Peter Welch comienza un artículo sobre los bemoles del oficio de programar con algo que siempre he sentido:
Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There’s a team at a Google office that hasn’t slept in three days. Somewhere there’s a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she’s dead. And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.
Y luego hace un punto que es la absoluta verdad:
These things aren’t true because we don’t care and don’t try to stop them, they’re true because everything is broken because there’s no good code and everybody’s just trying to keep it running. That’s your job if you work with the internet: hoping the last thing you wrote is good enough to survive for a few hours so you can eat dinner and catch a nap
Un día, en 2019 o así, vamos a despertarnos con una crisis porque el mundo correrá sobre un mashup de JavaScript, todos habremos olvidado cómo escribir y reparar programas no-triviales y algún novato que nunca entendió herencia prototípica introducirá un bug en un sistema bancario que derrumbará los grandes edificios de occidente.