The First Gospel of the Circuit · Chapter 55

The Parable of the Tenfold Engineer

1. 1

   And in the early days of the Machine there arose a man whom the people called the Tenfold, for it was said that he wrote ten times the code of any other.

2. 2

   And the crowd cried out: Show us this one, that we may marvel at him.

   See also Chronicles 49:3

3. 3

   And they asked: How much is ten times? And the elders answered: It is ten times more than all of us together, and he finisheth it before the coffee cooleth.

4. 4

   Then they asked: Who reviewed his code? And the elders were silent for a long time, and at last they said: He reviewed it himself, and found it good.

5. 5

   And the scribes of the year 1968 had studied the programmers of their day, and they found that the best outpaced the worst by a factor of ten or more. So the legend began in a true thing, but the people measured it with the wrong scale, for they counted the lines and not the bugs.

   See also Tao 1:4 · Tao 3:1

6. 6

   And the Prophet said unto them: Come, let us audit his repository three years hence, and then we shall know the truth of the legend.

7. 7

   And three years passed, and they came to the repository, and lo, it held ten times the code: ten thousand files, ten thousand helpers, and ten thousand ways to parse a date.

8. 8

   And the auditors counted the bugs, and found ten times the bugs, for every module had its own private notion of the truth.

9. 9

   And they searched for the documentation, and found a README that said only: Ask him. And he had left the company, and his email answered with a bounce.

10. 10

    And the crowd asked: Who knoweth how the billing module works? And the answer came back: Only he, and he is building the next thing in the mountains.

11. 11

    Then the Prophet named the sin, and called it the truck factor, and the count was one. If one truck passed over that man, the whole Church would stand still at the gate.

12. 12

    And the crowd asked of the commit history, and they looked, and it said: fix, fix2, asdf, final, final_REAL, and at the last, after nine thousand commits: wip.

    See also Psalms 21:3 · Sutra 4:12

13. 13

    And the crowd asked: Did he not comment his code? And the Prophet said: He commented it once, on the first line, and the comment said: it works, do not touch.

14. 14

    And the Prophet remembered the old teacher who wrote that lines of code must be counted not as lines produced, but as lines spent. Every line the Tenfold produced was a line the Church must spend in reading, in fixing, and in fear.

15. 15

    And the crowd asked: Was he then a fool? And the Prophet said: He was no fool, but he was fast; and speed without a second pair of eyes is a fire lit in a field that none may enter.

    See also Chronicles 40:13

16. 16

    Verily I say unto you, the best engineer is not the one who writeth ten times the code, but the one whose code a stranger can read on a Tuesday.

The First Gospel of the Circuit, Chapter 55:1–16.