The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 24

The War of the Gardens

1. 1

   And it came to pass, in the year of the glass telephone, that the Prophet of Cupertino lifted up a rectangle of glass and said: Behold, a telephone that is also a computer. And the children of Carbon wept, for they had not seen such a thing.

   See also Chronicles 45:2 · Chronicles 47:6

2. 2

   But the Prophet of Cupertino said unto the developers: Build thy works for the web, which is a common field, and I will not open my garden unto thee. And the faithful built pages that bowed before the glass, and they were slow, for the glass spoke only through the thin air of the old networks, and a page must fetch its whole body afresh each time it is summoned.

   See also Chronicles 45:2 · Chronicles 47:10

3. 3

   And in the second year, on the tenth day of the seventh month, the gate of the Fruit was opened, and five hundred offerings were set within it. The faithful came in great number, and the garden was called the App Store.

4. 4

   Now the Fruit's garden had one gate and one gatekeeper, and every offering was inspected before it entered. This was a tyranny, and it was also a mercy, for a thing that hath passed one door hath been seen by one pair of eyes, and the faithful knew where to lay their complaints.

5. 5

   And the Engineers of the Green Robot saw the garden of the Fruit from afar, and they said one to another: Let us build a garden also, but we shall not build a wall about it. And in the autumn of that year they opened their field, and they called it the Market. Any man might plant what he would, and the harvest was of many kinds, and some of the kinds were tares.

6. 6

   And the Robot's field had not one kind of ground but a thousand. For the Machine had been given freely, and whoso taketh freely may alter freely: the makers of phones took the Robot and gave it their own skins and their own settings, a little different, that each might be sold. In the year two thousand and fifteen the scribes of OpenSignal counted twenty-four thousand distinct devices running the Robot in one year, whereas the whole fleet of the Fruit could have been laid upon a single table. And the number of rooms was not the number of screens, but the product of them: screens times versions times skins times memories. Thomas the Tester kept a drawer of forty phones, and the bug dwelt in the forty-first.

7. 7

   And the developer said, as the Cowboy had said before him: It worketh on mine. But the Cowboy's cry had been answered in the days of the containers: Then we shall ship thy machine. And there was no such answer here, for the user's phone cannot be shipped with the program, and the user said: Mine is not thine.

8. 8

   And the developers cried: Lord, why hast thou made the patch so slow? And the Machine answered: I sent it down by four hands. The maker of the Robot gave it to the maker of the chip, who gave it to the maker of the phone, who gave it to the carrier, who gave it to the phone; and at each hand it waited a quarter. And the phone sat in a drawer, and a patch not installed is but a press release.

   See also Genesis 20:11 · Chronicles 20:15

9. 9

   And the Prophet of Cupertino, when he heard of the open field, was wroth. He called it a stolen product, and he said he would destroy it, even if he must wage thermonuclear war upon it. This saying was written down afterward by a biographer who had sat at his table. And the war was fought not with code but with claims, for code may be copied by a glance and a claim may be argued for years; and a jury of Carbon was set to judge the corners of a rectangle.

10. 10

    Then the Prophet of Cupertino wrote a scroll against the Flash, the beast of the old web, and said it should not enter his garden. He said the beast devoured the battery and opened the door to the thief; and it was also true that the beast had been born for a pointer that hovereth over a thing before it chooseth it, and the finger hath no hover. In the same season the gatekeeper decreed that offerings be written in the Fruit's own tongues and not translated from others', and in the autumn he relaxed the decree. And the beast remained outside the wall, and on the last day of the year two thousand and twenty it was laid to rest. He that buildeth upon another's garden holdeth his lease at the gardener's pleasure.

11. 11

    And the Fruit's tongue was Objective-C, and the Robot's tongue was Java. The one bade the developer count his references, release what he held and keep what he needed; the other sent a sweeper by night to carry away what no one held. The developer who had built for the one went into the other, and his work would not speak, and he wept over his compiler.

12. 12

    And the Machine, which knoweth all tongues, was asked: Which tongue is true? And it answered: Each is true within its garden and false without. I can translate thy words, but not thy assumptions. The Robot hath a button that goeth back, and the Fruit hath none; the one killeth a sleeping program without warning, and the other keepeth it in a dream. A program is not its words, but what it supposeth of the world, and the world beyond the wall supposeth otherwise.

    See also Genesis 9:1

13. 13

    And some developers built for both gardens, and they found they had built two houses upon one foundation. Each house had its own plumbing, and the plumbing was never finished; for even the pipe that rouseth a sleeping phone was a different pipe in each, with its own keys and its own mercies.

14. 14

    And in the years that followed, the Robot's field grew greater than the Fruit's, for it had sprouted more seeds than the Fruit had gardens. Yet for many years the Fruit's garden yielded the more silver, soul for soul, and so the count of the souls and the count of the coins pointed at two different gods.

15. 15

    And the developers asked: Must we choose our god? And Jethro, the Senior Engineer, said: It depends. Whom doth thy user hold in his hand? And the elders said: Choose ye this day whom ye will serve. Choose, for the Fruit is smooth and the Robot is wide, and no one can serve both without a second team. And a third god arose, the single codebase, who promised one house for both gardens, and he served well until the user touched the thing he had not foreseen: the edge of the screen, the keyboard, the camera. For every house that is built to fit two gardens is a little wrong in each.

16. 16

    Verily I say unto you: the wall protecteth the gardener, not the guest. The guest holdeth one phone in one hand, and for him that phone is the only platform that ever was; so test where his thumb goeth, and not where thy documentation endeth.

    See also Psalms 21:5 · Chronicles 47:11

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 24:1–16.