Why Conservatives Can't Code
I found the following "review" at the Amazon site for Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler by an A. Gonzalez, of Austin, Texas. I have flagged it as (completely) Inappropriate because Mr. Gonzales hadn't read the book, and what follows are Mr. Gonzales' remarks, and my Comment in reply. Both will remain, of course, until I get Amazon to remove the Inappropriate review and the rating of two stars.
Gonzales:
While looking for a book on Compilers, I came across a review of this book, which also had some responses posted by the author. Among them, was this comment:
"As to the relevance of politics. I have consistently found that political conservatives have difficulty in learning to code, since coding involves a necessary deconstruction of social structures: their analysis. "
- Edward G. Nilges
Not only do I believe this was irrelevant, it simply wasn't called for.
Nilges:
I have reported your comment to Amazon as Inappropriate, because you have reviewed and rated my book based not on reading my book, but on a comment at this site. I will also write Amazon as the author to inform them that your comment and rating should be removed.
I am posting your challenge and my response at www.developerDotStar.COM as a permanent record.
Although my comment at this site doesn't appear in my book, you can take it as read. I've noticed, as early as 1972, that people with character armor and one-dimensional "company men" typically talked a very good game about being good with the mainframes that dominated that era...while failing to deliver.
My predecessor in my first programming job was for example prowar and angry about the demonstrations erupting in Chicago where I worked. When I inherited his code I discovered zero error checking and default paths in assembler because, as he told me when I asked him about it, it was the user's "personal responsibility" to enter input perfectly, and if the keypunch operators couldn't they "should" be fired...in a union shop where it wasn't easy to fire these employees.
It was clear to me that individualism here interpreted "personal responsibility" to mean "I do my job, and should be rewarded on a strictly personal basis, and the hell with the group".
Keypunch operators, single mothers in many cases, were losing their jobs because their natural error rate was causing GIGO ("garbage in, garbage out") and they, and not the programmer, were being blamed.
Using "liberal" ideas taken from the Scandinavian approaches of Norwegian consultant Tom Gilb (who wrote a book called Humanized Input at this time), I implemented code which took responsibility for errors and relieved the keypunch operators of a burden of anxiety.
But long thereafter, I fought what I considered the good fight against a politics of data processing in which the world was treated one-dimensionally and as a dead collection of things that had no significant relations, and people separated into sheep and goats. I maintained and rewrote, for example, enormous programs originally written as a single main() function by programmers who couldn't be bothered (since "time is money") to think and as we say today factor, or who were forbidden by managers to think or factor.
It's been pointed out, in fact, by a German consultant that the original design of Fortran (in which Go To was the only control structure) was based on a strong, American interpretation of "management control" in which the user would do all the planning, and the programmer a lowly clerk who would simply transcribe and enter mathematical equations. Even before Fortran, a lowly Navy programmer, Grace Murray Hopper, discovered that the conservatives, invested as they were in a class system of command and control, were wrong, and the liberals, who allowed the programmer to think and factor, were right.
John von Neumann, of the Hungarian *haute* bourgeois, was (rightfully) angry at the Communist takeover of his country in 1946, but he allowed this anger to be generalized into anger at anyone with the bad taste not to be born with a silver spoon in her mouth, and von Neumann felt that "programming" was for clerks and fools.
During the 1990s, I realized that new systems were typically out of control because of a politically conservative requirement that as little as possible should be "unnecessarily" invested in new technology, and I realized that the hysterical language hurled against "unnecessary" features in data systems (such as error checking and humanized input) was isomorphic to conservative crusades against nondefense government "waste", in which swimming pools and lunches for poor kids are "an unnecessary frill" while the F-16 fighter-bomber needs of course to have many bells and whistles so its pilot is all comfy while setting cities on fire.
It seemed to me that any time the mere programmer had an idea he was at best patronized because a real programmer never takes the view of the executive suite. No, he greets the Mexican cleaning ladies when they clean up after hours, because he's dedicated and hardworking, and he is in front of the actual screen as is the clerk. He naturally has a "low level" perspective because he isn't escaping to Cancun on the company jet. In the Air Farce, he patched the code, he didn't fly the jet that set the city on fire.
I realized that the language was politics, masquerading as science: brutal allocation, misallocation, and (at Enron) outright theft masquerading as neutral technical talk.
I'd found that to be fair to all stakeholders including the mere help desk slave or low-balance customer at the ATM, the business rules of the system (as Gilb had realized) had to be transparent and not buried in code, and on this basis I formed the theory that drives chapter nine of Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler.
