> Programming languages aren't just for machines to execute. There are for humans to communicate and collaborate.
"All it does is segfault!" I wake up in a cold sweat. It's still dark; a quick glance at the clock shows that it's about 3 in the morning. There's a stir besides me.
"Was it the dream again?" My wife says from the darkness to my side.
"It's fine, just go back to sleep."
She mumbles something incoherent and in a few moments she's snoring quietly. I lie down, but I already know there's no more sleep for me tonight.
+++
In the morning I arrive late in the office. I was in the parking lot at 7:30, but it took me an hour and a half to work up the nerve to walk in the building. They're at it again. The "collaborators". After we invented the perfect programming language for human communication and collaboration (we-lang) software developers took to calling themselves 'collaborators'. Today they're rehashing the same argument that they've been on for the past month.
"Michael, why are you always late? The computer is doing it again, and you know you're the only one who gets it." A loose mob of collaborators are standing around a 50 inch monitor on the wall. A half blank terminal monopolizes the screen. It seems to have been in the middle of producing log output, but now the cursor blinks lazily at a final message: "generic fault encountered".
It started with looks of confusion, then contempt, and finally resignation. And now I stare back, knowing how today is going to go. The same way as all days. "Yes, there are two problems, which is what I was trying to say yesterday. The first problem is that we're launching multiple threads and then they're all trying to modify the same unlocked data. And the second," I take a deep breath, "and the second is that the goal is kind of an open problem. We're potentially ambiguous in a few places and even if we weren't then it could take decades for the fastest computers to brute force a solution that conforms to the spec."
"Michael, we've been over this before. We all agreed that this is the nature that the UI should follow. We all agreed that this is how the back end ought to work. Why can't you, those mathematicians you keep talking about, and the computer all just get with the program. Maybe try being a team player for once." In the mob heads nod in ascent. We-Lang is perfect. Everyone agrees and understands everyone else. The collaboration between humanity has been achieved as if we were a single person. One mind. Unification.
But when we run it on the computer, all it does is segfault.