11 November 2025
After Dennis Ritchie’s death in 2011, I wondered if we should start retiring usernames on Unix systems as a matter of respect, in the same way sports teams would retire many great players. I proposed a patch to useradd.c at that time which was rejected; I guess this makes sense, but I ran the modified version on my machine for a while, but it had no effect and for no other reason than my own. Those few lines of code must have been run a dozen times, inspecting the names of service accounts they would never object to, but I knew they were there.
I wonder again and again what building a deep cultural history into the workings of a common codebase would look like, and what a shared heritage might mean and perhaps benefit over time. How history can grow invisibly, not in a load-bearing bug or a temporary-permanence, but in the touchstone of human history.
You can no longer wear 99 in the NHL or 6 in the NBA. You probably won’t be able to log in as a DMR for the same reasons.