Interview

This isn’t the 1-2 year thing of what happens when you have a super powerful software engineer. But over time, if everyone has these superhuman tools to create a ton of different stuff, you’re going to get incredible diversity. Part of it is going to be solving hard problems: solving diseases, advancing science, developing new technology that makes our lives better. But I would guess that a lot of it is going to end up being cultural and social pursuits and entertainment.

Ginsparg was frustrated because he couldn’t understand why implementing features that used to take him a day now took weeks. I challenged him on this, asking if there was any documentation for developers to onboard the new code base. Ginsparg responded, “I learned Fortran in the 1960s, and real programmers didn’t document,” which nearly sent me, a coder, into cardiac arrest. Interview with the creator of arXiv which I’ve learned is pronouced ‘archive’.