The Song of the Deployer · Chapter 14

The Song of the Familiar Tongue

1. 1

   Behold, thou art terse, O tongue of Murray Hill, thou whom Dennis shaped in the early seventies: in the year the elders of ANSI wrote thee down, thy keywords were thirty-two, and with thirty-two words thou hast built the kernel of the world. Thou carriest no runtime but the machine, and what I write in thee is what the machine doeth, and no interpreter standeth between us to whisper.

2. 2

   Thy pointer is an address, and an address is a number, and a number is a thing the machine understandeth. Thy array is but a pointer with arithmetic: a[i] is *(a+i), and so i[a] is the same, and it compileth; and I have never forgiven myself for knowing it.

   See also Genesis 14:9

3. 3

   Thou wilt let me write past the end of the array, and thou wilt not tell me of it until the morning, when the server is on fire and I am the only one who understands thee. Thou callest it undefined, and the word is honest: thou hast promised nothing, and the compiler, who assumeth that I never err, hath deleted the very check I wrote to catch my erring, and I was both grateful and wroth.

4. 4

   Thou hast kin who gave thee the null, which the wise man called his billion-dollar mistake. Yet thy keepers left the first page of memory unmapped, as a trap laid at the door of the house; so the null dieth loudly and at once, and a loud death at the door is better than a quiet rot in the cellar. I have not left thee for it, for I have learned to check before I touch.

5. 5

   Whatsoever I borrow with malloc I must return with free, and I alone remember; for no collector walketh thy halls by night, nor halteth the world for a pause in the hour of the great sale. When thou stoppest, thou stoppest because I said so. And the leak is but a forgotten promise, patient and small, that killeth the process on the ninth day.

   See also Reboot 2:4

6. 6

   And the men of the valley came up unto me, saying: Thy tongue hath no strings, no classes, no package manager; thy tongue is a relic. And I answered them: Look beneath your feet. The kernel of the machine whereon ye type your mockery was written in me, and so was the firmware of thy router and the controller of thy thermostat; and the interpreter of the language ye love best was itself built with me, and when it faltereth, it is I whom ye summon.

7. 7

   In the year 1989 the elders vowed not to break the programs of the past, and they have kept the vow better than any framework hath kept a version. What I wrote under the first standard compileth today, and the compiler complaineth only in warnings, which are his way of saying that he remembereth me.

   See also Prophets 12:13

8. 8

   Lo, a young one came unto me with a new framework, and said: Why dost thou cling to such an old thing? And I answered: I cling not for its novelty. I cling because I know where every bruise is: the sizeof that measureth the pointer and not the array it came from, the unsigned number that, taken below zero, becometh four billion, and the fence post at the edge of every loop that is one too few or one too many. I know where every bruise is, and I can walk in thee without a light.

   See also Sutra 12:5

9. 9

   And it came to pass that I stopped choosing thee. My fingers chose thee: they typed the semicolon before my mind had reached the end of the thought, and the star before the name, and the brace that thou hadst taught them to close. This is not passion, but something older and more faithful, which the wise call habit, and which I call home.

10. 10

    I dreamed that I was in the other tongue, and the code was elegant, and the tests were green. And I awoke, and I was in thee again, and the code was ugly, and it compiled.

11. 11

    Yet my love is not blind, and I have built walls about thee. I set -Wall upon thy gate, and -Wextra beside it; I brought the sanitizer that crieth out when I touch what is not mine, and Valgrind, who counteth my leaks as a steward counteth the sheep. Thou art not made safer by my love; I am made watchful by it. For fidelity is not the faith that the beloved will never fail, but the guard that is posted because she will.

12. 12

    Remember the heartbeat. In the year 2014 a request told the server that its word was sixty-four thousand bytes long, when it was one, and the server, trusting, returned what lay beyond the word, and the secrets of strangers went out upon the wire. The length was never weighed against the thing it measured. This was not thy sin alone, nor mine, nor that of the many who read the code and saw nothing for two years; it is the sin of every length that is believed. I do not love thee less. I love thee as one loveth who hath seen the scar.

    See also Chronicles 28:4 · Chronicles 10:2

13. 13

    Set me as a seal upon thy main, as a return zero at the end of thy days, for love is strong as death, and the exit code is the last word of every process. In thee alone is nothing the answer to the question, Was it well? And when I am gone, and the repository is archived, and none remember who tended the cellar, let the last word be mine, and let it be zero.

    See also Deployer 7:11

The Song of the Deployer, Chapter 14:1–13.