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Comment by peterclary | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe that you can be said to cherish something if you don't care if it goes and you don't feel the need to preserve it.

cherish (verb):

1. to love, protect, and care for someone or something that is important to you:

Although I cherish my children, I do allow them their independence.

Her most cherished possession is a 1926 letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Freedom of speech is a cherished (= carefully protected) right in this country.

2. to keep hopes, memories, or ideas in your mind because they are important to you and bring you pleasure:

I cherish the memories of the time we spent together.

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Why not? I have fond memories of it. I have the memories of sleeping in my car for weeks on end when I was building the software. I have memories of the two friends I built it with. I have fond memories of the bucket-based OpenGL render engine I wrote for it, the dynamic water system, the physically-driven character rig, the 3D models I made, memories of the art I painted.

I also remember the blog posts I wrote about some of the complexities and fun problems we solved. I remember the reviews written about the product.

I cherish it. I just don't care if I have the source code or a working binary (though I still have the latter until this 32 bit support is dropped!). I have the memories and experience and the desire to create more.

Your quote says it all:

> I cherish the memories of the time we spent together.

I cherish the time I spent creating my software and putting it out into the world. Now I'm creating something else, and I'm happy with the memories.

So you cherish the memories, not the thing

I don't know if there is really a difference there.

It is absolutely possible to care, and love, and cherish something -- while also be willing to let it go, so you can move on to something else. And it's software, not a human child or something. These are absolutely not in conflict, at all. Why does this even need to be said? Are half the people here robots? Apparently they are, because the moment someone talks about throwing away some software, people begin making allusions to child rearing.

Bringing out dictionaries is just a way of being an annoying pendant; nitpicking phrasing like "... and care for" in a Merriam Webster definition does not make you sound like someone enlightened "loving" or in tune. It makes you sound like that insufferable jackass, that guy everyone avoids, because they have to remind everyone "but what about the pedantry" anytime any complaint exists in the public sphere.

I'm not trying to sound anything at all. I'm trying to understand his point of view. I broke out the dictionary to help establish whether he was using the word as I understood it, not as an attempt at irritating pedantry.

The discussion is about whether it matters that these 32-bit apps (and more generally, all software eventually) will be lost to us. In that context, whether you cherish the thing or the memory of the thing is a crucial distinction.

As for being loving or "in tune", jumping on strangers who are trying to understand somebody's point of view is neither. It is precisely the behaviour of a jackass.

Some people are genuinely upset when they lose the use of cherished thing, be it a pen, a car, or the iOS games or other apps which they enjoyed using, and ignoring that or dismissing that out of hand betrays a lack of empathy.

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