A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought, #2)

by Vernor Vinge

The Qeng Ho fleet was first to arrive at the OnOff star. That might not matter. For the last fifty years of their voyage, they had watched the torch-plumes of the Emergent fleet as it decelerated toward the same destination. They were strangers, meeting far from either side’s home territory. That was nothing new to the traders of the Qeng Ho—though normally the meetings were not so unwelcome, and there was the possibility of trade.

Explain Focus to your people, and do it so they can accept it, so what is left of our missions can survive. Vinh stared up into the last light in the sky. Stars

It was an old, old problem: to build the most advanced technological products you need an entire civilization—a civilization with all its webs of expertise and layers of capital industry. There were no shortcuts; Humankind had often imagined, but never created, a general assembler.

“The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmmers have had several

centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized.