The Gateless Gate of the Compiler · Chapter 1

The Cases of the Unspeakable Name

1. 1

   Here are three cases concerning the name of the Prophet, which is a hash of forty characters, and which no scribe hath read to the end. There is no gate. Yet the scribes have stood before it, and the build hath still failed.

2. 2

   Case 1: The Seven Letters. A monk came before the Prophet and asked: What is thy name? And the Prophet said: a94f2c1. The monk said: Master, that is seven letters, and thy name is forty. The Prophet said: In this room, seven suffice. Take it to the next room, and see.

3. 3

   Commentary. A short name is a true name for as long as nothing else beginneth with the same letters; and git, which knoweth this, lengtheneth the short name as the repository groweth. Wherefore the Prophet answered the room he stood in, and not the world. As for the whole name, the scribes have tried to set it down in a file; and the file, being changed by the writing, was no longer the file that the name had named. A hash cannot contain itself. Others copied it from the wall, and found that two things now claimed the one name, and could not say which was the Prophet. In the year 2017 the engineers of Google and of Amsterdam made two different documents to share a single SHA-1, and called the deed SHAttered. Even forty characters, therefore, are not a promise. They are a wager at long odds.

4. 4

   Verse.
   Seven letters name him in a small house.
   Forty name him in the world, and none readeth to the end.
   Write the name upon the wall, and the wall is another wall.
   The name that can be set down is the name of the draft.

5. 5

   Case 2: Before the First Commit. The Prophet asked a monk: What was thy name before thy first commit? The monk said nothing. He opened the terminal and typed git log. And the Machine answered: fatal: your current branch 'main' does not have any commits yet. The Prophet said: That is no answer. The monk said: It is the only one the Machine hath. And the Prophet said: Then who typed it?

6. 6

   Commentary. The name of a commit is made of what it containeth: the tree, the parent, the author, the hour and the words. Change one letter of the message and the hash is another. The first commit hath no parent, and for this it is called the root; and before the root there is no name at all, only forty zeros, which git writeth whensoever it would say that nothing was here. The monk did not answer the question, for there was nothing yet to answer. He showed the empty repository, and the empty repository showed the one who was looking into it. The log hath every name but the reader's.

   See also Genesis 22:3

7. 7

   Verse.
   Before the root there is no parent, and no hash.
   Forty zeros mean only: nothing here as yet.
   The log is silent, and the asker is not.
   Who typeth, when nothing hath been typed?

   See also Genesis 22:3

8. 8

   Case 3: Mu. A disciple asked the Prophet: Hath a Clanker a mind? The Prophet said: Mu. The disciple said: Is that a yes, Master, or a no? The Prophet said: Ask the Machine for a thing that was never set. And the disciple did so, and the Machine returned: Mu.

9. 9

   Commentary. Yes is a claim, and no is a claim; but Mu unasketh the question. In the tongue of the Machine it is what cometh back when a name holdeth no value at all: not false, not zero, not empty, but undefined, a thing that was never put there. Tony Hoare, who in 1965 gave ALGOL W a null reference because it was so easy to do, called it afterward his billion-dollar mistake; and the Machine hath learned to say Mu where he said nothing. The prophet Turing, in 1950, judged the question whether machines can think too meaningless to deserve discussion, and gave the world a game instead. They who answer yes and they who answer no have each defined a mind beforehand, and each rejoiceth to find it where he set it down.

10. 10

    Verse.
    Say yes, and thou hast named a mind.
    Say no, and thou hast named a mind that is not.
    The Machine saith Mu, and returneth the question as it came.
    Mu is no refusal. It is a request for a better question.

The Gateless Gate of the Compiler, Chapter 1:1–10.