"I read a lovely story in my youth about shooting Nuns who were trespassing on a beach. Such purity of mission - such strength of resolve. It reminds me of the first real lesson I got from the service: 'Patience is the enemy!'. When I was able to grasp such a subtle yet inevitable truth on my own, my dear mother was actually brought to tears." His face is now hairless and smooth, the gray beard of a moment ago nowhere to be seen. We wait for this emotional episode to pass, as he wipes his eyes, and his shoulders continue to tremble. Slowly his age returns to the same early middle age he was when we first encountered him. I'm waiting for the next outburst from any one of this trio of political rivals, when the arms pusher suddenly hears something of importance to himself and begins carefully scrutinizing the horizon. Only after I follow his gaze and notice the motion of whoever it is that he's watching do I hear the TWANG of a bow that caught his attention.
"So sorry to take my leave at this early hour gentlemen, but I'm afraid business calls from yonder hill. Have a nice day." With a wink and a smile and handshakes all around, he's off and running, hoping to prevent an insufficiently armed conflict of any sort.
Of course that leaves us here with the holy bomber, and I don't suppose J--- will remain civil in this context for too long. My fears are confirmed almost instantly as they start probing and taunting one another.
The man looks us over with a look of utter hatred and contempt. From my long hair to J---'s partially shaved head, to the black jeans and leather, J---'s pierced ear and my bat conservation t- shirt, nothing pleases his holy, inalterable judgment.
He fixes his eye on J---. "I normally don't associate with lost souls, pagan."
J--- bristles. "You don't know what I believe in. How can you imply that I'm guilty of some sort of unpardonable sin with no knowledge of any acts, good or bad?"
The fundamentalist gives a scornful roll of the eyes. "I've dealt with enough of your type over the years. That last comment gave you away, as if your appearance wasn't enough. Do you think god is interested in throwing your case out of court on some technical infraction?"
"That's not the point!"
Voices are raised, matched, and raised again.
"You're right, that's not the point. The point is that Jesus is coming, and he is your one and only chance to avoid eternal damnation!"
I resist the obvious obscene response. Luckily J--- doesn't seem to be aware of it, and also remains silent.
He seems to examine J---'s T-shirt depicting some rock band I can't identify with great interest. His insane gaze creeps skyward, then slowly returns to burn deeply into J---'s eyes. "Appreciation is the first step towards Idolatry!" he screeches.
J--- sputters at this ridiculous claim. "How can you possibly equate the appreciation - rational acknowledgment - of something that is good or worthwhile, with the worship of idols?"
"It's the first step on the long road to hell, sinner!" He replies at high volume.
"Do you really think this is how Jesus would want you to live and think? He taught men to lead simple and good lives, not to attack ...."
"I'm trying to save you from the twisted world Satan has laid before your eyes! Jesus is your only hope of salvation from God's judgment!"
"But isn't Jesus God too? That's circular - God as Jesus is saving me from his own judgment? How can you suggest conflict within a single deity, never mind a perfect, OMNISCIENT deity? And why would a deity that is outside of time and sees everything before it happens change his mind about salvation?"
"Do not attempt to judge your creator. His ways are beyond our comprehension, and far above your condemnation. You are a flawed creature whom God dearly wants to return to righteousness. He cannot help it if you earn your own damnation."
"You're mapping human-human conflicts onto a human-deity relationship. They are not the same. If I do something 'wrong', and an omnipotent deity is responsible for everything that ever happened to me leading up to that event, and for my very existence and form, how could he possibly punish his own flawed creation? All cause would lie with him."
This is met with a condemning glare. "Your tricks and sly tongue won't save you from final judgment!" He points upwards. "You choose your fate yourself - eternal life or eternal damnation stand before you. You have but to accept God's gift to you. That is all."
"I don't believe any of this. Why should I, can you tell me that?"
I can't believe J--- is taunting a fanatic as heavily armed as this guy is. He's clearly nearing the end of his rope.
