The nihilist programmer takes as axiomatic that their product is already broken. It is in constant flux, poorly defined, the product of compromise in design, and inevitably compromised in implementation. Even more, that it will remain this way, by its nature, forever. The nihilist programmer starts from these axioms and then decides what to do. What to do? The least amount of change possible. Limit exposure, limit effect. Get to the next checkpoint.
The particular medicine isn’t a bad one, per se. There’s value in those limits. What’s bad, I think, is the ethos. If a thing is undefinable, you will naturally resist efforts to define it. If a thing is forever in flux, you will resist efforts to freeze it. If a thing is composed exclusively of compromise, you will resist efforts to make decisive decisions. And if a thing will never be good, you will resist efforts to make it good.
.. The optimist programmer assumes the thing can be good, and constantly initiates to make it good. That the thing shouldn’t contain compromise, and should reflect clear decisions. That the thing should be defined and then built, and not rock forever on a sea of changing assumptions. That the thing ought rightly be defined, that its true form is definitional.
.. Successful projects live somewhere in the middle. But I think all good software is fundamentally optimistic. Not that it won’t contain compromise, or technical debt to be repaid, but that it doesn’t start from the assumption that nothing is definite and all hope is lost. Optimistic software makes decisive claims, executes on them, and owns the compromises it makes.
America, From Exceptionalism to Nihilism
The U.S. leads the free world in its helplessness
before the dissolution of its most cherished values.Walter Lippmann worried that the promise of private wealth-creation was a weak moral basis for a national community.
For many midcentury thinkers, nihilism, a catastrophic breakdown of faith in national ideology and institutions that had occurred in Europe, was also a possibility in America.
.. The 1960s and 1970s did turn out to reveal a country sharply divided along generational, racial, religious, gender and political lines. White and black, gay and straight, men and women, religious and secular, antiwar protesters and hard-hatted patriots all faced off. For a time, the founding principles of American society — the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — seemed like they would be unable to adjudicate between the competing, often clashing, interests.
.. It has been too easily forgotten that the calamitous failure of these “market Bolsheviks,” as the economist Joseph Stiglitz called them, helped spawn the first major demagogue of our time: Vladimir V. Putin.
.. In another self-protective move, these intellectuals have taken to blaming identity politics for Mr. Trump’s support among white male voters.
.. It could be argued that this frequently asserted and widely believed American creed of continuous and irreversible progress is what saved a diverse society not only from tragic social conflicts, but also from the mass manipulators who have periodically ruined other countries with their quack solutions. Today, however, more people seem to have seen through the constructed nature of this quasi-religious faith: It’s credible only if you believe in it.
.. They feel deceived by a class of politicians, experts, technocrats and journalists which had claimed to be in possession of the truth and offered a series of propositions that turned out to be misleading or wrong:
- the rising tide of globalization will lift all boats,
- the market is free and fair, shock therapy would bring capitalism to Russia,
- shock-and-awe therapy would deliver democracy to Iraq.
Many of the aggrieved now see the elites, who offered to expedite progress while expanding their own power and wealth, as self-serving charlatans.
.. America has accelerated its most insidious tendency: nihilism.