The nun Zjing had acquired an aversion to heights. A young
monk found her in her new quarters: a small hut nestled at
the lowest point of a valley seven hundred feet below the
Temple.
The monk sat down, for Zjing had taken to working while
lying on the floor.
“I have written a most elegant subsystem for our
image-rendering pipeline,” said the monk. “It has increased
throughput dramatically, yet it is extremely fragile. Every
change must be made with the utmost caution or chaos will
result. For a solid year I have maintained the code,
trusting it to no one else. Now my nerves are frayed. I must
move on to other projects or risk the loss of my few
remaining wits.”
“I understand,” said Zjing, clutching the floor as she sat
upright to examine the code on the monk’s laptop. “You fear
the inevitable day when your successor makes a careless
change and the system falls apart.”
“Yes—for I shall be blamed, and rightly so!” cried the monk.
“How can I best ensure that such a disaster will not occur?
By extensive comments in the code? By extensive
documentation outside the code? By providing a hundred unit
tests that will fail if incorrect changes are made? By
permeating the code with a hundred consistency checks—thus
increasing its complexity even more? Or by remaining on this
project until my brains turn to jelly?”
“Wú,” said the nun. She selected the directory that held the
subsystem’s source code, hit the delete button, and crawled
out the door.
