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Enjoy Orlando, Donna

Edward G Nilges — Tue, 16 May 2006 21:17:28 -0700

I have a blast when I get to go to VSLive. There is a certain energy when geeks get together and out of the cube. I've enjoyed my VSLives and before that my Share conferences for IBM mainframe geeks at which the evenings usually concluded with a drunken chorus of "we all live in a virtual machine", to the tune of Yellow Submarine.

Is Bill Gates there?

I hope I don't scare Edward Yourdon away.

The Edwards

Donna L Davis — Tue, 16 May 2006 18:57:13 -0700

I'm following this saga with great interest, feeling pretty superficial blogging about an Orlando developer conference when such weightier topics are being discussed.

Dazed and Confused

Edward G Nilges — Tue, 16 May 2006 06:01:53 -0700

Some people may have thought Dijkstra was just kidding when he predicted that large organizations would collapse owing to the unmastered complexity of their data systems. He wasn't, and one example of unmastered complexity would be the US election system.

See http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/1964: there is doubt that the US had a valid election in 2000 and 2004 because of security flaws in electronic voting machines as used in decisive states such as Florida and Ohio.

But how is this related to structured programming, of all things?

An unstructured program might be fully correct in fact: many authors of "spaghetti" code were persuaded of this and some of them were right (me, for instance, before I read F. T. Baker's 1972 article on structured programming). SOME programs worked in the interval 1950..1970 prior to the introduction of the structured techniques. Hell, my father checked each bank statement by hand and he assures me the bank was right even after it computerized.

But part of the problem was that the organization depended for assurance on the reliability of this primitive software on the programmers themselves, and the correctness of the software could not be proven, whether using formal methods or English.

Structured programming not only led to provable programs in an informal sense (we can discern correctness or its lack in structured code as opposed to go-to code) it also had the social impact of making programmers more accountable to management, and management accountable to programmers for a brief interval.

Macho epistemology, however, resisted the structured techniques because in macho (typically male) epistemology, one knows what one knows and one is never wrong. This is why wymyn like Donna, and my former coworker at Bell Northern Research, have been in my experience somewhat more loyal to good praxis including structured programming.

Moreover, I have found consistently that good structure tends to rise through the levels of a data system and that conversely bad practice down deep tends to corrupt the data system upwards.

For example, the Macintosh until now was based on a somewhat cleaner Motorola chip and not the Intel 8xxx series, and the latter's early versions included a number of design "compromises", which seemed to have infected Windows to this day.

Investigations into 2000 and 2005 voting fraud are discovering in general an "unstructured" situation of security holes and backdoors, and undocumented features because lack of true accountability tends to be reflected in code.

Lip service has been paid to Dijkstra. I don't count Ed Yourdon's praise as such, but for many programmers, there is a schizophrenia in which they admire the integrity of a man like Dijkstra but have no way on earth of demanding that their employers give them time to prove their software correct...either by formal methods or else by simple, clear, "informal" English such as would emerge in a truly fair and open structured walkthrough, with no managers present to renarrate the English as "gibberish" because the managers themselves are so corrupted by management-speak that mathematical clarity is (as GWB said of Al Gore's ideas on Social Security, and its math) to them "fuzzy".

The structured methods, and later good OO praxis have in my experience died a messy death in any organization that overvalues obedience and control, and my sources on Diebold (the maker of election software despite the fact that its CEO was a rabid Bush supporter) describe its MIS culture as one of ... fear and intimidation, the same sort that obtained in my experience at Montgomery Ward.

Management theorists since Frederick Taylor have been as is Ed Yourdon anti-Taylor. They do not believe, as regards MIS, that we don't need the structured or OO methods as long as the "mere coders" can be persuaded to forgo a family life and work free overtime "pondering weak and weary over many a midnight dreary" unstructured and obfuscated code.

