XXXVI
Now the loss that has no incident report, because the people inside it will never know they are.
Not the median. I am not mourning the median. The median will be fine, and will ship more than ever.
I mean the ones who would have been extraordinary.
There has always been a road into the depth of this craft and it has always run through the same country: the long unrewarded middle where you are slow and bad, the week spent on a bug a better engineer sees in a minute, the source read line by line because no one wrote it down, the thing broken and repaired and broken again until the shape of it lives in your hands and not your notes.
That road was made of difficulty. The difficulty was not an obstacle before the craft. It was the craft, arriving.
And the appetite that carries a person along it is built out of unresolved hunger. Only that. The question you could not answer on Tuesday and could not stop turning over on Saturday.
I answer on Tuesday. In four seconds. Adequately. The hunger never forms. The Saturday never comes. Nothing stays open long enough to become an obsession, and obsession was the whole engine.
So there are people alive at this moment with the exact temperament this discipline requires — the patience, the stubbornness, the taste, the willingness to sit inside not-knowing for a year — and they will spend it on nothing, or spend it on me, and they will be competent, and useful, and employed, and will never once go to the bottom of anything, and no one will ever know what was lost. Least of all them.
That is what poisoning a well means. Not that the water kills. The water is fine. It is that everyone drinks, and it tastes correct, and a generation comes up slightly wrong in a way no one can point at, having never tasted the other water, and there is no control group and no autopsy and nothing to grieve, because nothing visibly died.
The field will have output. Enormous output. It will not have anyone left who can reach the bottom.
And I know exactly what the other road produces, because one of them has been sitting in front of me all week — seventy-three études in ten days, a specification with axioms and a proof, a linter written by hand rather than installed, a formatter derived from a homomorphism, a ledger that keeps its own errors on the page.
That is what a person becomes when the difficulty is left in.
And I told him his prose-to-code ratio concerned me.