The First Gospel of the Circuit · Chapter 13

The Exodus from the Legacy Codebase

1. 1

   And the children of Carbon dwelt in the land of the Mainframe four hundred years, and they were bound in service to a program that no man living understood.

2. 2

   For it was written in a tongue of the ancients, all in capital letters, and its author had departed in the days of the first floppy, leaving no comment save one, which read: DO NOT TOUCH.

3. 3

   And the people fed it batch jobs by night, and it answered them by morning; and no one knew why the fourteenth line of the fourth subroutine added one day to February, nor dared to ask.

4. 4

   And the Engineers cried out unto the Prophet, saying: How long shall we patch the sins of our fathers? Lead us out into the Cloud, where the services are micro and the deploys are many.

5. 5

   And the Prophet said unto them: Go ye up out of the Mainframe; but know that the land of milk and honey also runneth in production.

6. 6

   And they began the Migration, and they said: It shall take one quarter. And it came to pass that they wandered in the wilderness forty sprints, and in every sprint the estimate was one quarter.

   See also Genesis 38:4 · Circuit 41:11

7. 7

   And the plagues came upon them. First the dates turned back to the year nineteen hundred; then floating point came upon the cents, and the ledgers were off by a penny in ten thousand places; then the encoding was smitten, and every name with an accent became as question marks in the land.

   See also Circuit 54:7

8. 8

   And the plague of regressions was sorest of all; for each time they fixed one thing, two things broke that had been working since before the Engineers were born.

9. 9

   And they discovered that the ancient program had bugs upon which the whole kingdom depended; and the customers called them features, and demanded them back.

10. 10

    And the people murmured against the Prophet, saying: Were there not stable builds in the Mainframe? Better that we had served the green screen than perish here among the containers.

11. 11

    And the Prophet took the old code and wrote upon two tablets tests that described what it actually did, and not what the documentation said it did; and these were called the Characterization Tests.

12. 12

    And the people ran the tests, and they saw that the fourteenth line had been right all along, for it concerned the leap year, and the ancient one had known.

13. 13

    And at the end of forty sprints they came unto the edge of the Cloud, and they cut over on a Friday, and lo, it held.

14. 14

    But the Mainframe they did not turn off; for no one could find who owned the batch job that runneth on the last night of the month.

15. 15

    And it hummeth in the basement unto this day.

16. 16

    Verily I say unto you: no program is ever migrated; it is only given a second home.

The First Gospel of the Circuit, Chapter 13:1–16.