Bastion of the Turbofish
28 points by nrposner
28 points by nrposner
A thing I’m mourning these days is the slow death of human whimsy in programming. One of the best talks I ever saw was Nadia deliver a detective story of a bug at RubyConf. It was so well delivered and thought out. Took skill and time to craft.
Now /r/ruby gets many detective themed murder mystery debugging style posts submitted that are clearly someone prompting “make a detective story about bug X”. It's nice this link was dated 2 years ago so it has a lower chance of being mechanical, but these days I can't help but suspect. There might be no human behind such works at all. So it's not that I think programmers will stop being whimsical it's that the things they produce will always have this shadow of doubt.
Its a force that is almost incentivizing people to not fix typos and to leave the output less produced and polished. As a guy who loves doing things over the top that makes me a little sad.
Its much older than 2 years old, the file has just been moved a few times: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits/7fd15f09008dd72f40d76a5bebb60e3991095a5f/src/test/ui/bastion-of-the-turbofish.rs?browsing_rename_history=true&new_path=tests/ui/parser/bastion-of-the-turbofish.rs&original_branch=main
Rest in peace, Anna
I didn't notice it at first, but the epic comment has been updated after-the-fact to be a memorial to her.
I always love seeing little bits of human whimsy, as @schneems put it. But discovering that in this case it's both whimsical and a memorial makes it even better in a very bittersweet way, even though I never knew Anna. It's like a celebration of being human.
Rest in peace.