Epilogue and Benediction

... in spite o’ knock and scale, o’ friction, waste an’ slip,
An’ by that light-now, mark my word—we’ll build the Perfect Ship.
I’ll never last to judge her lines or take her curve—not I.
But I ha’ lived an’ I ha’ worked. All thanks to Thee, Most High!
An’ I ha’ done what I ha’ done—judge Thou if ill or well.

—Rudyard Kipling, writing on the inevitability of technological progress,
“McAndrew’s Hymn,” 1894.

Like McAndrew, I have done what I have done—written this book—and now it’s up to you to judge it. Is .NET the perfect operating system? Don’t be silly. Is this the perfect book about it? Don’t be sillier. We won’t see perfection in our lifetimes, any more than McAndrew did in his. But .NET will make you more money than anything else that’s out there now or on the horizon, and I hope this book helps you understand how.

My daughters, born in 2000 and 2003, belong to the first generation that will know the Internet from the cradle, not as some recent geeky add-on, as it is for you and me. Their cousins belong to the first generation to grow up with desktop PCs, their parents to the first generation with TV, their grandparents to the first with radio. Do you have any idea how this will shape them? Do you?

Of course not, neither do I; nobody does. Or rather, lots of people have mutually contradictory ideas, and no one knows who is correct. But as I first wrote these words in 2001, I remembered Arthur C. Clarke’s introduction to his book 2001: A Space Odyssey: “It is important to remember that this is a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.” He’s the one guy I believe.

We software developers hold much more responsibility than we ever did before. As the dean of my engineering school, a recovering metallurgist, recently wrote in our alumni journal, “Today our nation’s wealth and security resides much more in bits and bytes than it does in bullets or bullion.” If Freecell crashed, who cares, except the guy who lost his string of winning games? But it’s different when an airline’s reservation system goes down, and more different still when a hospital loses all its patients’ medical histories. As Kipling wrote, speaking of McAndrew’s passengers,

Maybe they steam from grace to wrath—to sin by folly led,—
It isna mine to judge their path—their lives are on my head.
Mine at the last—when all is done it all comes back to me,
The fault that leaves six thousand ton a log upon the sea.

Carry it well.

I submit to you, my fellow geeks, that we are bringing about nothing more nor less than the next step in the evolution of our species: humankind is creating its own image. Crude, limited, buggy (and what’s more human than that?), but our own image nonetheless. That’s why development holds a thrill that nothing we’ve ever experienced can match. Some people describe it as sexual, and based on the creative output, that doesn’t surprise me. McAndrew felt it 100 years ago:

Uplift am I? When first in store the new-made beasties stood,
Were Ye cast down that breathed the Word declarin’ all things
good?

That’s why we got into this crazy business, and that’s why we stay. That’s why you see very few geeks hanging up their mice and going to law school, even with their stock options under water.

Read what Kipling wrote about McAndrew 100 years ago. For “first-class passengers,” put in your own trochaic description of an idiot—“bone-head manager” or perhaps “VB programmer.” For “horse-power,” substitute “megaflops” or whatever your performance metric is. Now tell me this isn’t how you feel when your system goes live:

Oh for a man to weld it then, in one trip-hammer strain,
Till even first-class passengers could tell the meanin’ plain!
But no one cares except mysel’ that serve an’ understand
My seven thousand horse-power here. Eh, Lord! They’re grand,
they’re grand!