Who are understandably anxious about their very nature as men (are we not men?) owing to postfeminism and the disempowering antisexuality of the corporate monastery and who seek to restore it by jettisoning the girlieman structured methods, usually at a key point...say by adding an undocumented "macro" capability to software under pressure at Diebold, which will allow operatives to change the landslide for Barack Obama in 2008 to one for Jeb Bush at the last minute.

Management literature, of which Ed Yourdon is a master, cannot even outside of Taylorism really "bite the hand that feeds it" by analyzing "the decline and fall of the American programmer" less as a failure of personal discipline than as a mechanism where management needs, almost in spite of it, to make actual skill as physically alienated as possible...if necessary, by outsourcing it, in a physical alienation that reflects the underlying economic dynamic that Marx described.

Oops. Stink bomb. I can't write management literature because at critical moments I think about Marx, and his bottom line: that no, society isn't "rational" today and that no, managers aren't wealth maximizers, seeking Profit by maintaining excellent "employee relations" who feel that the Company is their loving Parent. Even though this might produce maximum profits for the firm, as it seems to have done for companies like Southwest Airlines, it is always the exception, never the rule, always the bridesmaid and never the bride.

Sure, I'm on record as saying it makes sense to outsource to the coral strand. Hell, I even outsourced myself to beautiful downtown Shenzen in Red China.

But even in an outsourcing case, it seems to me that at the point where the remote Chinese or Indian programmer becomes actually familiar with code and invested in it (losing his initial alienation), the firm then seeks to re-alienate, by pushing into the hinterlands of China, the high country of Nepal or the mountains of the moon for "cheaper" labor. Cost pressures can't completely explain the dynamic, because it's net cheaper to stay in Bangalore if the homeys finally understand your business.

No, the underlying explanation has to take alienation, the necessity that your employees be to a certain extent Dazed and Confused, and their code reflects this, as a primitive. Marx wasn't completely right: the process isn't explained solely by profit maximization. There's a deeper dialectic in which what has to be avoided is Hegel's mutual recognition (CEOs, in my experience, can't make good eye contact and could use lessons in charm from their lowliest Customer Service Reps).

That's my idea. We think we should be rational and structured, but there is (despite good CEO intentions) a *telos* in organizations, independent of methodological individualism, that necessarily changes them from communities of rational mutual recognizers to anti-communities of people who hide in cubicles and write bad code.

Take Google (please). It has been perhaps corrupted by its adventure in China, and by allowing the Chinese government to use its search engine technology to PREVENT openness and transparency. At a key point Google sacrificed the whole deal to short term profit. On schedule its organizational culture seems to be changing to standard-issue American Fun Corporation, where people don't speak the truth, worry about their quarterly performance reviews, and stab each other in the back.

Hegel viewed history as necessary progress to a community something like the European Union in which we gain maximal freedom and recognition by being nice people, being painfully Politically Correct, and never putting people to death for heinous crimes. Alexander Kojeve literally believed this and after reading and lecturing on Hegel took part in the EU's founding as a direct result.

But Theodore Adorno may have discovered a darker *telos* in which we regress, in a process he called "psychoanalysis in reverse" to GREATER isolation (programmers sobbing in cubicles while we Call Security), GREATER levels of sexual and ethnic fear (cubicles decorated with racist "free speech") and GREATER abilities to simply ignore what is being done in our name (a BBC report this morning confirms that as of today, 90% of the Iraqi children we liberated are clinically malnourished). Which are positively correlated in my experience to the disappearance of the structured walkthrough, because Weinberg's structured walker throughers are above all sexually and emotionally secured psychoanalyzed people who don't get easily flustered.

[Not "financially" secure, perhaps. But it helps.]

Dijkstra himself, I believe, did not himself realize what he was calling for when he called for mathematical provability because ultimately mathematical provability of a data system that affects peoples lives (most data systems, that is) means you can use clear natural language, as Euclid did, to explain it in a Town Meeting to grown-ups like my grandfather, who only completed 8th grade but was no damned fool.