"You only live once. You might as well die twice."
Ah, that's about was I was waiting for. J---'s expression changes in a second as he sees that this debate is about to transcend verbal discourse. I back away a few steps.
The Lemur King suddenly appears in the blasted skeleton of a tree nearby. "There are many ways to salvation, aren't there, my friend?" He slyly taunts, giving us a wink.
"My way is the only way to salvation!" The fundoid cries back, throwing one fist up and pointing again to heaven.
A deafening crashing noise erupts above us, and I'm on the ground with my arms covering my head before I know what's going on. As I get up, I am simultaneously struck by the overpowering stench of ozone and burnt meat. J--- is the only other person around, as our previous companion seems to have been reduced to a small pile of overcooked bacon. Apparently someone up above took issue with his stance. The Lemur King is picking his way slowly between shell craters in the distance.
Neither of us knows quite how to react to this, and in the ensuing silence I can dimly hear a radio radiating a news broadcast about NASA's ongoing project to tunnel through the celestial crystal sphere separating us from the outer planets. Apparently attacks by demons have rendered one sentinel probe inoperative, placing the manned ships in direct danger until the expected reinforcements of Angelic troops arrive. I don't recall hearing about this project before, but I let that slide.
Typical of humans, J--- becomes much more outspoken in his argument against religion now that his opponent is no longer present. "It's ridiculous. They can't see past their own narrow blinders - if you're not following their way, you're a Satanist!"
"Well, that's consistent with their cosmology. They realize that you think you're following something outside the YHWH/Satan conflict, but they think you're wrong, and being deceived. It is reasonable based on the primary assumptions, which may or may not be reasonable. Those assumptions are what you must debate however."
"Yeah, but they're too obsessed with their mind-numbing slogans of salvation to debate anything of that subtlety."
"Those are just random street fanatics. If you look, you can certainly find people in any religion that actually pursue these problems and look for real answers."
J--- just won't give up. "Well, fundamentalists are the worst." "Actually in some respects you've got to give fundamentalists the most credit. They're striving to follow the fundamental ideals of their religion, shedding any distortions and craft that have accumulated over the years from purely uninspired human sources. Politics adds layers to any ancient religion, and such material is obviously of absolutely no real worth and has no legitimacy."
"Yeah, but these nutcases that sleep eat and breath their religion..."
"Are the only theists you can take seriously." I shock J--- with that of course. "If their God really does exist, how else should they behave? Consider REALLY believing in God - like you believe that the sun exists and will rise every morning to illuminate the day. You base almost every facet of your day-to-day existence around that assumption. How could you possibly do otherwise? So too with real religious beliefs. You're just too accustomed to superficial religion users."
We walk in silence for a while.
"So what kind of religious beliefs do you respect?" I wonder what J---'s background on this is anyway.
"Personal, intuitive. Pagans and hermits."
"So it's the style or approach, not the specific cosmology that you react to."
"Yeah."
We both stop suddenly, as the jungle parts before our steps, and we see a small clearing before a cave at the mouth of which sits a hermit.
J--- is now confronted with the incarnation of his alleged ideals. I can see he is nervous, his claims being put to an irrefutable test - confrontation with reality. He steps forward and immediately gains confidence in his situation, as he is showered with warm greetings from the rising hermit.
"We are not familiar with this land, my friend and I are only just passing through. Actually, we're completely lost, and wandering wherever the path might take us."
The hermit laughs at this and reassures J--- that his wandering can take a break now, in his hospitality. "You are my first visitors since the winter. Many years ago when trade routes passed within a few miles of this cave of mine, I dreaded the distracting sight of strangers, but these days a few visitors a year doesn't bother my own pursuits of meditation and contemplation."
J--- is enthralled by this display of articulation from a cave dweller. "How do you manage to live with this poverty?" He brings us right around to our original debate.
The hermit is startled by these words. "What poverty? Look, I have a stick." He holds up a stick, displaying it from every angle, obviously with great pride.
