on forking

fork-day.txt

Before we get started, may I hold the floor for a minute?
I’d like to open the podcast with a reflection on American history.

The leaders of Typelevel.org are open
in using the word “fork”
to describe what they’re planning to do.

As an American, this has me thinking about our history.

The United States itself was founded when the American revolutionaries forked the United Kingdom.
	WE LIVE IN A FORK.
	That’s an example of a fork that ended well.
	(If it hadn’t, we’d all be eating crumpets and talking like Dick Wall.)
Some decades later, the United States was in turn forked by the Confederacy.
	That’s a fork that ended badly.
	I was reminded today by Wikipedia
	that one name for Southerners who sided with the victorious northerners after the war
		was “scalawags”.
In any case,
since the Civil War,
there have not been any further forks of the United States.

However, yesterday, we celebrated Labor Day.
And I’d like to point out that Labor Day is itself a fork.
Labor Day is a fork of the May 1st holiday, International Workers’ Day, called Labour Day in some countries.
	In the United States, Labor Day celebrates the labor movement, but by having it in September instead of May,
	we avoid any association with communism, with socialism, and with commemoration
	of the Haymarket Massacre which took place on May 4 in Chicago,
	and was a rallying point for the labor movement.
So we forked May Day, and the fork is called Labor Day.

So the day after Labor Day is a fine time to discuss the forking of Scala.
I think anyone has to admit there’s some justice,
and some poetry perhaps,
in Scala getting forked.
Because Scala is itself a fork of Java.
Right?
Scala is a fork, and we live in it.

From now on, perhaps we should celebrate September 2 as International Fork Day.