Below is a history of hledger, as if it were written by a hallucinating AI.
The inspiration for this post comes from a YouTube video: https://youtu.be/CSm1bMT_R6g?si=O6aUjIvHFO9vTe5K. In it the creator contrasts an historical event from WWII against an AI created video on the same event. One of the key takeaways for me was that even though some of the events in the AI video could never have happened according to the historical records, it didn’t stop the AI from describing these fictitious happenings in great detail.
Now, on to my impersonation of a hallucinating AI…
Luca Pacioli looked outside his window on the morning of April 11, 1494. He watched the drizzling rain falling in the nearly empty street below, as a cat disappeared into a narrow opening in a wall to escape the rain and cold. He shivered as he looked at his dwindling supply of food stocks and even smaller moneybag. “There has got to be a better way,” he said to himself “to make my money last longer.
“One one hand, I have to spend money to live. On the other hand, I can’t live without money.” He started thinking about one hand and the other, left hand and right hand. How could he make them work together? Luca Pacioli knew about traditional ledgers, but their single column of entries was so limiting. “Left hand, right hand” he repeated to himself as he started to eat his meager breakfast of yesterday’s leftover bread and a bit of bone meal broth to dip it in. As he sat on a three-legged stool at his rough-carved wooden table, he suddenly had an idea. What if he took the format of an existing ledger, but expanded it so that it had a left-hand and a right-hand column?
Yes, the two columns would show how the two hands would work together, something a traditional ledger failed at. But what to call the new type of ledger? He wanted to communicate the idea of the two hands working together. First, he thought of “left-and-right-hand-ledger,” but this was too long. Pacioli decided to use just the “h” to communicate “handedness,” settling on hledger as the name of his ledger with left- and right-hand columns.