Great post, thanks, Donna

Edward G Nilges — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 01:26:53 -0800

I wrote a letter to the editor of COMPUTERWORLD in 1972, asking why Turing got no credit: I didn't realize that his reputation as a "homosexual" had obscured his achievement.

It is hard to imagine just how feared homosexuality was in the 1950s. Basically, my father, who as an upper-middle class physician, both refused to wear Harry Trumanesque goomba shirts and forced my Mom to wear high heels, gloves, a hat, and a dress every day of her life, because, I think, he feared being outed as gay, which he wasn't.

He spoke to me recently of how my Mom looked up to him as a real guy, who'd served in the Army, but unlike the guys who grabbed her when she and her fellow nurses served in the USO. My Mom liked the fact that my father knew opera and would take her on dates to museums, a cheap date in the 1940s.

To me my father represented a solution to the equation of being a guy and being half-civilized.

But because my father couldn't talk about these issues, and because I inherited my Mom's willowy frame, my father was always scared that I was queer. This created alienation and bad feeling that lasts until today, because I felt people shouldn't be labeled. Plus I am not gay, just happy now and then :-).

There was a fashion in the 1970s for outing famous figures. I feel we're all a little bit bisexual, and that creative, intelligent people a little bit more.

Certainly, I encountered anti-gay sexual politics in MIS. The very idea of the geek codes the geek as the feminine/queer term in a relationship to the "real" MANager.

Simple software quality and reliability is re-presented, in the politics, as "frills" with the implication that the software designer not concerned, like a real Man, with the essentials of "business" alone wears mesh bikini shorts underneath his sober Gap attire.

The very idea of the Turing machine is gay-subversive, for it deconstructs the phallic competition of the "powerful" system, which systematically confuses information with the conversion of energy that occurs in that quintessentially male device, the car, with the textual, writerly, and therefore suspect activity of code.

At Midnight, all the agents

Andy Tegethoff — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 14:14:40 -0800

Mmmm.... Dylan.....
Where was I? Oh yes -- good review, Ed. This book would actually have interested me, but you took it out of my queue.

I agree with Jeff

Edward G Nilges — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 20:32:47 -0800

...but I would add that in the summer of 1973 I experienced first hand a Hegelian contradiction when I realized that I wasn't the only Freak to become addicted to programming, a contradiction of the sort that may have passed through Shakespeare when he experienced the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism first hand.

I was on the mailing lists of the early players including the People's Computer Company and I discovered that while most "liberal" people in Chicago thought computers were tools of evil, there were some people who "looked" cool in faraway California who also like me were fascinated by software.

One confusion that Markoff spreads is that we were fascinated by machines and technology per se. But if one reads David Gerlenter in a strong sense we carried our hatred of Moloch (the image Allen Ginsberg used of midcentury rust belt technology in Howl) into software which for us represented a dialectical engagement with and triumph over Moloch-the-machine.

When I learned that "any computer can be programmed to simulate any other computer given time and space" I was like, cool, and I proposed to my boss at Roosevelt University's computer center that INSTEAD of begging IBM for an educational discounted IBM System/360-20, we should take the existing 1401 and program simulators of major architectures (including the 360 and the DEC PDP 8) to base our teaching of applied computer science.

But one IBM salesman told me my code was "disruptive". I'd told him while he was "researching" our current practice that I used /* as an end marker for card decks in order to handle multiple batches in a single run.

He said I had "disrupted" IBM's plans to convert Roosevelt to the 360 because JCL (Job Control Language, the worst quasi-programming-language ever made) used this symbol.

I should have learned then and there that no more than the lawn trolls with their beards and sandals, the suits were not my pals either, and they would alternatively use my skills and throw me aside, like Willie Loman. I should have lit out for China then and there. But I figgered that a real man would keep beating his head on a stone wall, like my father and his father before me.

