William Byrd on ”The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written” (2017) [video]
At great risk of being downvoted to oblivion (before you pile on, check your motives), this struck me on first encounter, 30 years ago, and ever more strongly since, as the most self-indulgent of all programs. People impressed by it invariably appear, primarily, pleased with themselves for the depth of perception they demonstrate by being impressed with it.<p>Comparing it to Maxwell&#x27;s equations sharpens this. The equations are deeply illuminative of fundametal processes of reality, summarizing comprehensively and precisely decades of exacting experimentation by the best physicists of the age. The speed of light (in vacuum, and in any medium) is simply derived from them. No detail of them could be deduced without abstraction from all the experience of all who came before.<p>How much work went into this program? Would any two people, who just knew Lisp, but no theory of computation, asked to write it, write it differently? How long could it take? An hour, a week, a month? How much insight would it take? How much lived experience does it represent?<p>Think it through: A Lisp interpreter in Lisp. It demonstrates that, if you are handed a Lisp runtime, as we are today, it is easy to make it execute Lisp programs. With small changes, it runs slightly different programs.<p>Should that impress us? Where did this Lisp runtime come from, and why would one expect it to be tuned for anything but running Lisp programs? If it were not good for running Lisp programs, what would it be good for?<p>The program relies, fundamentally, on all the science (and, frankly, engineering) that came before, but illuminates none of it. It is a fleck of foam that rides determinedly at the surface, belying the depths that support it. It illuminates nothing beyond itself.