The Future of Pedantry, Redux, and Technological Veneries: A Satirical Lecture
Welcome, esteemed attendees of the International Symposium on the Futility of Innovation. Today, we gather to discuss a phenomenon we can all marvel at: the rise of pedantry in the tech industry, redux of redux, and the peculiar mating dances—veneries, if you will—of our finest developers and engineers.
Let us start with the pedant. Once upon a time, pedantry had humble origins. It was merely the inclination to correct an insignificant detail—say, reminding someone that it’s “its” not “it’s” in a code comment. But today? Today, pedantry has evolved into a competitive sport, and the playing field is vast. In our current state of “Hyper-Pedantism,” engineers now debate if the underscore or camelCase approach has philosophical significance. Was Nietzsche right about the camel stage of life? Or did Pascal overlook the value of “snake_case” in the early 17th century? In any case, we no longer merely correct. We rewrite, recompile, and re-contextualize—redux, redux, redux.
Now, “redux” was once a noble word, meaning “brought back.” We used it to breathe new life into ideas. But, alas, the word has suffered greatly. Today, to “redux” is to return with slightly different syntax, a fresh coat of varnish, and yet somehow, less functionality. We rebuild applications on the bleeding edge of...last week’s hot framework. Redux itself was redone and again reborn as Redux Redux. Entire teams spend years honing applications to perfection, only to deprecate their own work with the next iteration. And why do they do it? For the veneries—oh yes, for the veneries.
Let us talk about the veneries of technology, the grand romantic pursuit of “Better Than What Was Before.” Veneries were once a term for describing animals' movements, like an "exaltation of larks." In tech? We now have an “infinitude of refactors,” “a scourge of stack traces,” “a futility of frameworks.” Engineers romance their chosen framework, only to cast it aside as the next API update debuts. Passionate flings with languages are frequent—one day, it’s Rust; the next, it’s Go, or Kotlin, or who-knows-what synthetic elixir.
But here’s the satire, friends: we do not advance. Each line of code rewritten is an anthem of obsolescence. We perpetuate the past, in sharper, shinier ways. We add comments, “// TODO: Make this better,” as if there were a finish line in sight. The tech cycle is one grand, performative hunt—a relentless, repetitive veneration of the newest, slightly reconfigured “old.” And so we redux, refactor, and perpetuate our veneries ad infinitum.
In conclusion, dear friends, we are gathered here not to change the world, but to change our tooling—and then change it back again. The pedant, the redux, and the veneries are the self-proclaimed aristocrats of our ecosystem. They parade about, grandly correcting, refactoring, and reinventing each others' work into an endless loop. Progress? Oh, surely it exists somewhere—perhaps in another repository, or another universe, where technology dares to stay the same for more than six months.
