A Comment on the Ugliness of Language and the Politics of Code

"Ah knows there's a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there's going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq"

The sneer is implied but it's there. The statement performs two things: it sneers at the very idea of doing anything "gracefully", and it identifies Bush with "not Washington": not one of those lucky policy-making cocktail party animals but a fine, upstanding, put-upon white American who works oh so hard on code, and stuff, and is not a gonna have no fancy pants blogger tell him he can't (cain't) code.

President Bush, if we're not going to exit "gracefully", how are we going to exit?

Is a cane going to come out from stage left to drag us off the stage of history as we do the old soft shoe on skulls?

Would you like it to be like Britain's exit from Afghanistan way back in the 19th century, with not a man left alive after the Green Zone is blown to shit, and the starving and brutalized Iraqis kill the fat Americans who fight amongst themselves for places on helicopters?

President Bush is clearly performing a nihilistic meltdown as he realizes in the innermost recesses in his heart that he's fucked up royally and at this point the game is making black, white, and attacking ANYONE with dignity and grace.

George Marshall arranged a graceful exit for the bulk of American forces and aid from Europe in the form of the Marshall plan. He was hounded from public life by Bush's grandfather because the grace he showed made Prescott Bush look like an idiot.

In like manner, for the past thirty years, conversations about "good code" and quality in data systems have had a circular track. They start with things as they are in which Steve McConnell's "coding horror" is the norm and not the exception.

Readers of Code Complete will be familiar with Steve's icon of the programmer behind the screen whose hair is raised by what he sees, a total lack of grace and truth:

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine

We resolve to program with more grace and to discuss ways and means from structured to extreme programming.

But then we're brutalized by manufactured crises whose origin is the executive suite and which are for this reason undiscussable.

The ONLY way to behave in these manufactured crises is macho: to claim without evidence that there is a "simple" solution, constituted in the immediate removal, or non-implementation, of any module that "appears" unnecessary.

Of course, while it is bad practice for a marginal module to do necessary work for a central module, you're still dealing with a complexity that approaches a biological system.

Let's say you refuse to authorize implementation of code to transform international input to ASCII. On delivery, the "numbers" reflect USA business exclusively and are useless in fact. But nobody's the wiser.

The programmers are easily persuaded not to worry, because as members of the lower middle class, they have been fooled by the bogus campaign that falsely claims that there are "too many" immigrants. MIS management keeps as quiet as possible about the quality of the numbers.

If some "consultant" comes in because the user is complaining that the numbers he's getting make no sense after all, and discovers that 50% of the incoming raw transactions are being skipped because they contain unicode characters with value > 255, he's sneered at strategically as "academic", and told to get back to work and find the REAL reason...the reason that doesn't make the MIS manager look bad.

"Look, Joe, we know all about that problem. But this is a USA company and I'm sure most of the business is domestic. I don't want an elegant solution or a graceful solution. Why don't you just add 10% to each 'valid' transaction?"

[This stuff happens. A system whose vendor claimed could count people going into a mall had to apply all sorts of "smoothing" math, which was beyond the understanding of the suits, to deliver sensible output.]

This is the origin of the sneer...Bush's sneer. The sneer is a gesture that knows "all about" the higher things and pretends to be surfeit from having absorbed them, and to see "through" their hollowness.

The "programmer" expects and desires to enter computing history at some sort of grand Origin, and the "executive headhunter" and recruiting manager assures him he'll do ahistorical new development.

The problem is that he or she enters a conversation and is immediately subject to preset rules, such as "don't make me, the manager, look like an idiot who's failed to think of that, because I cannot be wrong" [Bush is a man who can't be wrong, because he's allowed not only the elections but also policy to be driven by Karl Rove's lies and fraud: if Bush is wrong, he's fucked].

To the sneer, it's impossible to actually go to Vietnam (when Bush was cowering in the National Guard), to sail up and down brown rivers with Viet Cong shooting at one, and then to return gracefully to the United States to work against the war.

This is why both Kerry and earlier McCain had to have their reputations trashed.

Similarly, programmers secretly recode working code "their way" because they're offended by its "style", often by what objectively is a graceful style.

The sneer has eaten the former society and what Yeats called the ceremony of innocence hasn't so much been drowned, it's been absorbed in such a manner that we "know" (in a primitive way) all about it and need not revisit it.