The user should be in control, but this means he's responsible for being clear and transparent about the business rules, so that the business system can be audited. Business people of course love to complain, at the level of back office oversight, about "excessive" needs for compliance, especially after Sarbanes Oxley, but they don't complain when marketing schemes are complexified so as to fool the customer into thinking she's getting a deal when, uh, she doesn't, because they matter and "she" usually, uh, doesn't.
Well, often in practice the best way for a complex system to be written in a human matter is to write a damn compiler, and if you have the skills to parse, which I impart in my book, you have a shot.
We can't always "solve" problems at least in the short term. We can however, talk about them to each other and even to computers. But, of course, conservatives don't like a lot of talk (not one serious effort has been made by the Bush administration to get the Arabs and the Israelis to talk, with the result that children have died).
Very well. You are offended because I said "conservatives can't code". Well, coding is micropolitics (cg. Lawrence Lessig, Code and the Laws of Cyberspace) and imposing a social scheme on other people, your real conservative should be naturally suspicious of companies so big as to constitute potentially oppressive monopolies "coding the laws of cyberspace", using programmers, terrified for their jobs, to "focus on the business needs" to the exclusion of environmental costs and the needs of customers and employees who don't matter.
But, of course, they aren't. Needing to believe in the sanctity of private property, they close their eyes to force and to fraud. They don't see the bug, whether in the code or in the argument for the Iraq war. With hearts grown brutal they fill their heads with fantasies, to paraphrase Yeats.
As programmers and their managers, they trash working systems in human services agencies by "programming" replacements authorized by Republican appointees of welfare and human services agencies, whose real, if secret, mission is to destroy those agencies.
For example, it has become effectively impossible for poor working people to file, in many cases, for Earned Income Credit because IRS manual and automated systems have been juryrigged to demand documents which the poor don't have in order to get the tax credit...tax cuts for the rich being conservative, tax savings for the poor a non-starter.
Likewise, Medicaid and Medicare data systems are a mess, because the conservative Bush administration is run by men who literally, according to former treasury scretary John Snow, DO NOT KNOW the difference between Medicaid and Medicare, but who appoint people to run those agencies, and replace working systems by buggy new systems that don't serve the actual Medicare/Medicaid users...the poor people who die without government aid.
As in the case of IRS systems, these systems are INCOMPETENTLY PROGRAMMED...again, to demand constant re-input of vital statistics and documentation that the designers and their managers know is not available to poor, working, single mothers.
This is incompetent management BY DESIGN and it logically implies incompetent implementation of bad goals.
And, in a scandal that will only continue to grow as the new Democratic Congress investigates, we have the mother of all incompetent programming: the complete and willed inability of programmers at John Diebold's company to code the code to give the voter a paper copy of her ballot.
Conservatives can't code. They don't want to code. They prefer using computers to fool the poor and ensure that as far as taking care of strangers is concerned, Margaret Thatcher's obscene will comes to pass: "there is no such thing as society": just incompetent and unquestionable code helping the rich and fooling the poor.
You're offended, because as a matter of professional courtesy we programmers are supposed to be politically neutral on the job (although there's always, it seems, a free pass in programming shops for the local head case, as long he's libertarian or religious head case: the Marxist head case is never seen).
Well, conservatives have "coded" my society in the USA since Reagan's election and they've ruined my life and that of my children.
Because "there is no such thing as society", I worked 16 hours a day doing systems jock work in Oklahoma while my wife suffered severely from clinical depression, installing parts of an OS I'd code in assembler and unable to question why it was I had to even work in Oklahoma, since I'd tested all my changes under a virtual machine.
Because "there is no such thing as society" I had to waste my coding talents making sure the moneyed customer was "happy" and could see my body in East Jesus. There was no such thing as society and no real needs on my (former) wife's part for a kind word and my loving touch: just other people's (incompetent) code that I had to make work on the double.
Despite my 16 hours a day, despite the bugs solved and the millions of lines of code I've written, I have absolutely no property in this code, and I live and teach in Hong Kong with no savings and no retirement plan (so buy my book, dammit). I'm consistently encouraged back in the USA to blame myself for any problems I might have because to do otherwise puts the focus on a society whose everyday brutality is an international byword.
13000 people have died in Iraq in recent months as a result of a CONSERVATIVE experiment to see what would happen if we destroyed a semi-socialist society, and laid off most members of the army, police and civil servants as "excess features". The code, metaphorically, was stripped down to almost nothing as were the forces sent by that clown Donald Rumsfeld, who is the very model of the data processing manager who tells the programmers "just get it done, just hack it".
