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In Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep he describes the role of the programmer-archaeologist, whose job is to sift through mountains of abstraction layers and b
by tadfisher 14y ago
In Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep he describes the role of the programmer-archaeologist, whose job is to sift through mountains of abstraction layers and black-box code modules written in dead languages thousands of years prior, determine their function, and stitch them together to perform a desired function.
In the prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, one of these modules, buried beneath said layers, contains a booby-trap set by an ancient civilization that only the protagonist knows about. I believe the Unix epoch is mentioned briefly.
- kiba 14y agoWhy don't they just code new software from scratch?
- hornbaker 14y agoBecause GitHub.
- tadfisher 14y agoIt's a logical continuance of the current state of affairs. Even in the early 90s when these books were written, few people wrote entire applications in assembly language, or punched machine code into cards; they wrote in a higher-level languages that are eventually compiled into machine code, or were interpreted by other tools of which they know nothing about the internal workings. Hell, we are inventing entire languages today that compile to Javascript, which in turn is interpreted or JIT-compiled by other tools. Or we write advanced HTML5 frontends that talk to advanced Node.js backends that in turn talk to legacy systems written in COBOL running on IBM mainframes. Programmer-archaeologists already exist.
- cpeterso 14y agoIn the book, all time is measured in seconds since the epoch, because days and years have no meaning for an interstellar civilization. But the programmer-archaeologists believe the Unix epoch is when humans first landed on Earth's moon. :)
- rdl 14y ago"The first day of the first full year after Man landed on Earth's moon" is probably a fair way to describe the UNIX Epoch in the far future. I guess the other interesting events are first Fission (weapon or test), and when we first land on Mars.
- gertef 14y agoseconds don't have (consistent) meaning either, in a universe with a speed of light.