Never Done (Paperback)

Paperback. Two ordinary moments from a working week. A function ships clean, and months later fails on a case its type checker looked straight at and passed. A service that shipped clean a year ago, untouched since, will no longer run - nothing in it moved; everything under it did. The first says a rule can never cover every case it governs; the second, that an artefact can never be finished, only kept in being. This is a book about those two refusals and its single claim of them: neither ever closes. One opening is logical, a limit no procedure escapes, sharpened here into a theorem; the other is temporal, the upkeep of software having the form of labor - consumed in the doing, setting nothing down for good. Held apart as two lenses, they are shown to touch at one place a programmer can point to: the commit in which a custom kept by hand hardens into a rule a machine enforces. And the enclosure settles nothing: it moves the unruled margin rather than removing it, opening a fresh frontier at the new rule's edge. From that join follows an account of what a maker does where nothing comes to rest - not finishing, which no one can do, but staffing the unfinishable in the open. The fifth volume in the Code Crafting series, written to be read alone. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…