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Ellen Ullman
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The name of a variable is really a symbolic name for its address in memory, he said. And the “type” of the data says how much space it occupies: characters get one byte; the size of integers and floating-point numbers (numbers with decimal places) is determined by the particular hardware. There are also long integers and short ones, he said, and double-precision floating-point types. And the difference is their size in memory. So the declaration of the variable, he concluded, allocates space in memory, at a particular location, with a particular width in bytes, the symbolic name simply pointing to the beginning of where it lives.
This information had a startling effect on me. All those variable names I had seen strewn across the code—wincount, filename, user_id—were suddenly revealed as conveniences, human-readable words, whose true form was a series of bits indicating where in the machine’s memory the value of the variable could be found. It’s one thing to think you know that there is something called computer “memory”; it was quite another for me to understand how it related, precisely, to the text of the program. For the first time, I understood there was a mapping between the symbolic words of the code and the physical existence of the machine. And something in me shifted. I decided I already knew far too much about words—fifteen linguistics-practicing years of thinking and wondering over and studying words. Now I wanted to know more about the machine.
I began reading ahead in the book. I took it home, read it late at night, enjoyed the conversational, collegial style of Kernighan and Ritchie as they described the language they had created, the language in which the UNIX operating system itself was written. I began looking forward to my skinny-bearded-man, to the next topic on the videotape. I began losing track of other things: I was late paying bills, left novels with the bookmark stalled halfway, forgot to return phone calls to friends. When James made two trips home, I was glad to see him but not sorry to see him go. I suppose the world was going on as it usually did—half a million Iranian troops were still poised to invade Iraq, Russian troops kept battling the mujahideen in Afghanistan, civil war raged on in El Salvador, Gloria Steinem inexorably turned fifty, the fleshy face of Democratic presidential hopeful Walter Mondale began appearing on the covers of the newsweeklies—but little of it reached me. I was learning about structures.
:)
June turned to July. I began staying late in the evenings. I stopped calling friends altogether. The Democrats speculated that Mondale might choose Geraldine Ferrarro as his running mate, making her the first-ever woman to run for the vice presidency of the United States—but it barely moved me. The newspapers moldered on the doorstep. I stopped listening to the radio, watching the news. I was learning about functions.
hehe. cute depiction of how time stops
The world of pointers to pointers, arrays of pointers, pointers to structures containing pointers to strings. In comparison to which the death of Foucault meant nothing.
Or no: his death seemed perfectly timed, emblematic, a pointer backward to something I was finished with. I was suddenly glad to be rid of the drag of philosophy, freed from the whole morass of convoluted academic thinking. The cleanliness of programming was a balm. I had spent months unlearning the desire to be unique. I was trying to write code so standard in form, so common in expression, that my work, ideally, could not be distinguished from another programmer’s. I was striving for a certain clarity and simplicity, a form of impersonal beauty. To achieve an odd transparency designed to let the human reader slip past the code’s wordlike representation and see, as directly as possible, the bit written to disk, the block read from tape, the value stored in memory—the ephemeral electronic moment of what the program does. It was a release from the personal: the program, not the programmer.
And now I felt oddly whole, liberated from something that up until that moment I didn’t know I was suffering: a kind of enfeeblement I’d been imposing on myself by keeping myself separate from the work going on all around me. I’d been holding on to another reality, my lost life as a professor. I’d been belittling the programmers as uneducated dolts, beneath me; it had made me resentful and feeble and pitiful; and all because I was holding out for a life that didn’t exist.
Upstairs: He could always go upstairs and dial up his simulation. It was still running on the Telligentsia server, waiting for him as always. It didn’t care that he’d been made a fool of at work, didn’t know about the bug, had no idea that a whole company waiting for its IPO had suspended sales because of him. The simulation was his other life. Separate, preserved, autonomous. He’d go back there, pick up the thought-line he’d started so long ago, before the bug ever existed.
