The Waves
by Virginia Woolf · first published 1931
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2014–2021first – last mentioned
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Tracing the lives of a group of friends, this novel follows their development from childhood to middle age. Social events, individual achievements and disappointments form the outer structure of the book, but the focus is the inner life of the characters which is conveyed in rich poetic language.
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I once attempted to let the influence of Virginia Woolf guide the way I programmed. After reading The Waves, I therefore decided to create a low-level dialect of Brainfuck with an emphasis on concurrency, a creation which I would use to manage my company's clients. Eventually I came to the realization that…
on “To write better code, read Virginia Woolf” ↗…write a program which overcomes the gulf between the technical culture of our civilization, and which inserts itself into our human life as deeply as Eliot's poems of the wasteland or Virginia Woolf's The Waves?"
on “Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?” ↗…obfuscates the original idea. But then there's an explorative type of art where the method and the process is much more meaningful than the insight or punchline that the novel may have been built around. The Waves by Virginia Woolf, for example. (edited to use my words more good)
on “How I Consume Books” ↗…write a program which overcomes the gulf between the technical culture of our civilization, and which inserts itself into our human life as deeply as Eliot’s poems of the wasteland or Virginia Woolf’s The Waves? Just contrast this with the movement that thinks abstract factory is an example of a design pattern. I believe you could summarize Christopher Alexander's philosophy as opposition to abstract factories.
on “Why Patterns Failed and Why You Should Care” ↗…write a program which overcomes the gulf between the technical culture of our civilization, and which inserts itself into our human life as deeply as Eliot's poems of the wasteland or Virginia Woolf's The Waves?" Maybe code is just bad literature?
on “Code is not Literature” ↗…of culture proceeds apace, as the technology of surveillance hovers at the borders of our brains, such spaces are becoming rarer and more confined. I am haunted by a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.”
on “The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the Critique of Pop Culture” ↗