Never Done: The Double Non-Closure of Software Work

Two ordinary moments from a working week. A function ships clean,and months later fails on a case its type checker looked straightat and passed. A service that shipped clean a year ago, untouchedsince, will no longer run - nothing in it moved; everything underit did. The first says a rule can never cover every case it governs;the second, that an artefact can never be finished, only kept inbeing.This is a book about those two refusals and its single claim ofthem: neither ever closes. One opening is logical, a limit noprocedure escapes, sharpened here into a theorem; the other istemporal, the upkeep of software having the form of labor - consumed in the doing, setting nothing down for good. Held apart astwo lenses, they are shown to touch at one place a programmer canpoint to: the commit in which a custom kept by hand hardens into arule a machine enforces. And the enclosure settles nothing: it movesthe unruled margin rather than removing it, opening a fresh frontier atthe new rule's edge. From that join follows an account of what amaker does where nothing comes to rest - not finishing, which noone can do, but staffing the unfinishable in the open. The fifthvolume in the Code Crafting series, written to be read alone.