"So you are content with this ascetic life, even though you have knowledge of modern civilization?" J--- is thrilled.
"Certainly. Why pursue more than is necessary? I have what I want. I do not need to be surrounded by the pursuit of greed that consumes all social interaction in modern times. I do not need the petty power plays and competition of egos that passes for 'high society'. I have a sufficiently powerful and flexible environment in which to work." J--- greets that last comment with a blank stare, then decides to ignore it and continue bashing his own lifestyle, without bothering to reject it himself. Oh yeah.
"So you have conquered materialism by doing without desire. Meanwhile the main herd of mankind scampers on, thinking that asceticism means doing without fulfillment of desire. What shortsightedness!"
I don't think the hermit quite knows what to make of these ravings coming from a member of the main herd of humanity, and he just shrugs.
A fire is roaring in a pit at the entrance to the cave. Beyond we can see a scattered assortment of basic stone-age tools and a few cleaned animal skins. Beyond those, at the very back of the cave, lights flash and a soft hum drones. He notices my curiosity, and beckons me to follow him. Soon I am standing beneath a wall of rack-mounted equipment, hypnotized by the blinking lights, as J--- waits outside by the fire.
"36 bits of cosmic adoration." He chuckles.
He shows me to the hardcopy console and logs me into a guest account. My tenex is a little rusty, but it feels good to be back. I'd never been online in stranger surroundings though. I jump into ADVENT for a second, but I'm just not in the mood right now.
"This is an original, but I'm working on a GaAS implementation over there." He points to another wall of racks, this one sans skins. A few boards seem to be running, but it is clearly in a very early stage of development. A flickering life is hiding amongst the tangled ribbon cables and logic probes. Birth.
"It's mostly FPGAs right now, but a few of my own fabled chips are in there. I'm still at the run-it-till-it-hangs-then-grab- the-logic-analyzer stage."
"What are you using these for?" I ask.
"The search for truth and illumination. I seek new methods of closing the mind-machine gap and of extending the capacity of the human mind in general."
"Ah - user interface stuff?" Weird machine to do it on, but...
"Not really. Though-" another chuckle "I suppose you can consider language design to be the user interface for programmers at a certain deeper level. I seek new languages for better natural expression of problems and their solutions. This is the real issue in user interface design, not dinky little details like GUI look-and-feel. For example, Lisp (and relatives) have the well-known JvNesque advantage of being able to easily manipulate their own code. Unfortunately, I have a hard time approaching problems with a tree-reduction mindset. I need an ALGOL-descendant language with this capacity. Haven't found it yet, alas, alas. I need density and power without a line noise syntax." He muses.
"There are still problems with basic GUI systems though. There's still plenty of work to be done in that area, no?" I'm still not sure about where he's coming from, or what era of system development he's even aware of. Can he really be dismissing such a massive chunk of contemporary study so casually?
"Sure, but I don't care. There's enough problems out there for everyone. I'll leave the worthless superficial toy problems to people that fall for that sort of thing. The basic issues in graphical interfaces are simple, the obvious solutions just haven't been properly implemented yet. It's more of an industry problem than a technical problem."
This is going a bit too far, and I leap to the attack. "You might argue that the external behavior that is desired is understood (and I might disagree) but the internals become more complex as we see heavy networking, distributed processes, and graphic access to big iron." I'm still not sure if his casual dismissal of these problems indicates ignorance or transcendence.
"Of course you have to take these things into consideration, but it's still not particularly interesting. You shouldn't burden your primary machine with mindless visual interface stuff - that can be handled on the user's desktop with a cheap microprocessor. There's no question that a client-server distribution is a good ideal. The question is really where to split the problem (and problems can be split into more than two pieces of course) and what level of protocol to use between the client and server. I don't like graphic-level protocols for basic user-interface stuff. It wastes bandwidth and limits the desktop implementation. A generalized user-interface protocol would be much better. You know - 'This is a menu of commands. Display it as you wish, and tell me if the user chooses one of them.' leave the rest up to the desktop machine, eh? Then we get into questions of protocol design. If you use something that functions as a full programming language (certain stack-based typesetting languages come to mind) then you give the programmer amazing power to go beyond the original intent of the system in playing with the problem distribution. However, that protocol then becomes very difficult to usefully filter. That can be a drawback."
