Sean Werkema's Blog

I had wondered at the start of the Trump administration which of the two Trumps we’d get. We’ve pretty clearly gotten two in the past:

• Lazy Trump. This one likes the adulation of being President, but he doesn’t really do anything beyond that. During his first term, this Trump spent more time golfing than any President in history, and he often didn’t start work until 10 AM.
• Vindictive Trump. This one likes to punch. He’s a schoolyard bully, and he might back down whenever somebody stronger shows up, but mostly he likes to walk around hurting people who are smaller or weaker than he is. We didn’t see as much of this Trump during his first term, but we saw plenty of it on the campaign trail.

A couple weeks in, there’s little doubt that Trump 2.0 is the Vindictive model. From slash-and-burn tactics to ridiculous and ineffective tariffs to blaming the deaths of his fellow Americans on DEI policies, this Trump is clearly the angry, hateful one, not the lazy one.

That’s a shame. We could probably all live with the lazy one — we did it for four years already — but the angry one presents a conundrum. A screaming toddler with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower, and the Republican Party is far too cowardly to take his toys away this time.

And cowardice, mind you, is the correct term. I will happily call the current members of the Republican Party cowards to their faces: You sacrificed your spines and your consciences to a mook from Queens? Just so you could hate an inner-city single Black mother who just wanted a chance for her kids, and a brown man who just wanted not to starve, and two guys who were just kissing on a park bench? For shame, all of you. I don’t care if you got shot at overseas in uniform: Dishonor is dishonor, and that squelches whatever honor you might otherwise claim. I hope you have a really good answer when you’re standing someday in front of St. Peter at the Pearly Gates and he asks you whether you think you’ve earned your way in.

But I digress. There’s still the outstanding question of how to deal with the overgrown child that the American populace unwisely elevated to the Presidency, ideally before he does something so stupid and destructive that we can’t eventually fix it. Last time, he didn’t know how to drive the car; this time, he knows the controls just well enough to drive it into a tree at 100 MPH. If the Republicans hadn’t become utterly ineffectual parents, they’d take away the keys, or at least chauffeur him around again for the next four years. But that’s no longer viable: You can’t really hope a bad parent will become a good one, even with court-mandated parenting classes.

And the Democrats? They’re not worth mentioning. You might as well put your hope in tantric yoga and magical crystals.

Which means that there’s not really much left to pin hope on for the next few years. The courts might restrain him a little bit, but it’s unlikely. Realistically, Vindictive Trump is going to pick his victims, and he’s going to hurt his victims, and nobody’s going to do anything about it. One parent will look the other way, and the other will say “tsk, tsk,” and that’s as far as it’ll go. It’s a somber assessment, but it’s a sober one.

Someday — and as Liz Cheney so rightly noted, there will be a someday when Trump is gone — the history books will write their story of him. I can’t imagine it’ll be a good one. The people who joined the Confederacy, the ones who joined the Nazi party or the Communist party, the ones who followed John Birch and Joe McCarthy and George Wallace — they’re all denigrated by history, and rightly so, for the ignorance and hate which led them to those choices. There’s little doubt that Trumpism and its founder will join that ignominious group once the Baby Boomer generation has breathed its last, and those of us following after will describe them the same way every generation does when faced with the truth that so many of their forebears were, in fact, objectively pretty terrible people: “It was a different time.”

In the interim, we have to do our best to persevere: Ignore the toddler when he burns the foliage, try to offer shiny baubles to distract him away from anything important, and do our best to continually spray water in the fervent hope that when he’s gone at last, the house still stands.

…assuming, of course, that it’s not so divided that it still can.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to say here in the wake of Trump’s reelection. I think it was among the stupidest things human beings have ever done in history, and that it’ll pay negative dividends for decades, but what do I know? I’m just some guy.

So what I’ve concluded I’ll say is simple: America: You broke it, so you bought it.

You don’t get to claim that whatever comes next isn’t what you voted for, good or bad. Price of gas and eggs goes down? Dow Jones goes up? Jobs come back to small towns? You can totally claim those results. Trump starts internment camps, collapses the economy, declares war on France? You bought the crazy bad results too. You don’t get to blame the Democrats this time: Republicans are now 100% in charge in Washington, DC, so if you voted red, you own all of it. Credit where credit is due on the successes, but you’d better man up and accept any failures you get too.

Lest there be any doubt, here’s what you all voted on. (And I included for rent both a red state and a purple state, just so you can see I’m not cheating.)

Let’s review these after a year or two of Trump running the show, shall we? I’m sure the prices will definitely go down when they’re managed by such a fabulously successful businessman. I’d love to see them go down — and I’ll freely credit Trump if they do — but I’m not betting on it.

As for me, I’m likely going to be sitting back with a bowl of popcorn occasionally shaking my head — assuming, that is, that there’ll still be farms in America to grow that corn, and not nuclear blast holes filled with Nazi stormtroopers.