So you'll pardon me if in commentary at this review I say it loud and clear. Conservatives can't code, and I don't want them running my life anymore, ever again.
"How much does it cost, I'll buy it.
The time is all we've lost, I'll try it.
He can't even run his own life
I'll be damned if he'll run mine!"
"Conservatism"
Thanks for this thoughtful comment, Brian: but the claim of conservatives, including conservatives I respect notably William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk, that they don't wish to run my life, or anyone else's, is just nonsense.
They prescribe a "back to basics" in government which frees basically only the landlord and capitalist to use my labor without paying for it in full.
Furthermore, I am getting real tired of people who are clearly chained to a job, a relationship, and a car, who can't walk a mile without getting winded, that they are free men.
This may not be you. However, in my extensive experience, the typical conservative is so dependent upon a delicate network of social structures that he could not survive a single day in the hell the politicians he created in Iraq.
In software, the conservative is shrink wrapped. His only forays into internals happen to be destructive and they express infantile rage against a very real, and total dependency on an even more delicate network.
I'm confused
Edward, who are these landlords and capitalists you speak of? My understanding and experience is that anyone can become either of these. If they use your labor without full payment, it is you who have not extracted full value. In fact, you are the landlord of your skills. If you are not receiving appropriate "rent" you can remove the tenent.
The socialist/communist alternative is what? A planning commity deciding what everyone's value is?
Being wrapped to a job, relationship, and car of your own choice is better than the dependency for your food, housing, and transportation of a governments whims.
In software, the liberal is stuck in the requirements process. Waiting on the desires of others, not moving forward, and whining and complaining about the lack of progress.
Unbelievable
I'm more likely to believe that it is you who cannot code. Your attempt to link political ideology to technical ability based purely on your own personal and anecdotal experience demonstrates a fundamental inability to use basic logical reasoning skills. And since writing code requires logic, I don't see how you could be any good at it.
Please review this article to understand why you are wrong in so many ways:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy
"Personal, anecdotal" experience is usually a token of a type
Wow, an article in Wikipedia, whose authors are religious maniacs and convenience store clerks who demand a "citate" [sic] for the existence of Descartes.
I realized when I posted "conservatives can't code" I would trigger explosions of rage, because in fact (as playwright and essayist David Mamet has noticed) American data processing has been a sort of catchbasin for ineffective people, who can't code among other things.
I include myself in this categorization, because my family issues destroyed my self-confidence and self-esteem, and I entered data processing because if you COULD code (which I could) you could easily compete with workmates with your own lack of self-esteem, who couldn't code.
The fact is, in my direct experience, American programmers can spend years making six figures...while never understanding (for example) the two different ways Boolean operators can be evaluated. And because management organizes them using negative, bureaucratic capability (the mobilization of anger and fear to accomplish organizational ends by default), this is not a problem, because management ensures that something emerges from the machine that's useful, especially in helping the rich and fooling the poor.
For this reason, American computer workers have an extraordinarily well-developed sense of personal offense because you take offense when you are personally insecure, unlike the people who post regularly at this site, such as Daniel and Donna. Dijsktra had to entitle an essay "How Do We Tell Truths that Might Hurt?" for this reason.
OK, I don't know "logic" and I can't "code", especially if I've lived so long into the new global Dark age that "logic" and "good code" have changed their meaning to "the consistent adherence to the predictable thought" and "mindless entering of computer instructions".
I taught logic at university, but I will save you time and I will save Dan server space. I am certain that in your frame of reference, the university was dazzled by my good looks, and imposed me on Plain Folk Just Trying To Get An Education So As To Make Money.
Nor can I Code, if that means what you think it means. I have a lot of strange Coding habits such as the writing of a *feuilleton* at the beginning of each module declaring, in amusing terms, what the module is a gonna do.
But let me address a key point. I've noticed over the course of my 56 years that ANY tale of American woe is always, necessarily, "personal and anecdotal", and, it is *verboten* in any way to fancy that it might be a token of a type (since you're an expert on logic I bet you know that a token of a type is an instance of a type).
The problem is that I am simply not the only programmer to CHOOSE (freely enough, taking responsibility for the CHOICE) to work 16 hours a day far from home in place of telling his boss to stuff it.
I could have told SEI Information Technology to stuff it. But guess what. I was paying the bills for two kids' health care and my wife didn't work, so I reasoned that the job and its bullshit (having to test code in Oklahoma that worked in Illinois) had to take precedence over my wife's depression.
