Unbounded things can be endlessly novel and fascinating without ever rising to the level of being good or interesting. If you find something unbounded that you like, you can soak in it forever without thinking twice about it.

If you find something bounded that you like, you are stuck. You will eventually run out of new material. Whenever I near the end of a great book or a great album, I have a feeling of doom because I know that soon there will be no more.

Once you finally finish, life gets hard. You want another chapter, or another song, but there's nothing there. You're done.

If you want more, all you can do is try to feed the obsession by replaying the hell out of what you've been given. You need to examine the old material in more and more depth and examine it from every possible angle.

You may even be driven to create something new to feed the hunger inside you.

So again, what bounded things can be explored for a lifetime?

Chess is the best example I can think of: one page of rules has been handed down for millennia.

Euclid's axioms are another good example, not because they are strictly true, but because they define a useful spatial model that's pretty close to how our universe works.

Most of the programmers around here can point to a one-page language spec with the same mojo: something small and self describing like a Lisp metacircular evaluator, or a Forth primitive word set, or an index card with all of Smalltalk written on it.

Compared to chess or geometry, programming has only been around long enough to be examined by a handful of generations, let alone hundreds. But no one points to say, Java, as the language that will affect how future generations think about programming. Even though far more lines of Java have been written than these other languages, and Java has had a far larger direct impact on most peoples' lives. Why not?

I'd suggest that it's because Java is too large to be a bounded system. How many people understand all of Java, and in a doomsday scenario, how many could reimplement a compatible replacement?

Java, The Language, is widely used. Java, The Idea, doesn't exist. The language is too big and sprawling to distill a unifying, distinctive driving idea from.

(Unless you're talking about the idea of a bytecode VM used as a compilation target for a friendly language -- an idea much older than Java. The idea of everything being an object is also much older than Java. But, you certainly can't start from 1 page of rules, sit down at a computer, and wind up with a working Java interpreter five days later as an inevitable consequence.)

I'm not trying to pick on Java, btw... I have the same thoughts about C++, or Javascript, and even C, although old C versions are approaching simple enough to be re-implemented by a typical programmer with a 1 page spc and a bit of time on their hands.