Finding the Bottom Turtle
This highlights the importance of <i>tradition</i> in modern computing.<p>You can't and don't "bootstrap" even your <i>bread</i>, which is one of the simplest and oldest human technologies. Bread is said to take flour, yeast, salt and heat. You don't "bootstrap" your yeast culture and your grain culture - you get them from some source. You are handed over the recipe and these living cultures from people who have been doing it before, and you start from that (you can experiment with changes to that of course). Of course the technology changes, but there's still a tradition and will always be.<p>What matters practically is that we have a variety of living software cultures and traditions to choose from to consume, to conserve and to pass on.