Three years ago, I identified five pieces of software that I thought were “great works” that were written by one or a very few number of people. In rough chronological order, they are C/Unix, The ARM instruction set, TeX, VisiCalc, and the Web Browser/Server. I didn’t pick them based on what the software did, but they are all basically programming languages. They also are somewhat old (> 30 years), yet still exist or have a lineage of derivative projects (i.e. they were not lost).
Since then, I thought of two others. They are also programming languages of a sort and both are enabled by the existence of the web. Both are in heavy use, albeit mostly through derivatives. They are also both relatively tiny programs—more like poetry than prose.
The first is Markdown by John Gruber—you can download the original Perl at that link. Markdown is ubiquitous and finished, in the sense that it hasn’t been updated, and it doesn’t need updates.
Even the derivatives don’t need updates. In 2016 I wrote the Swift implementation of Trello Flavored Markdown by porting our web client’s JavaScript version (so it would match exactly). It was a little longer than Gruber’s original, but not by much. Once it was done, it only had one update that I know of.
The second software poem is the original Wiki software by Ward Cunningham. I don’t know if the original source is available, but I used this Perl implementation he published when I wanted a locally hosted version—it was my original second brain. I use Obsidian for this now, which (of course) is based on Markdown.
It’s funny that both Gruber and Cunningham chose Perl to write their poems. Perl syntax lends itself to writing actual poems—I have a vague memory of seeing some in Larry Wall’s Perl book. I would also note that both poems have minimal dependencies. I don’t think Markdown uses anything that isn’t in Perl. WikiWikiWeb uses Berkeley DB by default, but I trivially replaced that with simple files in my version (which I can’t find, but I do have the files, and they are just text).
They were also built in a time when it was common to build web server software in Perl (Markdown is 2004, WikiWikiWeb is 1995). I learned Perl in 1993 at my first job, which we used to replace all of our shell and awk scripts. I built production websites with Perl until 1999, but Perl was still my go-to language for scripting until 2013 when I switched to Python for web backends, scripting, and anything where Pandas would help. I’m sure Perl has equivalents for everything I do, but I never learned modern Perl.
My attempt at a poem of this nature is Page-o-Mat, a YAML-based language for making journals. It’s small, but I need YAML and PDF dependencies to make that happen. That fact about modern programming makes me think we won’t see another great software poem again.