Markoff and the suits thought we liked machines. The suits would give us machines and pat us on the head. They didn't even realize that Bob Dylan's Desolation Row was running through our heads: "where the heart attack machine, is strapped on to their bodies, and then the kerosene".

However, the software itself was reified and was turned to stone as heavy as the moon when it became third party, closed source.

Which is not to say that Open Source was not itself Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, as I imply in the review.

Perhaps, as the wimmen were saying at the time, we were ALL stinkers...half of us in suits becoming Yuppie thugs and the other half taking credit for other people's work in beards in sandals.

Historical change is a time of real contradiction. My father could not understand, if I wanted in 1970 to be a programmer, why I would not get a haircut: he'd visited the computer center at Swedish Covenant Hospital in Chicago, and, he reported, the programmers had short hair and wore jackets and ties. But I wanted to be a programmer precisely because I would no longer have to live at my father's house and obey his rules.

Years later, my son-the-C++-whiz saw the same paradox when in 1995 I became totally addicted to Visual Basic. He said, Dad, if you think Microsoft is evil then why don't you at least use Delphi?

The situation is very complex. Visual Basic gave me a wider audience for my book and there is good and evil in everything, as in the Shadow Play of Indonesia.

Nicely Done

Daniel Read — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 16:38:31 -0800

I like the review. While you're hard on the book (I have not read it), you explain why in the review. I liked this especially:

Basically, you don't get into the ethnocentric playbook without the proper background. Furthermore, Wirth, like his mentor and friend Edsger Dijkstra (who is unmentioned in the book as a critic of drug-addled development) were in the Californian-Markoff scheme of things speed bumps in the way of a reified and commodified Progress because both had the bad grace to think critically about software, and neither thought that Great Men should never code actual software unless their Greatness be deconstructed.

Another critical review on Amazon, by Jerry Saperstein, had this to say:

The Bay Area did have a heavy concentration of scientifically oriented universities, many engineers, technicians and scientists and a lot of companies requiring those skills. So it is not at all surprising that lots of ideas about computers and their uses came from these people and this area. Likewise, it wasn't surprising that so many automobile companies --- and there were dozens at one time --- located in Detroit, where the earliest pioneers were. It would be difficult for someone to argue that Henry Ford's auto manufacturing revolution stemmed from Detroit's culture of the time, much less its counterculture. But that's essentially what Markoff attempts here.

Worse, he links much of it to a bunch of groups he acknowledges, if not admits, were more oriented toward the goals of Stalin and Mao. Markoff glosses over the fact that it was taxpayer and corporate funding that made all of the developments he describes possible. Overall, Markoff attepts to connect coincidence (the rise of the counterculture) with the inexorable quest for new technology.

What do you think?

Dan

Re: Computers of the Future

Bill Marriott — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 10:41:46 -0700

Hi Dan,

Wish I had seen this a while back. I could have confirmed for you that this is certainly not a futurist's prediction of what a home computer might look like. I see that you linked to a truth or fiction type site, and I can confirm that it is the set of control panels for a nuclear submarine. Having spent several years of my life staring at those meters and gauges, it was surprising to stumble across them on your site.

Bill

Taschen Computer History Book

Daniel Read — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 06:18:35 -0800

Hi, Edward. I was re-reading this post of yours from awhile back since I had just made my first visit to Silicon Valley a couple weeks ago for SDWest. I found the same as Pswar, that the Valley appears to have awakened (if it was sleeping); there were crowds at the conference, and there appeared to be a lot going on business-wise in the area. (I got this sense listening to people talk around the conference, also.) On the other hand, I also found that a striking rich-poor dichotomy, which you allude to in your post.

What prompted me to post this comment, however, is the Taschen book computing history images that you mention. I believe this is the book:

The Computer. An Illustrated History

Looks like a winner. I'm going to order a copy from my friends at Ziesing Books (they can get anything I need, minus the Amazon discount, but they always wrap and ship with great care), and hopefully I'll have a review to post here soon. $30 US seems not a bad price for a 330+ book of this sort.

