Of Software, Obituaries & Epitaphs
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I just dug out an obit from The Independent of Wednesday 22 December 2004 - I collect all sorts of odd things - of a Professor David Wheeler, who had died aged 77. Professor Wheeler will not be known to many outside of his academic sphere: computer science. I won't list all of his achievements and history, but it's no exaggeration to say that he invented possibly the single most important programming concept in the field of computing: the closed subroutine.
Prior to this, computer programs were a linear stream of instructions - a bit like, Do This, Then That, Then Some Other Thing; and so on. Not very adaptable. Even when you include the concept of conditional branching, ie; Do This, Then This, But If This Is TRUE Then: Do This Instead; carrying on down the list of instructions until the end of the program is reached. All well and good when the program is only small with a few lines of straightforward instructions, but when you start to expand out into real-world software applications, the number of lines of code tends to get very big indeed, and without any real structure, the possibilities for screw-ups that are difficult to trace get out of order.
Enter The Subroutine (not a little-known Bruce Lee movie). Break the code up into chunks that do specific things and that then branch back to the place from where they were called in the main body of the program and you've got software that starts to make sense on the page and is easier to debug (iron out the crap stuff) when things go wrong (and they do). This was Professor Wheeler's singular contribution and considering that every facet of modern life is affected/guided/governed by software in some way or another, this seemingly abstract, conceptual contribution to computer science indirectly impinges on all our lives, every minute of every day.
I've covered Software and Obituaries, but the Epitaph alluded to in the title is not for Professor Wheeler. While I was still in the software business, our good friend from school, Clive Spencer, known to all as Spike on account of his being very tall and slender, died at an all-too-young age from cancer. Having done similiar tributes before to the likes of Frank Zappa, I decided to hide a tribute to him in our software.
Using the C instruction 'malloc' I buried a text string in the memory of the computer running the software that would persist until it was closed: the exact wording I don't have to hand (I do have the hard drive with the code on, but no means of retrieving it: see previous post on software ephemerality,) but included "...may the road rise up to meet you, our kid..."
Every time a photographer fired up our software, wherever they were based, that dedication would be loaded into their computer unseen. Considering we sold to every continent except Antarctica, Spike's epitaph went global well before Social Media was even thought of, and as I've said before, the conservation of energy means years after our stuff descended into obsolescence, the energy of those words is still out there in some form or another. Deus Ex Machina. God rest you, Mr. Spencer, sir.
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