Dilletante

June 6, 2025

I am no more than a tourist in this world. True of Code. True of everything. True by virtue of my own limitations.

A story having King James the First of England in it will explain.

It is my one trip to London. I follow a tour group threading around among the crypts of Westminster Cathedral, where the physical remains of Olde English monarchs are said to lie.

We come to James I in his alabaster box, him who comissioned the English translation of the Bible that bears his name. And down over there, the docent points for us, we see into the chamber where the royal translators performed the work.

Every language has words in it that succinctly encode concepts for which all the other languages need complete sentences or paragraphs to say. The translators would argue among themselves how to carry meaning across from the ancient Greek and Hebrew texts into the contemporary English of their time. In what language did they conduct these debates? Why, Latin, of course. You had to ask?

That is all I know about King James and his Biblical translation project, except to note that the work product withstood the test of time.

The vast difference between knowing about a thing, compared to having actual knowledge of it, means I can be only a tourist at the doorway of the room where a king's name became a synonym for holy scripture. Lacking both in languages and in theology, I could not inhabit that room.

Likewise, I can only visit Code. I write just enough of it to learn how to read it. When I read the work of real code writers, it is like visiting Westminster Cathedral as someone who can only read English. Here are the dead kings: Univacs that commanded whole rooms; their scribes encoding in ancient tongues of ALGOL, COBOL, FORTRAN. Over there, ‘C’, the Coronation Chair of nearly all modern languages, with its carven graffiti (C++, C#, countless incompatible compilers).

Now we arrive in Poet's Corner. Chaucer is buried here and I would lay Donald Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming, beside him in the fullness of time. Few can claim, as these giants surely may, to have established the foundations of the languages in which we do all of our writing today.

Lord Byron's monument abides in the Corner nearby, he the poet and father of Lady Ada Lovelace, she the originator of the loop in computer code-writing and spirit-namesake of Limor Fried, who calls herself Ladyada, founder of the electronics supplier Adafruit and generous contributor to the global open source software community around microcontrollers.

On my best day I only know about such great things. So I do only what a tourist may do after visiting great places, which is to leave, go home and scribble in my diary.