But not that that would happen, would it?

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Loosely related, I’ve ditched Twitter (X) for good. I was sorta poking at it again for the last year occasionally, but I’m done with visiting wretched hives of scum and villainy, and I couldn’t be happier having said goodbye to it. And no, I haven’t signed up anywhere else: You might enjoy sadomasochism, but it’s definitely not for me.

“We have to rewrite it!”

I’ve done a lot of interviews recently, and a common theme among them — and among prior interviews over the years too — is companies who want to go from an existing “legacy” system to their shiny “new” system: They’ve concluded that the existing “legacy” system isn’t meeting their needs, and that a “new” system is necessary.

I call these “version 2.0” projects, because quite a lot of them involve taking an “original” system that’s been keeping the company alive since its inception, and making a replacement for it. I’ve been on several teams doing “version 2.0” projects over the years, and I’ve even started a couple of those projects, and there’s one truth that has been consistently valid among every single one of those exercises:

Don’t do it.

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The recent hullabaloo over Roald Dahl’s works being edited censored has me utterly incensed. Sure, Roald Dahl was kind of a terrible person, and he wrote several things I too find offensive. But that gives no-one other than Roald Dahl himself the right to censor his writing. He wrote what he wrote, and if you don’t like it, read something else. There are plenty of sanitized, safe, bland, milquetoast books out there if you don’t like having your sensitivities offended.

But it occurred to me that the reason that Puffin Books can get away with this censorship is that they (and Netflix) own the copyright, and by law copyright terms are ridiculously long. It’ll be four decades yet before anyone else can re-publish the stories the way Dahl wrote them.

I don’t want to be a part of this.

But I’m a creator: I make things, I write things, I draw things, I code things, I build things. I’m constantly contributing to a system I never signed up for. In my life a ton of work has been fixed in a tangible medium by me, to use the legal copyright terminology. Per copyright law, I hold the rights to a mountain of content, and because I keep creating, the mountain keeps getting bigger. These very words will join that pile, and if I die just after writing this sentence, my heirs or estate would hold the copyright in it for another 70 years — these words would enter the public domain in February 2093, which is utterly insane.

So I’m making an addendum right here to my last will and testament, and as soon as I’m done typing it, I’m going to print a copy and sign it to give it the force of law. And this addendum is simply this:

My works — all of them — will enter into the
public domain exactly one year after my death.

Not 70 years. One year. Every story, every essay, every picture, every pixel, every line of code, every last byte, everything I’ve made that could possibly be copyrightable and in which I hold the copyright will be up for grabs to the world one year later.

Does the world want it? Probably not, but you all get it anyway. Once I’m gone, my family gets a year to prepare for its release, and then it belongs to everybody, the whole kit and kaboodle. Anyone can have whatever debates you want over what I might have intended for some picture or some character or some design or whatever, but everybody is free to put their own spin on them all after the one-year mark. Once I’m gone, I don’t have a say in it anymore.

Presumably, I still have a lot of years left in me, and I can state my intentions and control my works for a few more decades. But whenever I’m gone, there’s one year on my copyrights left, and that’s it.

The copyright system is pretty broken, but with this, I believe I’m helping in my own small way to help right the ship. Maybe Congress will have some sense someday and shorten copyright terms to match, but until they take care of it, this declaration will have to do.

Beginner and intermediate programmers often think that programming is math. After all, a lot of computer science is math, and computers run on math, and core concepts of the field like Turing Machines and lambda calculus are really pure hard math. You can’t get started in this field without knowing some math.

But programming — or software engineering if you prefer — really isn’t math. Programming, as Donald Knuth rightly noted all the way back in the 1970s, is really literature. We tell the computer stories about how to do things: We write plays, and the computer acts out the play for us. Some of the words that we use in those plays are based on math, but most programming is really a form of storytelling. Code is sometimes compared to poetry, but I think it has the most in common with prose — which is arguably why systems like ChatGPT are so good at it.

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My grandmother passed away today, early afternoon.

My cat passed away today, late afternoon.

Both were very old; my grandmother was 91, and my cat was 17.

But both happened on the same day, two hours apart. I was almost holding it together, after my grandmother passed. And then our cat started crying, her stomach in pain.

We’re deleting this date from the calendar. Henceforth, in subsequent years, we will all go straight from October 8 to October 10.

Seriously, we don’t.

I was asked on Discord today why some languages require semicolons and others don’t, and this is one of those surprisingly deep questions that to the best of my knowledge hasn’t been answered very well elsewhere:

• Why do some languages end statements with semicolons?
• Why do other languages explicitly not end statements with semicolons?
• Why do some languages require them but it seems like the compiler could just “figure it out,” since it seems to know when you’ve forgotten them?
• Why are they optional in some languages?
• And, of all things, why the weird shape that is the semicolon? Why not | or $ or even ★ instead?

So let’s talk about semicolons, and try to answer this as well as we can.

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