🔗 The programmer identity crisis

I am a programmer. A coder. A keyboard cowboy. A hacker. My day is spent punching keys; catalyzing code. It’s fun; it’s my identity. The editor, Vim, is my workshop, my sanctum1. Here, I hone my craft, sharpen my tools, expand my capabilities through curiosity, and for a while, escape into a trance-like flow. A full-screen terminal window with nothing between me and thought but INSERT mode. At the altar of Bram2, I spin reality’s yarn out of thin air into bits beaming through silicon. A completely imagined, non-tangible world with IRL ramifications. A place in which I find comfort in craft and creativity. Time disappears into puzzle-solving. Where connecting pieces matters more than completing a picture. Craft springs from fingers to buffer. I program and fade away into flow and composition.

In the late 1950s at MIT, a new and electrifying culture was emerging. Hands-on, experimental, and anti-establishment. I like to imagine myself there, sitting at the slate-blue L-shaped console. Typing away at the Flexowriter3 as it spits out punched paper tape programs to be fed to the nearby wall of metal uprights, tangled wire, and early transistors; the “Tixo”4. Waiting with bated breath, as enthralling beeps emanate from the machinery while it runs the program: will it succeed? I imagine the Hackers—as they came to be known—around me, pointing at code and offering advice on how to achieve “The Right Thing”5: the perfect program, pristine, elegant, and succinct. I can sense the original culture of programming pouring out of them as they passionately embody “The Hacker Ethic” while sharing stubs of their own paper programs to guide me on my quest.

It was there—in the computing crucible of building 26—that the craft of coding was cast. Nearly 70 years ago, members of the Tech Model Railroad Club immersed themselves in the language of machines to pursue a mastery of digital wizardry. The sublime magic of manipulating formal languages to solve increasingly challenging cryptic conundrums and—core to the culture—sharing findings with other students of the dark arts of software sorcery.

The ghosts of ancient Hackers past still roam the machines and—through the culture they established—our minds. Their legacy of the forging of craft lingers. A deep and kinetic craft we’ve extended and built a passionate industry on. We are driven by the same wonder, sense of achievement, and elegance of puzzle-solving as they were. Still driven by “The Right Thing.” These constitutional ideas, the very identity of programmers, are increasingly imperiled. Under threat. The future of programming, once so bright and apparent, is now cloaked in foreboding darkness, grifts, and uncertainty.