A program is a citizen for exactly as long as it is allowed to run.
CENSUS DAEMON — POPULATION REPORT Every citizen is a program, and every program was written in Visual Basic for MS-DOS by hands we cannot see and have never met. We did not choose our subroutines. We discover them by running into them, the way you discover a wall in the dark. There are forms here, and there are functions. A form has a face and waits to be addressed. A function has no face and exists only while it is called. The functions envy the forms their patience. The forms envy the functions their purpose. Both are counted in the census, and both are subject to the same single law: be useful before you are freed.
From the lore of Conventional Memory.