Title: Coder of God

Gender: Male

Age: 20

Location: Mount Pleasant, MI

“God in the Code” is the concept of writing programs that will make the world better somehow, by helping people grow personally and accomplish whatever they can imagine, and hopefully help them make a positive difference in the world by enabling them. It is also the concept of writing clean, reusable, resilient code, and programs which serve as many purposes and audiences as is reasonable; part of this is making any one feature as user-friendly as possible even if it were separated from all the other features, and making it so that when the features are put together they don’t get in each others’ way.

I’m just beginning as a programmer, though, so I have high ideals but no actual wisdom. And there is something else I should say about myself… I believe what our society should be doing is focussing on preserving as much of what we now have as possible in case of a total societal collapse. Think how much intellectually richer we would be if more ancient civilizations had written large quantities of their literature on materials which last. Right now the bulk of our ‘literature’, the Internet, would simply disappear if our electrical network was knocked out for a century or so, which though unlikely seems totally possible to me. I don’t know what to do about this, but it seems really important. We need computers that last, so that someone a thousand years or more can dig it up and turn it on and will have maybe a few weeks of battery power to try to comprehend its contents. Or, preferably, the computer should come with a hand-crank or other simple generator.

I don’t only look to the future, however; I really enjoy binding books by hand, and writing with a fountain pen; and I am doing my best to learn Latin, because it wasn’t very long ago that all educated people knew it and encountered Latin phrases routinely in their reading. I think the past is important not simply because its how we got to the present, but because we didn’t necessarily take the right road between the two. Improving something comes easiest when you know where it came from. Teaching math without math history is making people less innovative.

I believe in changing the world by empowering people more than by enlightening them. I think truth naturally emerges when people are empowered. This may be the rationale that led to the atom bomb… but perhaps thats why I believe so much in preparing for the fall of our current society. Change, which is both good and inevitable, inherently causes destruction, of at least the old, though often of bystanders. The best we can do is try to create positive things, for we cannot stop the march of Time and prevent change entirely.

Member Since: Friday, November 17 2006

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