The Alan Turing buffet

The Alan Turing buffet

You do not get to take the Enigma and the mathematics and leave the persecution as garnish.

Eric Raymond, in Abusing Alan Turing, writes:

Yes, yes, repression, anti-gay prejudice, I know all right-thinking people are supposed to be horrified by such things – but the man who (more than any other single person) cracked the Enigma code and unified computer programming with mathematical logic deserves to be remembered for those things, not for the accident of his sexual preferences or a myth of final martyrdom later forcibly grafted onto his life.

That is a buffet. You do not gorge on dessert first. The whole life is the plate.

Turing unified programming with mathematical logic. I already wrote about what that unification costs, politically, in The hundred-year language will be regulated. The science is not in dispute. The ranking is.

Raymond says the work is what he deserves to be remembered for, and the rest is accident and myth. The BBC piece he is answering does the same split from the other side: a life in compartments, pick a tray. Neither is an authority on how Turing would want to be remembered. The notion is ridiculous. He was a human being. The life is one life.

Standing for what is right under persecution is not less than a scientific result. It is not a lifestyle footnote on a Wikipedia page whose real content is Enigma. It is magnitudes more important than any paper. Programming will never outrank preventing the persecution of actual people. Hacker culture — and the industry around it — is quick to elevate technology and progress over that. Raymond’s paragraph is the type specimen. Facebook and its kin are the contemporary product of the same ranking.

Jon maddog Hall wrote Turing as a whole person, including the torment. That is the honour. This is not.

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