Writting books for machines

Sometimes people ask me : “What do you do for a job?“

Saying that I’am a computer programmer (coder/developer – call it how you want) won’t tell them too much. It’s not like when you are a priest. When you say that you are a priest them it’s quite clear what you do : you prey, you preach, etc.

If you have the skill of a priest, when you use this skill you will “produce” things like : holiness, peace of soul and the like.

If you say that you are a coder/developer (let’s say web applications) people will ask you : “And what do your kind of skill produce?”.
You show them a webpage like google.com, and say : “These are the kind of things we produce”. And then utter different things that include words like : enterprise application, distributed, cloud computing, thin/thick client, vertical partitioning, etc.

When you look into their eyes you will see that they don’t understand what you do. Often they ask you : “And they pay X thousands of dollars/euros a month to a guy that arranges the _google_ text above the  search box? I can do that too. In 2 hours no more or less. And I can even animate it.”

So I decided that I will never tell them that I’am a developer/coder and never show them “google.com”.
I decided to tell them that I am a writter. I am a writter unlike traditional writters (that write books for people).I instead, write books that are read only by machines.

I tell them that when I think about a subject for my future book, I’am never thinking about people. Never. The machines have very different tastes and share a world that is utterly strange to the humans. Strange at least to most of the humans.

In this realms you could think that the Linux kernel is as much a best-seller for machines as is the Bible for the humans. Many machines (you could say) read this holy book (the Linux kernel) over and over again. For many years in a row.

Imagine a web server that reads “The Linux Kernel” as a hermit would read “The Holy Bible”. He stays there, noticed by few, but reading the same book over and over again. Never he tires, never he complains. His repetition is his only personal askesis towards God.

Sometimes the “Linux Kernel” changes just as a popular books gets a second edition (revised and improved by the author ). They call it a software update or even a major version change. And sometimes the book title changes from “Linux 2.4.6″ to “Linux 2.6.26.3″, but any machine knows that inside those “covers” it can find the same old wisdom. But wisdom applied to new things. (like : a better VIA PadLock instruction usage with irq_ts_save/restore() – see here)

Some books written for machines never change because they never make it. They are not enough popular among machines, just as a book that is forgotten never makes it beyound it’s first edition.

I would compare the coders that work for any large software corporation to the scholars from the Aristotle’s Lykeion.  Both of them write/wrote books for millions of readers. The only thing is that they are different kind of readers.