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SMALL_BITES

                                             October 21, 2021

In the 1980s, the popularity of free-market
libertarianism among computer-folk was pretty
striking, and a common question was "why?".

An old thought of mine:

    "I've always had a pet theory that
    lots of hackers become libertarians,
    because hacking, though it may start      Originally, this thought was
    out as a quest for control, becomes       posted to su.etc group at
    a fundamentally humbling experience.      Stanford, but here I'm quoted
    'I can't even debug a few thousand        from:
    lines of code, how could I possibly
    handle engineering a society?  How                LIBERTY
    could anyone?'"
                                                     (That's a now somewhat
The idea there is that falling back on               embarassing collection
market mechanisms is an attempt at                   of pro-libertarian bits
contriving a simple organizing principle             from the mid-80s.)
to substitute for the difficulty of
getting large-scale social planning to work.

    Managing complexity is the central             The idea that you can
    problem of computer programming, and           hold the entire code base
    there are various strategies for               in your head has long
    organizing your code neatly that it is         since been abandoned--
    hoped if followed scrupulously will            instead it's understood
    create a more comprehensible code base         the problems need to be
    that's easier to to test, maintain and         subdivided into smaller
    extend...                                      ones an individual can
                                                   work on.

                                                   The only question is "how":
                                                   the various competing
                                                   programming methodologies
                                                   are esssentially different
                                                   divide-and-conquer
                                                   strategies.


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