"For services to the PureScript Community, Gary Burgess!"
You've done it, Gary. Moore, Lineker, Coleman, and now Burgess. All the work was worth it.
The halls erupted with praise. Children dressed as Space Ghost, teens with "I only get high on
Halogen" t-shirts, a giant banner held aloft with the message, "Tuple @garyb me". Through
the noise of the crowds and Phil's uninterpretable Northern accent, he barely managed to hear
his theme tu-
BZZP. BZZP.
Gary sat up in bed. "What the functor!?" Another dream, he guessed. He smiled to himself as he realised he'd said the functor thing, and then let out a sigh. He had been pushing that line at work for the better part of six months, but no one could seem to "get it". It wasn't hard, was it? You swap out the rude word out for "functor". That's all you have to do, guys.
Still, it was too early to moan. He shuffled to the edge of the mattress, and reached under the bed for some slippers. After more-effort-than-it-was-worth, he settled on two (right-foot) shoes: one, an overly fluffy reindeer with a shining red nose. The other, a flip-flop with a picture of Philip Wadler glued to the strap. After LambdaConf'16, Gary had become accustomed to waking up to things he couldn't explain. Truly, that hooch was the gift that still kept on giving.
Flip-flop discomfort aside, Gary made it to the table where his alarm had been blaring. He thumbed the screen until, eventually, his phone acquiesced, and peace was restored. Until, of course, the all-too-familiar sound of Christoph's self-selected ringtone broke the silence.
WAYNE'S WORLD. WAYNE'S WORLD. PARTY TIME. EXCELLENT Sigh.
"Gary! Where the function have you been?" Christoph was probably the closest to getting it, but the battle was far from over. Habitually, Christoph would ring Gary every morning at 8am to tell him that he had made it safely to his desk on the other side of the room, fed the cat, and rewritten the type unification -- no, subsumption -- algorithm. Gary listened to something about chrono- meta-cofunctors for a little while as he crudely applied corn flakes to his face. He put the phone on speaker, and could now hear one Kevin Smith film or another in the background. How much do we really know about Christoph?, he thought to himself. What an enigma. Regrettably, though, the now-loudspeakered phone was free to show the first snippets of the Slack messages from the night before.
- "@garyb Is Eff a comonad if we use unsaf..."
- "@garyb You should rewrite it with recur..."
- "@garyb Nate here, have you seen Douglan..."
- "@garyb Would you mind if I wrote fan fi..."
It had been five years since electricity arrived in northern England, and two years since the world wide web had come to join it. Both of which, in Gary's opinion, were to be considered terrible mistakes. Gone were the days when he could deny pull requests with a passive-aggressive advert in the classifieds. Forgotten were the days when he and Phil sat on the moors with tea and whippets, lamenting the death of the mining industry. Where once his beloved wireless had sat, now lay a crudely-coloured and haphazardly-stapled pile of paper that Nate had sent over. More conspiracy theories around Eichford, Gary imagined, though the front cover collages were definitely becoming more creative.
"... out that we had been inlining any calls to randomInt as pure 4! Anyway, gotta go, man;
Chris Rock just met Alan Rickman!" Ah. The line cut out.
After a few peaceful hours of declining hundreds of poorly-written patches to purescript-dom, he
noticed it was time to face the Americans. Colorado was awake and ready to go. Reluctantly, he
clicked the Skype icon, and discovered he was late to the call.
"Gary! What is the foldr?!" It wasn't hard, was it? As the Slack logo began to spin, and the faulty PRs flooded into his inbox, Gary pulled the mask over his nose, and began to sellotape his palm to his forehead. Another day.