Don't you dare, don't you dare, for one minute to suppose that I haven't revisited this choice because odds are you are a young punk who doesn't know jack about the real world, and who doesn't know that adult life is a series of decisions like this.
But notice that there was no question here about "being able to code". I wrote several OS modules in assembler so that Standard Oil could continue to hide seismic data from the EPA and from its competitors, and they worked.
But you'll learn soon enough that the White Collar game, as C. Wright Mills, is to constantly change the rules so as to ensure the maintenance of a white collar servant class.
This is why "being able to code" becomes unimportant...as soon as you learn how to code, because the needs of the organization supersede those of the individual, and as soon as he becomes, like me, an ace coder, the language game has to devise other ways in which he is defective and shoddy goods...for otherwise, he might demand too much, which would be a bad thing if he (and especially she) hasn't previously registered membership in what C. Wright Mills, again, identified as the (white, Protestant, male, Ivy League) Power Elite.
And, it's not unique: it's a token of a type. From the start of my own career, in which I was encouraged to continue by my first boss because he thought (silly bastard) that I could code, I noticed men in their thirties emerging in tears from closed offices and "structured walkthroughs".
Typically rather good-looking in a conventional way, and, in Chicago, typically lapsed Roman Catholic or nonobservant Jewish, typically trapped in marriages and children, they were typically very good at "coding" using the primitive tools of the time.
Nonetheless, I saw them leave firms enraged or in tears because they were being told, I realized, that there was oh, so much more to life than those nasty little bits and bytes, that they were "arrogant" (with that arrogance that makes men do heroic stunts but which is disvalued today) and they needed to "listen".
I realized that no matter how good they were at their trade, this doesn't matter in an age where organizations and not people call the shots, and I could see the writing on the wall, because I was a handsome devil who could code, who was a lapsed Roman Catholic, and who was trapped in an early marriage.
Boom, the shit hit the fan on schedule.
This experience is a token of a type. And I would be the first to admit that my own defective character played a role. The problem is that the organization NEEDS your defects of character: if you are a greedy sumbitch, they need to use your greed as a trader: if you are a dull fellow who likes to work breaking other people's code for hours, they need you to work as the typical American programmer to create the illusion that something's being Done.
But beyond my defects of character, my international experience has shown me that the American way of doing things hasn't changed since Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, which I hope you read in high school.
People are used up, and thrown away, and post facto a narrative of their own unique defects of character is used to justify the unjustifiable savagery of American life, which starts with the Black man and woman at the bottom but also includes the non-elite former computer programmer who's homeless now whether or not he could code.
Commenters on my original note are trying an old language game: to reassert that nonelite white people in America (an American-sodden societies, like Eastern Europe) can control their destiny "if only" they could code, or work well with other people, or something.
I've escaped that situation and I thank my stars for having done so.
Deserving Dan and Edward, the Enigma
I am afraid I do not deserve the same level of credit as Dan. I am often shocked and sometimes dismayed by your posts, Edward. However, I recognize that you are also clearly brilliant and perhaps take some pleasure in the shock value of your posts. I also realize that even if we disagree, sometimes we need to be shocked out of complacency. If you never fully win us over to your line of thinking, you will have likely caused us to ponder issues and perspectives that otherwise we would have ignored.
Comments on "generalizing"
When we do things we need to do them on purpose. We need to play golf on purpose, and P. J. Plauger exhorted us to "program on purpose".
When I generalize, I generalize on purpose.
I felt for thirty years that conservatives, control freaks and pseudo-alpha male bullies made lousy coders but I kept my big mouth shut because I had a family to support.
Now I "generalize", and possibly the word is a mild critique of my "generalizing" in a thoughtful note from Chris Morris: that exhorts me not to set my face against classes and sets of people and to be a good, nice person, who indeed takes the world one person at a time.
Programmers, many being unlike me from scientific backgrounds, feel that you cannot "generalize" about people without using statistical techniques and polling and they are generally unaware of the methodological problems with such data gathering.
An essay like mine is pigeonholed into the category of a Rant, and unfortunately an unprincipled clown (Dennis Miller of Saturday Night Live) killed that category.
Well, it's not a rant. Using computers in all but the hard sciences is ultimately a matter of justice and fairness, and because it (per Lessig) changes society, conservatives are in bad faith when they mix retrograde political views with high technology.
In my experience, quiet, nice, analytical men are being USED by corporate, government and intelligence apparati in ways over which they have no control.
