Exams are a time where I get all kinds of crazy ideas. When I have time, ideas refuse to come. When I am trying to sleep and have a written test tomorrow, the brain says hello. And I have to write it down, lest I never remember it again. But I like this process. During this end-of-semester exam, I had this weird dream about an old man sitting with his PC, and me going to him as “the last court of appeal” for solving issues in my code. Added a bit of drama. Here it is.

A university town somewhere. In some abandoned basement there sits an old man with a white beard hunched on a park bench. No one knows how it (or he) got there. In his hand is a laptop from a bygone age. No internet in sight (and range)

And around the old man there sit young programmers carrying laptops, or spectabled computer scientists with their papers.

Because this man (for those who know of such things) is the last court of appeal

Here is a programmer who ported Age of Empires to some old microprocessor in assembly. His code throws up bugs that have given it sleepless nights. There is a graduate student with a conjecture he knows is true but hasn’t been able to prove for years.

People don’t know who the old man is. He must have been a conputer scientist once. There are hazy bits- he reverse engineered hardware and wrote FOSS drivers for it once. He was a brilliant PhD candidate who never published. He reads code once, and gets it working. Like magic. But he dosen’t believe in magic. He believes in mathematics.

There is a dark side to this. The programmer who comes here knows in their heart that the final program is not theirs. Without him, it would never have run.

Today I saw a programmer dance with joy when armies marched across a monitor interfaced with a tiny chip, it’s PCB lying on the grubby basement floor.

The old computer scientist likes programmers. He has giant tomes about compilers, algorithms and software engineering, and keeps them piled up in the basement for anyone to read. All he asks for is obscurity. You are welcome with your bugs, and to listen to his musings. Gifts of language references for new programming languages, and their compilers are gratefully accepted, as is the odd new RAM when his stops working. But bring money and work, and you will be turned away. Or he will go away. And what will happen then?

As far as I know, he is old since my Algorithms professor was an undergraduate. He sits in this cave of his, with his music and his code (and your bugs). A demigod in obscurity.

Stallman?