November 11, 2025

In 2011 after Dennis Ritchie died, I wondered if we should start retiring usernames on unix systems as an honorific, in the same way sports teams will retire the numbers of great players. I’d proposed a patch to useradd.c at the time that was rejected; understandable, I suppose, but I ran the modified version on my own machine for a while, to no effect and for no reasons but my own. Those few lines of code might have run a dozen times, inspecting the names of service accounts that they’d never object to, but I knew they were there.

I frequently wonder what building a deeper cultural history into the functioning of the common codebase would look like, and what a shared heritage might mean and maybe gain over time. How history might invisibly accrete, not in load-bearing bugs or temporary-permanence, but in the touchstones of the human history.

You can’t wear 99 in the NHL now, or 6 in the NBA. Maybe you shouldn’t be able to log in as dmr for the same reasons.