Mark on Nostr: Coding needs to be a religious act When we create software we try to make it safe, ...

Coding needs to be a religious act

When we create software we try to make it safe, reproducible, decentralized, user centered, reusable, etc.

These are all first order principles, which we've found thru trial and error. Software we built on these principles is more resilient against the ups and downs of the cyberspace. Or will not blow up in our faces etc. There's a full field in CompSci dedicated to this: Requirement engineering.
If we lessen the bar and fail to create software according to the right principles, this might bite us in mysterious and convoluted ways.
This might feel counter intuitive, but we need to tread software development as a holy act.
I don't say that we cannot make any mistakes anymore, but should hesitate to make decisions which are from wrong principles.
I think religious people will understand what I mean.

Nostr as an example:
Why nostr? Why not mastodon? Or just use X, parler or whatever? (Or ethereum instead of Bitcoin etc. The particular software is not that important)
Why develop yet another software to scream into the void?
Because nostr* is built on other first order principles than X or mastodon etc. You cannot have mastodon like nostr. This is totally different software.
now let's fast forward a couple of year's (e.g. 100 or so) and assume a sun storm or world war did not threw us back into medieval times.
Will the coders still be able to see the first order principles Bitcoin and nostr was built from? Will they see beauty in the algorithms as we see? I doubt it. How can we raise the next generation to not run Bitcoin into the ground, but to make the technological society prosper (and not enslave us all). IMHO our successors must threat their work as holy. Then they won't try shortcuts or are lazy when they ship the software.
If you want to transfer the right principles thru the ages you have to get religious. You cannot just hand over a manual on software development to the next generation since the understanding of language will change. Or they won't read it, since reading is boring. Or will read the manual,
but misunderstand it in subtle ways.
One could now argue that this is fine - we all make mistakes and at the end our whole life is trial and error. But we don't need to repeat all the mistakes our ancestors did. In the short time we got in this world any progress is not possible, if we all need to start from 0 again.

I think most of the software will ossify - but still... Someone has to run and understand the technology. We cannot just rely on the servers to run forever or the smartphone to work always.

* yes, I know that I mix up a protocol (nostr) and a software (mastodon) here. I could also talk about nostr and activityhub or amethyst and mastodon instead. But for the argument the particular software does not matter.

#devstr #religion #christianostr