Chiba-City

FWIW, hundreds of thousands of Christian and Buddhist monks alive today all over our world live near to one another in cells or caves. A farming monastery in Arizona started 20 years ago is just beautiful and thriving. WV now has a Buddhist monastery. Buddhist monks are considered "ordained" but not most Christian monks. Lives of quiet or social Renunciation are everywhere and growing in number. Some even have fast WiFi. Go look on YouTube. I have been considering and schematically budgeting an urban ecumenical working monastery in Washington DC that would support itself with OSS testing, documentation and language localization.

I studied Philosophy at Harvard decades ago while working for Unitarians in Emerson's old church, had the privilege of paying Brad Cox's salary for a few years and now read Pali Buddhist Suttas, Stoics and Christian Scripture. 1) Stoics had huge impact on both pre-Christian Hellenized Jews and then centuries of early Christians. They distributed Epictetus' Enchiridion with "Jesus" penciled in for "Socrates." Most literate forefathers enjoyed some of that education. I even went to a Latin School. Stoicism runs DEEP in linguistic DNA like Aristotle. 2) Buddhism overlaps tightly with Stoicism and not by accident. Buddhists were all over the Silk Road alongside Stoics and Platonists for centuries surrounding O CE. Buddhism is also increasingly popular and the #2 religion in CA ahead of Islam. 3) Stoicism brings us back to personal regimen ethics components of philosophy most Philosophers of Math, Science And Language abandoned for a few recent centuries. 4) Smarter literate people are turning to Philosophy or High Orthodox philosophy-friendly religious traditions in rejecting Nationalist political ideologies. Traditionally "politics" was City-State local or School Cosmopolitan. City State politics are still quite strong here in DC or in NYC, BO or SF. Techies loving global protocols and online conversations are akin to Cosmopolitan Philosophical schools. We can think of geometry, applied maths and maybe Jupyter Notebooks soon as our Lingua Franca of sorts. Nation States are VERY recent Western fetishes that are less and less the focus of civilian political ambitions for overlapping good reasons. As a Sutta loving Stoic Cosmopolitan happier software engineering denizen of Christendom I judge that turning away from battle flags hopes very wise. [edits. Sorry for typos.]

Beautifully written. This is sleepy stream of consciousness, but I'll add that the conscientious developer internalizes their discipline and then sees new problem spaces everywhere, some realm of actual or potential responsibility. Most otherwise good folks in the world don't - can't really - easily reciprocate. I turned 50 today, and it's in the last year that I learned so many otherwise qualified professionals all around me just don't ever really study the manuals. Creative systematic development must cease being needlessly sacrificial. There's some emerging awareness of its occupational hazards that needs to be addressed if we want to transfer wisdom successfully over generations to better thrive. A few chapters of Shrage's "No More Teams" refer to software languages as a legitimate standard for what collaborative innovating literacy might someday mean.

Please, assembly is OK. It's not even magic or special wizardry. My dad programmed and maintained insurance industry applications in assembly side by side with many other normal office workers for decades. Assembly is OK.

I absolutely love my Moto G with T-Mobile. I won't buy an "on contract" phone again. I have no need to upgrade, but this new one looks like a winner too. I've been turning friends and family onto the Moto G, saving them a ton of money and worry about broken phones.

My computing device history goes way back to Commodore 64 and Apple IIc, I became a developer in the late 80's and today I am absolutely fascinated by relatively "disposable" < $200 phones, ChromeBooks and laptops.

After decades of developing new software for the next great leap in hardware specs, we're entering an interesting new phase of software development for a new class of hardware targets. Good times!

This is a very good question. Unix/C came from the glorious "system building" era. They took responsibility for building and documenting "the whole stack" - from assembly to signals to troff. Wirth's Oberon OS/language were codesigned in the same fashion. Smalltalk/V took over a PC.

Ceylon seems like a very nicely designed language (and I don't mean syntax). I would love to see a LLVM back end and the requisite docs for low level system hacking.