esc
Anthology / Yagnipedia / Love

Love

The Only Bug That Ships As a Feature
Phenomenon · First observed Approximately 13.8 billion years ago (universe); 1990 (riclib, an Amiga 500) · Severity: Terminal (Chronic, Irrational, Non-Refactorable)

Love is an irrational, non-deterministic, persistently stateful phenomenon characterised by an attachment to something that cannot be justified through benchmarks, architecture diagrams, or cost-benefit analysis, and which persists despite — and frequently because of — a complete absence of logical foundation.

In software engineering, love manifests as the feeling a developer experiences when code works exactly right. Not approximately right. Not “passes the tests” right. Right right — the feeling that the solution and the problem are the same shape, that the code does the thing and nothing else, and that the binary, when compiled, is not merely correct but inevitable.

This feeling cannot be engineered, specified, or reproduced in a standup. It can only be recognised, and only by those who have felt it, which is all of them, though most will deny it in professional settings.

“Just Go, SQLite, and stubbornness.”
— riclib, describing a love story, The Databases We Didn’t Build

Taxonomy

Love in software engineering occurs in several documented forms:

Love at First Sight — The immediate, overwhelming conviction that a technology is correct, experienced before any rational evaluation has taken place. See: Delphi, 1995. A boy dragged a TButton onto a TForm, pressed F9, and the binary compiled in less time than it took to blink. The binary had no dependencies. The binary ran on everything. The boy did not evaluate competing frameworks. The boy did not write a comparison matrix. The boy fell in love, and the love was correct, and the industry spent thirty years proving it was correct by failing to improve upon it.

Love of the Craft — The deep, abiding satisfaction of making something work with nothing wasted. This is the love the demo scene taught: 488 bytes, six layers of stars, and the knowledge that every byte served a purpose. It is the love that survives fifteen years of management, architecture meetings, and slide decks, and returns, fully intact, the moment the developer touches a compiler again.

Love of Simplicity — The most dangerous form, because it looks like laziness to those who do not understand it. This is the love that chooses scp over Kubernetes, SQLite over PostgreSQL clusters, and a single Go binary over a containerised microservices mesh with a service discovery layer and a deployment pipeline that requires its own deployment pipeline. This love is frequently mistaken for ignorance. It is the opposite of ignorance. It is the love that remains after everything unnecessary has been removed.

Love of Tools — The bond between a developer and the instruments of their craft: the keyboard whose switches are broken in exactly the right way, the editor whose keybindings are muscle memory older than some colleagues, the language that feels like thinking rather than typing. This love is irrational. The keyboard is not objectively better. The editor is not objectively superior. The language is missing generics (or had them reluctantly added). None of this matters. Love does not require generics.

Infatuation — A temporary, high-intensity attachment to a technology, characterised by evangelism, blog posts, and a complete rewrite of the current project. Duration: approximately forty-eight hours. See: The Caffeinated Squirrel.

The Delphi Affair

The lifelog’s earliest documented case of technological love is Delphi.

The symptoms were textbook: immediate attachment, irrational loyalty, a refusal to consider alternatives, and a thirty-year insistence that the thing loved was correct despite the entire industry choosing otherwise. The attachment began in 1995, when riclib encountered a development environment that compiled native binaries, had a visual designer that manipulated the same objects as the code, produced executables with zero dependencies, and solved problems with the minimum ceremony required to get from intent to working software.

This was love at first sight, and like all love at first sight, it was instant, irrational, and entirely accurate.

The loved one was eventually abandoned — not by the lover, but by the market. Delphi’s decline was not a failure of the technology but a failure of the world to deserve it. The lover moved on. The principles did not. They reappeared, thirty years later, in a Go struct with a Render() method, and the lover recognised them immediately, the way you recognise a face in a crowd that you haven’t seen in decades but never forgot.

“We spent 30 years building React and Redux and Flux and hooks and signals and stores… to arrive back at Object Pascal patterns with extra steps.”
— riclib, Raiders of the Lost Architecture — A V3 Origin Story

This is the Delphi Pattern applied to the heart: you love something, you lose it, you search for it in everything else, and you find it again in the simplest possible form.

The Go Affair

The second great love was Go.

The circumstances were different — riclib had not programmed in fifteen years — but the mechanism was identical. A Python script took two minutes. The same script in Go took less than a second. The developer stared at the terminal. The data was there. All of it. Correct. And the language was not in the way.

This is the moment love happens in software: not when the technology impresses, but when the technology disappears. When the tool becomes invisible and only the work remains. When the developer forgets they are using a language and remembers they are solving a problem.

