Tour de Babel

Dashed off in one of the 3-to-6 a.m. insomniac fits Steve admits his true feelings were reserved for, and posted with the disclaimer that it's "not polished at all... just what I've got today." The language reviews are the advertised attraction; the accidental one is the Amazon reporting. This is 2004, two years before AWS, and the tour keeps wandering into the building: a C++ codebase swelling by eight million lines a quarter, one engineer's job described as crawling "into the very center" of a mountain of poop, the company's first two-pizza team, and a beloved customer-service tool written in Emacs Lisp whose retirement non-technical staff were still cornering Steve to grieve at Christmas parties.

As prophecy it can be graded now, and the marks are mixed in an instructive way. The obituary for Perl came true. The seven-year expiration date on Java did not. And the confident call that Ruby was doing to Python what Java once did to Smalltalk — "right now, today," practically overnight — inverted so completely that reading it from a Python-owned world is half the fun. Python's two "fatal flaws" get diagnosed near the end, and the second is built up to a punchline this note leaves alone. The riff on why a language finally came out of Japan has aged worse than anything else here, and the footnotes quietly correcting the text (Paul Graham, readers kept writing in to say, uses vi) show the fact-checking started early.