one thousands of your emails should have asked me to publish,
if only you knew what is good for you. It would take me years to actually complete,
testing and debugging countless fragments to bring you only my best, only the interesting to me,
only the apples of my eyes. Now I say, without a shadow of a doubt, that every single snippet,
if you run them as I shall, on exactly the same software stack and the same hardware to boot,
will probably work for you just as it will for me, even if you have never programmed before.
Idle Reader: Without my swearing to it, you can believe that I would like this blog, the child of my understanding, to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discrete that anyone could imagine. But I have not been able to contravene the natural order; in it, like begets like. And so what could my barren and poorly cultivated wits beget but the history of a child who is dry, withered, capricious, and continuously filled with streams of unbroken consciousness never imagined by anyone else, which is just what one would expect of a person betrodden in a corporation, where every discomfort has its place and every mournful sound makes its home? 1
I wanted only to present this blog to you plain and bare, unadorned by a prologue or
banal epigraphs that recur at the beginning of posts.
For I can tell you that although it costs me effort to create,
none seems greater than the price of perfecting the preface you are now reading.
I grabbed hold of my mouse and clicked EDIT many times to modify it, and many
times I pressed CLOSE again because I did not know what to change;
and once, when I was baffled,
with a version on my screen in front of me,
my keyboard askew on my corner desk,
my elbows propped up on the arms of my Steelcase chair,
and my glosses on my nose, pondering what I should have said,
a book by an author who was witty and wise came to mind.
Déjà vu! 2
Miguel, too, was in precisely the same pickle, more or less, hundreds of years ago when a friend of his unexpectedly came in and, seeing him so perplexed, asked the reason. Cervantes hid nothing from his friend and told him that he was thinking about the prologue that he had to write for the history of a different Don, and the problem was that he did not want to write it yet did not want to bring to light the deeds of so noble a knight without one.
“What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander!” I exclaimed. Hence, I do not want to charge you too much for the service I am performing in cobbling together this squirrely site, but I do want you to thank me for allowing you to make the acquaintance of the famous Don Knuth, who has summarized for us, with wit and charm, heaps of knowledge scattered throughout great masses of sagacious journals in The Art of Computer Programming. And having said this, may God grant him health and not forget D.E.K. Salve. 3
- I labored in a corporation for twenty years.
- “Déjà vu” in French.
- “Hello” in Latin.
Audience, level, and treatment
— a description of such matters is
what prefaces are supposed to be about.
