifacts. The "cathedral" model doesn't produce cathedrals, it produces photos of cathedrals that were abandoned and eventually collapsed and were forgotten. The bazaar has produced code that outlives its authors, its sponsors, its original communities. You can Tanenbaum Linux all day long but it will outlive the cockroaches. That's the real monument.