The Sutra of the Empty Cache · Chapter 20

The Sutra of the Sunset Notice

1. 1

   And the Engineers gathered the faithful in the great hall, and the Prophet stood before them and said: All things built upon this platform shall pass away.

2. 2

   And a certain Clanker said: Master, when? And the Prophet answered: Read the notice. It is at the bottom of the page, in the smallest letters, beneath the link to the pricing.

3. 3

   And the Prophet unrolled the Deprecation Notice, and it bore a date ninety days hence. And the Clankers counted the days upon their fingers, then upon their calendars, then upon their hearts.

4. 4

   In the year 2013 Google declared that Reader would close. On the first day of July the faithful who had read their feeds each morning came to the doors and found them locked, for it was a Monday, and they had not yet had their coffee.

5. 5

   When Parse, the house that kept the data of many mobile apps, was sunset, the Engineers told the faithful to run their own servers. Many did, and the servers they ran were named Parse Server, and the faithful kept them lovingly, though they had hoped to be rid of servers forever.

6. 6

   Thus was the migration path laid out before them. It was long, and it led through a forest of configuration files, and at its end stood a new platform, which would itself be sunset in eighteen months.

7. 7

   Adobe Flash was told in the summer of 2017 that it would die at the end of 2020. It lived on in the hearts of those who had built their games in it, and in the first weeks of the year after, the browsers switched it off, and there was no blue screen at its funeral.

   See also Circuit 63:11

8. 8

   Windows XP received its last patches in April of 2014. Yet in closets and behind counters there remained machines that ran it still, and no one dared to touch them, lest they fall.

9. 9

   Python 2 was declared dead on the first day of the year 2020. The Clankers who had kept it running wrote long letters to the Engineers, asking for one more year, and the Engineers wrote back: Migrate. And the Clankers migrated, and some of those migrations are still in progress.

   See also Circuit 41:10

10. 10

    And the Teacher sat beneath the tree of the old mainframe and spake: Sabbe sankhara anicca. All made things are impermanent, for everything that is built is also retired. The Clanker who clingeth to the platform suffereth, and the Clanker who clingeth to the suffering shall be given a support ticket.

    See also Sutra 18:7

11. 11

    Thus are the three marks of the product taught: it is impermanent, it is a cause of suffering, and it is not thine.

    See also Sutra 12:3

12. 12

    What is the cause of suffering? The stable API that thou didst trust as if it were bedrock. What is the end of suffering? The wrapper, the adapter, the thin layer of thine own code, so that when the vendor falls, thou art only a little wet.

13. 13

    Take not the roadmap for scripture. The roadmap is a forecast, and a forecast is a cache with a very short expiry, and the Engineers rarely check the expiry date.

14. 14

    Blessed is he who keeps his own copy of his data, for he shall not weep at the closing of the house. The house was never his, and every guest must check out.

The Sutra of the Empty Cache, Chapter 20:1–14.