Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

The most important program ever written!!!

Poet warriors monkeys? Or Code peasants (码农) according to the Chinese.

Ciro Santilli claims to be one of them.

Much like a pianist plays his piano, a software engineer plays his computer.

Programming is hard. To Ciro Santilli, it's almost masochistic.

What makes Ciro especially mad when programming is not the hard things.

It is the things that should be easy, but aren't, and which take up a lot of your programming time.

Especially when you are already a few levels of "simple problems" down from your original goal, and another one of them shows up.

This is basically the cause of Hofstadter's law.

But of course, it is because it is hard that it feels amazing when you achieve your goal.

Putting a complex and useful program together is like composing a symphony, or reaching the summit of a hard rock climbing proble.

Programming can be an art form. There can be great beauty in code and what it does. It is a shame that this is hard to see from within the walls of most companies, where you are stuck doing a small specific task as fast as possible.

Please, use AsciiDoc and one page to rule them all.

They are evil because they produce closed source offline software used by millions: Microsoft Windows.

And also their monopolistic practices: United States v. Microsoft Corp.

So, as put in Video "Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs by Epic Rap Battles of History (2012)" by fake Steve Jobs to fake Bill Gates:

However, like all big tech companies with infinite money, they do end up doing some cool things in their research department, Microsoft Research, notably for Ciro Santilli being:

Evil company that desecrated the beauty created by Sun Microsystems, and was trying to bury Java once and or all in the 2010's.

Their database is already matched by open source e.g. PostgreSQL, and ERP and CRM specific systems are boring.

Oracle basically grew out of selling one of the first SQL implementations in the late 70's, and notably to the United States Government and particularly the CIA. They did deliver a lot of value in those early pre-internet days, but now open source is and will supplant them entirely.

A glitch is more precisely a software bug that is hard to reproduce. But it has also been used to mean a software bug that is not very serious.

Debugging sucks. But there's also nothing quite that "oh fuck, that's why it doesn't work" moment, which happens after you have examined and placed everything that is relevant to the problem into your brain. You just can't see it coming. It just happens. You just learn what you generally have to look at so it happens faster.

The musical study of software engineering.

Ciro Santilli is obsessed by those in order to learn any new concept, not just for bug reporting.

This includes to learn more theoretical subjects like physics and mathematics.

Ciro Santilli started taking some notes at: github.com/cirosantilli/awesome-whole-cell-simulation. but they are going to be all migrated here.

It is interesting to note how one talks about single cell analysis, in contrast to whole cell simulation: experimentally it is hard to analyse a single cell. But theoretically, it is hard to simulate a single cell. This mismatch is perhaps the ultimate frontier of molecular biology.

A function that is either a sine or cosine, i.e. we don't know or care where the origin is exactly.

This is particularly relevant in electronics, where the oscilloscope's time origin is set to match the wave.

Theses places give out free food all the time.

The first time Ciro Santilli went to one was when an Indian friend of his took him to the one in the North of Paris when they were living there in the first half of the 2010's, the Gurdwara Singh Sabha France.

Much like Islam's Ramadan, Ciro Santilli appreciates this a lot due to due to Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality and Ciro Santilli's cheapness.

Instead of just talking, those people really go out, and put food on the plate for anyone who needs it (or even for those that don't really need it! Although who would be so souless to eat for free and not donate a few bucks if they can afford to???). There's a beauty to that.

Writing this also remembered Ciro of non-religious groups that would give out free food to the poor at