I always come back to this Christopher Alexander talk from 1996 where he was invited to talk about how his architectural design book inspired Object Oriented Programming and feed into that hype, and instead he basically just flat out told them to grow up and think about WHAT the impact of their work is because he argued programmers have an immense power to shape the future and as far as he could see programmers didn’t really seem to give a shit about the WHY at all, it was all about HOW…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_QzdKci6OY

So, today, I am standing before you, thinking to myself…right, I’m now talking to people who are in a way the core of the computer revolution. You probably realize, I know you must realize the extent to which the world is gradually now being shaped more and more and more, indirectly, by the efforts of all of you who are sitting in this room—because it is you who control the function of computers and their programs. It is the programs that control the shape of manufacturing, the shape of the transportation industries, construction management, diagnosis in medicine, printing and publishing. You almost can’t name a facet of the world which is not already, to some very strong degree, under the influence of the programs that are being written to manage and control those entities or those operations. And this is still in its infancy. How long has this been really going on? Not long. About 10 or 15 years, though of course, the preparation for it goes a lot further back than that. But really this is quite new. It is going to look a whole lot different, even more powerful in its degree of influence.

And yet, as a professional body, I don’t think that you are yet fully aware of it. I’m probably speaking out of turn here but, you know, I’ve thumbed through the proceedings of this conference, for instance. Jim was kind enough to show it to me yesterday. I don’t really see discussion about What, collectively, are computer scientists supposed to be doing with all these programs. How are they supposed to help the Earth? And, yet, the capacity to do that is sitting right here in this room. That is an amazing situation. You have so much power.…but that means that you also have an enormous responsibility.

https://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/ieee.html

I am sure at the time most programmers laughed and thought “isn’t that quaint what Christopher Alexander is saying, what a quirky dude he kind of sounds a little like a communist!”, let the thoughts from the talk fly out of their head forever after waving condescendingly, and turned to focus on the next career climbing move at the conference.

I fear nothing has changed, especially since the US tech industry fantastically failed to unionize in the two decades since and now the industry is likely going to significantly shrink in the US after the AI bubble pops as the few consolidated massive tech companies left fired all their talent to buy a bunch of useless data centers that aren’t even built yet and may never be built.

Programmers had a chance to wrestle control of the future away from oligarchs, but instead they became obsessed with playing Factorio with every aspect of society without EVER thinking about what the consequences were or why they were being paid to do what they were doing.

Programmers are not insane. You, on the other hand…