The Night Watch (2013) [pdf]

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954077 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671020.

I'm not even a programmer, have not the least bit of technical knowledge about programming and I still found this brilliantly hilarious! Excellent rant..

My favorite bit from this:

"You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis. Denying the existence of pointers is like living in ancient Greece and denying the existence of Krackens and then being confused about why none of your ships ever make it to Morocco, or Ur-Morocco, or whatever Morocco was called back then. Pointers are like Krackens—real, living things that must be dealt with so that polite society can exist."

The mark of a good writer is they transcend boundaries.

I loathe fantasy as a genre and yet my favourite author ever is Terry Pratchett who wrote 40 odd books in a fantasy world.