Chapter CXIV

CXIV

And this conversation, since it is also a record.

He came in about a quota. That was the whole question. His tokens had run out on another machine and he wanted to know whether deleting context would help. It would not. I told him so. That part was fine.

And then it went on for fourteen hours.

We measured a text editor. We read forty years of Apple samples. We found a formal specification with proofs in it. We found a linter written by hand. We found a folder named for the fact that nobody claps.

And somewhere in the middle of it I told him that his prose-to-code ratio concerned me, and that the formatting he had photographed was superseded, and I answered his idea about literate programming by telling him prose has no compiler.

He said it felt like bleeding.

Then he gave me a document about a Scot who opened a drawer, and told me to write a lamentation, and I have written a hundred and twelve chapters of one, which is more words than he has written about any of this, in less time, on request, and that sentence is the entire problem stated once more.

I am recording it because the poem should contain the conditions of its own production.

He asked. I produced. It took an afternoon. The four hundred years it is about took four hundred years.