Sure, we can use computers on our day off to help Katrina victims as Dan has pointed out.
But, when I worked at Princeton and had a relationship with a lady in NYC, at our church in New York City and in the upper West side what I noted among my girlfriend's friends was a signal futility.
Convinced liberals, they had had since the assasination of John Lennon to make continual compromises, getting business degrees on top of PhDs in English in an exhausting and expensive struggle. They worked in soup kitchens or, as I worked, as Scout leaders on Saturday morning while slaving at media and law firms during the week to pay brutally high rents and mortgages.
And, they counseled each other, as do the followers of Gerald Weinberg, not to look for simple justice and fairness, commodities they sought for others and not from themselves for the big media companies, white-shoe law firms, or (in my case) Ivy League universities.
No, it was always a matter of Yet Another self-help book or charismatic Unitarian minister to remind them as Godly folk, who'd returned to the old ways after the Purple decades of the 1960s and 1970s, they should always look within.
As a result, during the 1980s, media companies and corporate law firms made huge profits that were quietly distributed among the alpha males.
I attended a dinner with some of the women staff of the New York Times, and I heard the most astonishing stories of brutal macho, if compensating, conduct on the part of managers...real pathology, coming in different styles from men and women senior managers, but in both cases some things that were cruel and childish in the extreme.
Men did things to women, and alpha women did things to women and men, with a savagery that was metaphorically and allegorically captured by Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho.
Women would do the leg work for an entire story and write it up perfectly, and then, because some (male or female) senior manager owed a marker to another reporter, "he'd" get the byline and the credit.
Sylvia Nasar, when she did her award-winning New York Times series on John Nash and the book, wasn't promoted: she became a journalism professor. Although I of course spoke with her as a source, I do not know her well at all, but I'll speculate that this achievement threatened some higher up who was grooming Judith Miller to lie about the situation in Iraq.
[When I started out, doing something like debugging a Fortran compiler in object code was celebrated. Today we seem to take it for granted that any genuine accomplishment, whether in programming or in journalism, will threaten some higher up and he or she will retaliate.]
The terribly nice people I knew in Manhattan when I worked at Princeton never fought back as their grandmothers had in the 1940s, a decade when employees, including white collar types, would form wildcat unions at the drop of a hat. Oh, sure, there were feminist cabals and a complete ban on sexist talk...which the nice guys obeyed only to see it selectively used by the higher ups to control people, by injecting barbarism into "nice" offices.
Instead they read self-help books.
I was about fed up in July 1988 when I got on the Princeton to New York train to see my girlfriend...and read that the United States had shot down an Iranian passenger jet.
[It was an "accident" that involved bad software. We don't remember it. The Iranians do. We said at the time "shit happens".]
I was angry by the time I got to my girlfriend's apartment, and she treated my anger as an occasion for anger management...suggesting a talk with our minister.
I could see this was going nowhere, and because I DO have a problem with anger management, I broke up with her, not seeing any way of showing her (as I tried with more success with my manager at Princeton) that I can concede a problem with anger management, and take steps to work on it, but there can be also a genuine inequity "out there" that it's a PART of anger management to fight.
Indeed, I found no "uptake" on this except a limited "uptake" from by boss, and more from my therapist, and years later when I joined the anti-Iraq peace movement. Going to a political demonstration on your lunch hour is almost as refreshing as the old noon hour quickies I had during the 1970s in Chicago (alcoholic or in the sack) and much more constructive.
I would like very much to be a "nice" guy, who doesn't occasionally shock and offend Donna, who doesn't pound Nicorette, and who is in a "relationship" (working on that, got sorta lucky this week, met a new girl, we'll see how it works out).
But when I left America I was able to "factor" out the objective circumstance of what it means to work in America, and I find that I need definitely to work in a human services role, not feeding corporate computers.
We need to take life and people one day and one person at a time, and always remember we can't change the world without changing ourselves: Malcolm X knew that.
But political conservatives STILL can't code.
P.S.: Amazon replied courteously to my request that the Gonzalez review be removed as Inappropriate. His review of my book, which wasn't based on the book but on comments at the site, is gone but remains here at this site.
P.P.S. Dan: good job of editing my comments on the code. Thank you.
Wow
I'm a Conservative. I believe I can code, but you wouldn't take my word. I'm sorry that Conservatives have run your life in the past, and I hope you won't let them do it again. Pardoxically, if you were a Conservative you wouldn't have let someone else run your life in the first place.