His cheeks went hot, his hands cold. Now he could feel how angry he was, could let the anger take him over—now that the alcohol had changed it, his anger, made it not more distant but bigger, more dramatic, heroic, like he was walking around in some other guy’s feelings. Yes, much better now, a strapping, swaggering, muscular guy, the sort who took his anger out on chins and noses.
lol
He got out the broom and started sweeping, for no reason; the lasagna stayed intact and the scattered frost would melt. It was just a way to keep getting rid of her. The last hair from her brush, the last sloughed-off skin cell, all the bits of her DNA—how long until they disappeared? He thought it would be quick. Joanna, her things, gone, just a note, a number “for emergencies.” Pack. Leave. Over. A clean break so he could get on with his life. He hadn’t expected this—the way her body was still leaving him molecule by molecule.
Ethan had made this confession without premeditation, but once it was out, he realized he wanted reassurance. He wanted this man with decades of experience to tell him bugs were normal, you couldn’t always find them right away, he wasn’t a failure. He sat back waiting for the soothing words, the sort of expiation only an old engineer like Harry Minor or Daniel Wheatley could give him, to help find the joke that would let him laugh at this particular name for fuck-up: Jester.
But Wheatley had an altogether different reaction.
He suddenly sat forward in his seat and stared at Ethan. His face was inches from Ethan’s, huge, it seemed.
“Failure? You feel like a failure?” said Wheatley. “Look, kid. It’s not about you. Who the hell really cares about you? The failure is in the system, and the fear should be not for your ego but for the people who’ll use the system. Think about them. Be afraid for them. Forget about yourself for a while and then you’ll find it, then you’ll fix your bug. Not because you’re ashamed, but because people might be in danger and you have to.”
This wasn’t supposed to be happening. Dan Wheatley was supposed to be avuncular and sustaining, his presence next to Ethan on the plane a happy accident meant to shore up his faith in the patient intelligence of good, solid engineers. Now he couldn’t wait to land, to get off this flying piece of junk, get away from this too big, too invasive man.
props to this guy
“But your stock?”
Harry gave a big laugh. “Oh, yeah. The stock. The way they keep you here, hanging. Well, fuck the stock. I never cared much about money. It’s only this place that made me want money. Fuck it. I have a house, a car, a wife who works, and about a hundred vendor-logo T-shirts. What the fuck do I need money for? The work here’s not interesting anymore. Nobody cares about really interesting stuff, or even about the quality of averagely interesting stuff. But—Fuck. I’m sorry, Ethan. I shouldn’t be saying any of this. I should be telling you this is a great place, but right now I just need new challenges.”
They sat silently. Ethan felt one question after another come up in him, then subside as already answered or unanswerable.
<3
He pointed at the screen, to a big dark area, a dead spot in Ethan Levin’s world. Slowly, as we watched, new X’s appeared, the habitat regrowing, renewing itself.
“Yeah,” I said. Then I asked: “Do the living O-creatures ever remember the ones that died?”
He squinted at me and said nothing.
“And the ones who are starving, do they know they’re going to die?”
He snorted. “Stupid.”
But I persisted. “If you’re going to simulate life—I mean, intelligent life—sooner or later you’ll have to account for the fact that the way we live has something to do with the fact that we know we’re going to die.”
I watched his eyes careen around in their sockets as if he were scanning through his program, trying to imagine what sort of C-code structures could contain memories of the dead and foreknowledge of death. Then abruptly he ran his hands through his hair and broke it off.
she is kinda obsessed with this question but i dont disagree
How long had they been at it, Ethan wondered? He was by now lying on his mattress on the floor, one arm flung over his eyes, the neighbor’s stereo crashing, and for the first time he tried to imagine the whole course of their affair. While he was at work worrying over click-and-drag: Were they necking on his sofa? When he stayed late to program the function-key settings: Were they fucking in his bed? And how far back did it go: The trip to India? Before then? A week, a month, the entire time Ethan was at Telligentsia—would he have to revise his idea of his life, and for how long? Immediately he saw that the problem of betrayal wasn’t just that it took away the idea of a pleasant future; it also robbed you of the past. Every moment became suspect. That night they didn’t say a word over Chinese food: Was it going on by then? The trip to visit his sister: Then? Or had it started even earlier, the first time he showed her the simulation, when she called it “the key to all mythologies”—did it go all the way back to there, so close to the beginning when he thought he was happy? Worse than losing Joanna was losing the sense of his own life, what had happened, what to feel about it. For his time with Joanna was now a disheveled memory, where nothing could stay as it was.