I wanted to write a LinkedIn post this morning about the effect of our tools on our thought. And I wanted to quote one of my favourite articles on the topic by Oliver Steele where he talks about language mavens and tool builders. I’d posted about this topic before. But now this link didn’t resolve. In fact, as of now I can’t find an online version of “The IDE Divide” by Oliver Steele anywhere.
It’s tempting to think that our digital artefacts escape the effects of entropy that so plague our physical ones. Bits don’t need maintenance – they just need careful storage, right? But no, in our modern world the way we actually work with our bits tend to rot from the outside. You include a link to another document, and by the time you look at it, the link has moved or been removed from the Internet entirely. You use a package in your code that no longer works the same way or has been pulled from the package repository.
I am particularly repelled by the idea of duplication. I think every act of duplication implies at least a maintenance burden to keep things in sync. So I’ve resisted a relatively common pattern of copying articles I find online that I want to read again in favour of linking them from my Obsidian vault.
Today’s experience explains why people make local copies, and also that the link isn’t as free of maintenance as it might seem. It might seem like it’s no longer useful to have a copy of a book in the bookshelf when we can just find it online, but that guarantee goes down with popularity. At some point the thing you’re referring to might just no longer exist, and the context of your argument could be lost.
The difference between a copy and a link is that when you’ve made a copy you have more context to work back from. In the code case this is particularly useful since with modern tooling the cost of maintaining this copy has become less. As my estimates about the cost of maintenance and the durability of online sources change, so does my behaviour.
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