Dan

Hi, Its Me again

Gunish — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 08:07:20 -0800

hi,

this is gunish again (if u remember me), i have been constatly reading your blogs for some time now, getting inspired by them last month i decided to venture out into game theory, i did a bit ot research on it and it got selected at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee (which is a 150 years old university) last week in a paper presentaton contest.
Moreover the professors over there liked it very much and i won the second prize there. so i just wanted to thank you for beeing so inspiring in your writing. please keep writing always.
About my research, i did some work on the Nash's Equiliberium and its application to Computer Networking. i studied pareto optimality and how it can be analogus to explicit baud narrowing and shadowing problem. i got some interesting results which showed that full cognito networks got a performace boost of 64.3% in terms of load balancing and removing backloged packets. i would love to discuss the entire fiding with you, but i didnt want to eat up much of your blog space. i have also done a industrial survey and some buisness modeling to see how much it would cost to actualize router gaming. some good resuts were obtained there again. so all in all i am looking forward for inputs from your experience.

and i am also desperately waiting for your book :-)
hoping to hear from you soon,

Gunish Rai Chawla.

Job market

Edward G Nilges — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 16:02:22 -0800

I have heard the same from my former coworkers. The problem for me is in the type of jobs.

At one firm, a good product for generating Web skins over common code was intentionally destroyed because the developers were under such pressure to get the "skinned" code out for the client of the hour.

They were supposed to follow procedures to base the client look and feel on the common subdermis, but in fact they would copy all of the code of the common subdermis and modify until the client was all happy.

They did so in a sourly passive-aggressive context because they knew they were exponentially creating more and more work every day.

The problem, I think, is that the real estate market for renters and buyers creates a "floor" under the minimum realistic offer for a developer in the valley, and I think this floor is 100K.

Companies are willing to pay this because offshoring creates jobs (as I've said), but the "resource" becomes as expensive as a capital good which under the logic must work 24/7. The "resource" has no time to do things "right".

Whereas the low salaries "offshore" mean that truly interesting and creative work "offshore" can be funded for far less.

Now that my kids are grown, I'm like John Cusack in Say Anything. I don't wanna process anything, or work with anything processed. I don't wanna administrate no data bases nor no networks, and furthermore there are a lot of guys far more skilled at it than me.

I just wanna read Bjarne Stroustrup and write compilers. I don't even wanna make hot love to Iona Skye.

But the needs of younger developers are different. My advice is to avoid fancy real estate deals that require you and your sweetie to pay more than about 1/3 of combined net income. Suppose to pay for the war and my Social Security, Bush revokes the mortgage income deduction...or reduces it.

Can't happen? Don't bet on it. The costs of the war are not even properly reflected in the current budget and the middle class in America has already demonstrated that it can be screwed and will continue to vote Republican.

OK, just my opinion.

Not that bad

pswar — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 15:48:22 -0800

You are right, the home prices are outragious for sure here.
But job market here in the valley is not that bad. All of my friends who were looking for jobs landed jobs within weeks except one, it took 3 months for him because he is damn picky.

You are without a doubt - a Remarkable cat

Bill — Mon, 27 Dec 2004 21:50:31 -0800

More on this later - but suffice to say that you are definitely one of the 'great minds' that I've had the fortune of getting to be friends with. And if your brains keep rubbing off on me - I'll be a bad ass before long ;-)

Ready to Believe

Daniel Read — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 17:51:52 -0800

This silly thing got me thinking today. I added some musings to my blog:

A Little Skepticism is a Good Thing

Dan

The thing that really makes i

Rob MacGrogan — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 13:50:24 -0800

The thing that really makes it look real to me is the odd, unreadable, poorly-memiographed-looking type in the caption.