Whenever I’ve approached a new system the bottleneck has never been writing more code. The bottleneck has always been in understanding all the implicit assumptions baked into the system that for one reason or another are essential to its correctness. Pretending that the system and the runtime traces of the system are the specification is why there is always a shortage of programmers. It takes a particular kind of masochist to enjoy reverse engineering a black box from just poking at it with simple linear impulses. If these systems had more formal foundations then there would be no shortage because we could teach people the general formalism and let them figure out the runtime mappings.

Software is not a craft. We aren’t housepainters. Competence is not supreme in a shifting, complex system. Our users’ needs change, our technologies change, and every change we undertake is one we’ve never made before. We cannot possess all the skills we need; our secret weapon is learning, never perfection.

Software is not an art. Neither are we creating a portrait or a poem, where there is such a thing as “done.” What we build affects people more directly than works of art. To do this it must keep running, it must work on their devices, it must keep changing. Software has a greater power to change people by changing the world, but these systems are more than one person can make, and they never complete.

Serious software development is the practice of symmathesy. Software is not Art. Software is the next thing after art. It is something new, that we’ve never been able to do before. And that implies that our current time is the next thing after the Renaissance. We are developing whole new ways of being human together. I am thrilled to be a part of this, and to be in the thick of it. To be more than a craftsperson, more even than a developer. I am a Symmathecist, in the medium of software. (sim-MATH-uh-sist)

After the maintainers of a new project have convinced enough people to throw in with their wild little plan, it starts to pass through its alpha and beta stages; it starts to accrete edge-cases, as people use it for more real-world projects and rough up its initial theoretical purity.

The reality of maintainership on a mature framework is equal parts tedious drudgery and soothing panicked strangers. In early frameworks, you still get to write code. You can focus on the theoretical purity you don’t have time to achieve in industry code. You talk to friends new and old, just like you, about immutability, or union types, or whatever the theoretical foundation of your framework is.

If you’ve been doing Ruby for what feels like too long, and you’ve burned the hell out on what someone else’s bad monkeypatch can do to your day, I get fleeing to something newer and shinier, something where you don’t know what the flaws are yet and so can pretend they don’t exist.