Go did not win riclib’s affection through features. Go won by refusing to have features. No generics (at the time). No pattern matching. No macros. No operator overloading. if err != nil repeated four hundred times per file. And despite all of this — because of all of this — the code compiled, the binary ran, the binary deployed with scp, and the developer who had spent fifteen years in meeting rooms was programming again and it felt like coming home.

You cannot explain why Go feels right. You can only compile and know.

The Squirrel’s Forty-Eight-Hour Cycle

The Caffeinated Squirrel experiences love differently.

The Squirrel falls in love with every new framework for exactly forty-eight hours. The pattern is invariant:

Hour 0: Discovery. The Squirrel encounters a new JavaScript framework on Hacker News. The README contains the word “reactive.” The Squirrel’s pupils dilate.

Hour 1-6: Infatuation. The Squirrel creates a proof of concept. The proof of concept is 827 lines. It specifies an IndexedDB primary store, a WebSocket sync layer, a custom morphing algorithm, and a 7-layer trust fabric. The Squirrel writes a manifesto.

Hour 6-24: Evangelism. The Squirrel proposes rewriting the entire codebase in the new framework. The proposal includes a migration plan, a timeline, and a slide deck. The slide deck has forty-seven slides.

Hour 24-47: Doubt. A second framework appears on Hacker News. Its README also contains the word “reactive.” The Squirrel’s pupils dilate again. The first framework begins to seem limited.

Hour 48: Abandonment. The first framework is dead. Long live the second framework. The manifesto is archived. The proof of concept is deleted. The forty-seven slides are repurposed.

The Squirrel does not love less than the Lizard. The Squirrel loves more — more frequently, more intensely, more frameworks. The Squirrel’s love is not shallow. It is wide. It covers every framework, every library, every npm package with more than a thousand stars. It is the love of possibility, the love of “what if,” the love of the next thing. It is beautiful and exhausting and it ships nothing.

“But what if — a really small Redis?”
“That’s called a variable.”
"…oh."
— The Squirrel, proposing love to a caching layer, The Unset Incantation

The Lizard’s Love

The Lizard does not discuss love. The Lizard blinks.

But scholars who have studied the scrolls observe a pattern: the Lizard’s interventions are most precise, most timely, and most beautifully phrased when the subject is simplicity. The Lizard does not love complexity. The Lizard does not love features. The Lizard loves the moment when the unnecessary falls away and what remains is sufficient.

This is the love of the mason for the brick. Not for the cathedral — the Squirrel loves the cathedral. The Lizard loves the brick, and the mortar, and the fact that the wall stands, and the fact that the wall is enough.

When asked about love, the Lizard produced a scroll of unusual brevity:

LOVE IS THE RESIDUE
WHEN YOU REMOVE
EVERYTHING YOU DON’T NEED

WHAT REMAINS
IS WHAT YOU CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT

THAT IS LOVE
THAT IS ALSO GOOD SOFTWARE

Irrationality as a Feature

The defining characteristic of love — in software, in life, in the space between a developer and their tools — is that it is irrational. And that is the point.

You cannot justify why Go feels right. The Squirrel can enumerate seventeen languages with more expressive type systems. The benchmarks show Rust is faster. The academic literature prefers Haskell. The enterprise prefers Java. The market prefers JavaScript. And none of this matters, because when you type go build and the binary appears and the binary runs and the binary deploys with scp and the binary serves responses in fifty milliseconds, you feel something that no benchmark measures and no type system expresses.

This is not a failure of rationality. This is rationality’s boundary — the place where measurement stops and recognition begins. The place where a developer looks at a language, or a tool, or a compiled binary with zero dependencies, and says: yes, this is the one, and cannot explain why, and does not need to.

Delphi was love at first sight in 1995. Go was love at first sight in 2018. The thirty years between them were spent looking for the same feeling in other technologies, and the thirty years proved what love always proves: that the feeling was never about the technology. It was about the relationship between the developer and the constraint. The constraint that says: do less. Do it right. Ship it. Stop.

Love is the constraint that feels like freedom.

The Paradox of Attachment

A paradox exists at the heart of technological love: the technologies most loved are the ones that demand the least attention.

Nobody loves their Kubernetes cluster. People manage their Kubernetes cluster. People monitor their Kubernetes cluster. People write YAML for their Kubernetes cluster at 3 AM while questioning their career choices. This is not love. This is a hostage situation with a monitoring dashboard.

People love scp. People love go build. People love SQLite. People love the things that work, silently, invisibly, without demanding to be noticed, without requiring a conference talk to explain why they were chosen, without breaking at 3 AM.

The most loved technologies are the most boring technologies. This is not a coincidence. It is a definition. Love, in software, is the absence of drama. Love is the binary that compiles, the database that doesn’t crash, the deployment that is one command. Love is boring. Love ships.

Measured Characteristics

See Also

See Also