``` MAN(2) TORAH NAME torah - a general purpose data structure for storing narratives about the process of creation, including the key elements of history, simple beginnings, accumulated complexity, assorted bitching and moaning, and eventual refactor. SYNOPSIS The torah data structure is divided into five sections. These five sections are as follows. DESCRIPTION 1: Genesis. Background information about a given story. This section may include any notable data about the birth, education, or early life of relevant characters before they began to write, explore the ideas for which they eventually became known, and most importantly, before their personal Exodus, described below. 2: Exodus. Every creation story involves an Exodus: a story of disenchantment and departure from the predictable pain and complexity of one's old life into the unpredictable hardships of building something new, in an environment that is less predictable, more uncertain, with more responsibilities. The old world one leaves is always highly complex, and the new world is always simpler, though this does not mean the simpler life is easier. An Exodus consists of two primary features: 1. Quitting: Every Exodus involves leaving. Namely, a person or group leaves (either mentally or physically) some field, culture, or set of norms of some system in which the person or group had spent a significant amount of time prior to doing so. 2. The First Law: An expression of some remarkably small, simple, and memorable set of principles, ideas, or laws that the man in question believes should govern the new system, field, or world that they've set out to create. This expression of the law is also known as the commandments. These simple laws often fail to work and have to be reworked a bit. See for example: - Church and Curry's idea of removing the quantifiers from first order logic. - The Declaration of Independence: Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. - The compatible time sharing system in early computing. - Early Unix and C, continuing into the early history of BSD. - The constitution, in a more zoomed out version of the US's history. - The Ten commandments in the original book of Exodus. 3. Wandering in the Desert (optional): A period of uncertainty, in which the man in question and any followes s/he might have gathered wander around in search of the promised land, not knowing where to go or what to do, often being ignored by most of the outside world in the process. 4. Bitching (optional): In a complete Torah, the followers of the man in question will be found to constantly bitch about the new system, how much better slavery was in the old system for stupid reasons like "Slavery had better food", "Cantor's system was easier," or "Why can't we have a king again, kings were fun." The simple system then becomes more complex to accomodate the bitching. 3: Leviticus. While some men may only have a presence in man(1) and (2), a subset of men will find that their Exodus has produced something that lasts, endures, or otherwise catches on. As every developer knows, whenever a thing lasts, it eventually becomes complex. Hellishly complex. A tangled maze of cruft and boilerplate that no one wants to read, write, or wade through. This section catalogues and optionally mocks: 1. The Actual Law. - Church and Curry's first systems that turned out to be inconsistent. - The Articles of Confederation, in the story of the early United States. - The Multics project, which was an attempt to "improve" on CTSS by doing way more. Also known as "Second System Syndrome." - The complex set of proprietary Unixes that led to the baroque structure of Autoconf. - The current legal system, in a more zoomed out version of the US's history. - Leviticus, in the original Torah. 4: Numbers. During this period, the culture labors under the complexity that the originally simple system eventually became. This section is largely unspecified, and serves as a storage container for the intermediate period of arbitrary length between the original simplicity of the early system and the complex abomination that it eventually became. 1. Bitching (optional): Despite making the system more complex in response to every tiresome feature request and bitchy demand of the followers, they're still not happy, and they continue to bitch about the new system, even when the leaders literally work miracles and the gods shit magic cheesecake into everybody's mouth. The complainers are heard to say: "Not the best magic cheesecake from heaven I've ever had" and other bitchy moaning. 5. Dudetheyreontome During this period, most of the original complainers are dead and forgotten, never having contributed much except bitching, and their children have lived their entire lives in the new system in the desert. The original founders are getting old, and the task at hand is now to educate the youth. The purpose of this section is to deliver a final return to simplicity in: 1. The Second Law: A refactor of the complex system that eventually resulted from the original act of quitting to make things simpler. The second law preserves any essentials from the complex era that are worth keeping around, and deletes the rest, returning the system to the simple principles with which it began, with the addition of a few extra principles learned along the way. Examples include: - Church taking the small "lambda-definability" subset from his logic and making it into the untyped lambda calculus. - The Constitution, in the story of the early United States. - The Unix system, in which Ken took a few ideas he learned from Multics and deleted everything else to create a much simpler system in three weeks. - The continuation of Unix culture in Linus Torvalds' creation of Linux. - The US legal system has not yet been simplified after becoming overly complex. - Deuteronomy, in the original Torah, where the commandments are reiterated in their original simple form, and the previous leader hands over leadership to a new generation, with lessons about how to avoid making the same mistakes we did. ```