Programmer archaeologists

A fine information literature post crossed the nettime list transom this morning, concerning a recent sf novel:

Vernor Vinge (Hugo-award winning SF writer, and a computer scientist in a previous life) came up with the concept of "programmer archaeologist" in "A Deepness in the Sky". The book is set very far in
the future, and to cut a long story short, the idea behind the programmer-archaeologist is that most programming problems have already been solved in one form or another. So a large part of the task of the
programmer-archaeologist is finding previous solutions to the problem, and then stacking up emulators to make those programs work again.

The book is uneven, but the good parts are excellent.  There are several fine revenge plots, a scary social organization, and an interesting augmented reality extrapolation.

Comments

[D'Arcy Norman]

Reminds me of Asimov's Foundation series, where (IIRC) research has devolved to a library study, because everything has already been discovered or figured out - if you want to know something, you don't try to figure anything out, just hit the library. That'd be soooo depressing...