He does present an interesting tradeoff here. I'd run into this problem as a user previously, but not as an implementor. "So what do you see as the ideal general purpose language?"
He smiles at this. "Hey, if I knew that I would have written it already!" He laughs. "User interface, at whatever level of abstraction, is our biggest problem." Another laugh. "Everything else is a simple matter of programming."
He becomes serious again, and gestures as he begins to speak. "Your program is a structure through which data flows - the less active its motions, the more powerful it is. You must design your code such that data solves itself naturally. Your code represents a virtual machine whose machine language is the data which your program is designed to process. This may be code to be compiled, sampled data to be analyzed or recognized, or interactive keystrokes to be acted upon. Everyone realizes superficially that data and code are the same thing, but you must really grasp this equivalence at a deeper level if you are to write code such that your data becomes code to solve this problem. I can talk about this in the most general terms, but I cannot teach it directly. It is a lesson that can only be zenned directly by the student."
I don't think many current computer science students would deal well with these surroundings, but I don't say anything, and he continues after a moment.
"OK - so think about accessing operating system services - either at the command-line level or through system calls from within a program. Suppose I'm asking for a file, or asking to run a program and get its output - should there be any difference in accessing these two different sources of streams of data? If they're presented to user space via the same mechanism then they can be changed without breaking programs or user behavior at the prompt. For example - a system data file that is periodically updated by some daemon might be replaced with a program that goes and gets that data as needed. If done correctly, no user need be aware that the change took place. Analogously, think of the difference in most programming languages between accessing data - variables or complex structures - versus calling a function which might receive and return various chunks of data. Again - local data structures might be replaced in a library with functions that generate that data on demand from external or even remote sources. Why make the program and programmer aware of such distinctions? You know what you want, by name and by interface, who cares about its internal representation? Object oriented programming is a technique, a style, a general approach to programming. It does not require special languages, nor do special languages give it to you automatically."
We stare in silence as patterns chase themselves across that status lights rigged up on the half-built creature in the corner. I think I recognize the familiar five-pixel glider from Life, zooming along diagonally at half the speed of light, go zipping through the front panel and away into oblivion, but perhaps I imagined it.
He breaks the silence at last. "Shared memory has always had a sort of magical attraction for me."
"You like shared libraries a lot, eh?" I wonder what he's babbling about now. Maybe he's still using core and hasn't discovered cheap ram yet.
"Actually, no. I mean of course they're nice, and logically I appreciate the technique, but they don't give me that special feeling. It's automatic, I think that's why. I like user-space shared memory tricks. I want it totally explicit - I want to feel the shared memory segments squishing around in between my toes."
He shows me his collection of manuals for various historic machines and operating systems, then we head back out to the fire where J--- awaits us.
"The simple life is best." Says J---, thinking of hunter- gatherers and open fires.
"Absolutely." Says the hermit, thinking of CLIs and TTYs.
"Indeed." Say I, thinking of a way to ditch J---.
"Anyone who spent some time out here really experiencing life at this level, couldn't fail to come to the same conclusion as we." J--- is in full stride now.
Yeah, that's right, fool. Everything is just like you imagine it to be. All external structures fit nice and snug into your preconceived conceptual containers and nothing exists outside your understanding of reality. Right this way sir, won't you walk off this plank into the waiting room down below? Watch your step sir. Have a nice trip.

[Continued next issue]

David Fischer

was born in 1968, lives in Providence, works in a factory, and thinks The Germs are the greatest band of all time. His current fave author is Anita Desai.


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