Non Expecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum

​I'm writing this from a mountainside near Palermo on Easter Eve, the day the liturgical calendar leaves empty. Yesterday was the Crucifixion. Tomorrow is the Resurrection. Today is the silence between them; the day when, if you take the story seriously, God is dead and nobody yet knows what comes next.

Yesterday, one of my closest friends hanged himself. He is now unconscious on a ventilator. Nobody knows why he did it. Nobody knows what comes next for him either.

I'm not a believer. I've never been a believer. But I am an organist, and I've participated more times than I can count in that piece of symbolic theatre we call the liturgy. I have watched the Easter arc – from Maundy Thursday through the desolation of Good Friday to the silence of Saturday and the blazing major key of Sunday morning (Richard Strauss would of course have set it as a C major 6/4 chord) – move people in ways that have nothing to do with whether the story is true. The psychological architecture of it is real, even if its subject is not. I understand Easter Saturday better today than I did yesterday, and not because I've found faith, but because I'm living in the structure.

So I sit on a terrace in Sicily with a stupendous view and seven people I'm fond of, and the light is extraordinary, and a friend is suspended between life and death 2500 kilometres away, and there's nothing I can do. Which makes it a reasonable day to take stock.

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​We went to the Teatro Massimo two days ago. It's the third largest opera house in Europe, and the building itself is magnificent: the kind of architecture that earns the word. What happened on stage, however, was something else.

Don Quichotte. Classical ballet. Minkus.

Classical ballet of this type is a closed system of circular reasoning so thorough that its practitioners no longer notice it. It no longer has anything to say, yet they defend Minkus's oom-pah-oom-pah as though it were art. They define 'musicality' as the ability to dance in time with the beat. A musician would find this primitive in the extreme, and in fact not a description of musicality at all, but a description of mere competence. It's the conflation of floor with ceiling.

And yet the system sustains itself, because it has constructed an aesthetic vocabulary that exists only to justify its own continuation. Any external reference point is treated as irrelevant. What remains is religion, not art.

I recognise the pattern. I've encountered it in functional programming circles too: articles of faith masking real emptiness, defended not by argument but by social enforcement. The dynamic is identical. The domain is irrelevant.

In the Christian calendar, today is the day of unresolved tension, the day when the official story hasn't yet provided its answer. What I find clarifying about this particular Saturday is the absence of dogma. The story hasn't yet told you what to believe. For twenty-four hours, you're left with the facts.

I prefer the facts.

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When people ask why this blog looks the way it does – why there's so much documentation, so many architecture decision records, so much apparent excess – the honest answer again has to do with death.

I created Igor Engraver in the mid-1990s because I hated Finale. I had written an entire opera in it and the experience was sufficiently wretched to convince me that the problem was one of fundamental architecture. Igor was a music notation system that was, by most accounts, genuinely ahead of its time. It was acquired by idiots and left to die.

What I've come to understand, twenty-five years later, is that almost every fundamental architectural decision in Ooloi is a response to what happened to Igor, whether I originally intended it that way or not.

Open source, so that no individual's mismanagement can bury the work. Open-source components throughout, so that no proprietary dependency can become a chokepoint. ADRs. Guides. A RAG system that can answer deep, architectural questions about the codebase. A public blog that documents development as it happens, including the false starts and course corrections.

This is not a vanity exercise in transparency. It's an insurance policy. If I'm hit by a bus tomorrow, the work survives. Someone can pick it up, read why every decision was made, and continue. The documentation isn't supplementary to the project. It's structural. It's the specification.

Igor died and nothing survived it. I'm sixty-four. Therefore the work must be legible without its author.​

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I never discuss other notation programs on this blog, and people occasionally find this odd. The reason isn't diplomatic restraint; it's that I genuinely don't think about Ooloi in competitive terms. Ooloi exists because I'm convinced there's a better way to represent music computationally, and I believe I've found a significant part of it, and I want to build it properly and make it available, so that a field that's been stagnant for forty years has a reason to move​. That is the entirety of the motivation.
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​What I am doing inside Ooloi is architecturally different. And that's why I've named it after a third-gender space alien. It's a categorically different thing, and it needs to be. The technical argument for why is elsewhere on this blog, at length, and I won't repeat it here. What matters today is that the work exists, that it's open, and that it's legible. Because today is a day for thinking about what survives.

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What connects the friend on the ventilator, the ballet at the Teatro Massimo, the small dogmas of programming communities, and the theological void of Easter Saturday – apart from fragility, ossification, and death – is perhaps nothing more than this: that I have no patience for systems of thought that protect themselves from examination. Religious faith (which is wishful thinking fanned by fear of death) does this by design; classical ballet and programming communities accomplish the same thing through ossified aesthetic insularity and social enforcement respectively, but the mechanism is identical. All of them ask you to treat the absence of external validation as evidence of self-sufficiency rather than what it actually is: a warning.

Tomorrow is Easter. The faithful will celebrate a resurrection I don't believe in. My friend may wake up, or he may not. The view from this mountain is unchanged. Sicily doesn't care about any of it.

​That, too, is a kind of honesty.