I mean: I get on a bus in Chicago with a book. A skinny aging white guy, who has gone straight from boy to guy on drugs and alcohol and has never lived on the Isle of Man, looks with scorn at me, and says "I useta believe all dat shit".

I mean: within many data processing "shops" it's a termination offense to read and apply a data processing book. At Moore Business Forms I discovered that a predecessor had automated mailing labels with 150 Access macros and got started on a graceful solution (one VB Access module with a GUI).

The boss of the consulting firm told me to knock it off. Fortunately the client people were all sane and they liked me: they might have given me a separate contract direct job, but in Chicago to accept such an offer is a good way to get beat up in an alley, and I'm not exagerrating: for the same reason unions in Chicago harassed Fawcette Technical publications at a conference for hooking up their own presentations, small "consulting" firms in Chicago conduct business according to Capone rules.

The boss had totally absorbed the very idea that all "contract" programmers were losers and whores who would implement overly elaborate billable solutions.

Like Bush and Blair his approach was monotone, for he'd "learned" to insist on only one way. This Way or Tao consisted of deliberately screwing the client by delivering 10% of what the client wanted and hiding the deficiency of the work.

I resigned, and this was the ONLY time in my career when I invited the boss on leaving to perform an unnatural act on his own person: usually I tried to be a "professional". As Churchill said, this was my finest hour.

"Hitler is an autodidact, and not so much half-educated as at most one-tenth educated (you only have to listen to the unbelievable farrago of his Nuremberg speeches on culture: the only thing more dreadful than the rubbish of the *Karlchen Miesnick* is the groveling way in which it is admiringly received and quoted.) As the Fuhrer he is proud not to be weighed down by 'education in the traditional sense' and in the same breath proud of the knowledge he has gathered for himself."

Victor Klemperer was a philologist and a Jew who was trapped in the Third Reich during WWII, survived, and who wrote in hiding THE LANGUAGE OF THE THIRD REICH using his memory of books and papers taken from him by the Nazis and who could not consult libraries.

There's nothing of course wrong with being an "autodidact" (somebody who teaches himself). But as Klemperer makes clear there is a difference between the autodidact with humility, some self-knowledge, and compassion, and the person who concludes from his absorption of .10 that he is an *allesweisen*, a knowitall, which is what both Hitler was.

But there's a further difference between Hitler and Bush because Fascism differs in national manifestations being a national pathology.

The typical American male is not an *allesweisen* in the German sense, indeed, because of folk memories of how much fun it was to persecute German-Americans during WWII, it amuses him to mock "good" autodidacts as knowitalls.

But, he's a person who cannot be wrong, especially if he works on symbolic processing tasks.

A cancer of the personality occured in the actual Hitler. Whereas Stalin and Mao could change direction (if not their basic programme, meaning their personality had some cancer), while Krushchev and Den Xiao P'ing could change the basics of their programmes to a greater extent than Stalin or Mao, Hitler had, because of his lack of education or personal development, to insist that Germany could win until he was using 13 year olds to fight Russian shock troops in the Zoo at Berlin.

What I find frightening is that the American species of this personality cancer appears in Bush, and I've seen it in managers and their programmers: "I cannot be wrong or all is lost".

Now, Gerald Weinberg saw it in programmers in 1972 and prescribed a cure, because the "structured walkthrough" was originally a space where we could be wrong (gracefully so!)

But if we compare management theory and management literature, we find NO corresponding advice texts on how to be "wrong" gracefully.

No, we find at best books on how companies have handled disasters such as occured in 1983 when Tylenol bottles were opened by lunatics in drugstores, and the loons had replaced the product by poison.

Fortunately, these books make fixing the problem an integral part of the public relations campaign. But, even as Karl Rove has had until the last election a veto power over policy, the overall campaign is public relations.

The Asian corporate tradition is to resign: in Japan, the corporate executive feels beholden to do so as part of his *bushido*. But not for a moment did Ken Lay of Enron express regret, only denial, until he died (under mysterious circumstances).

Indeed, Oliver Stone makes the point that the only man to express regret for what may have been a New Orleans plot to kill JFK was killed.

"I need to rewrite the 150 macros using VBA, and it's going to take time." "In order to actually recognize a person entering a mall, you need to have a theory of what a person looks like, both the statics which take into account the fact that a lot of people have weird heads and the dynamics of the way people move: we can do this in place of smoothing the data with hacks, but it will take time."

This is like German officers telling Hitler that they could defend the Rhine, but not attack west of the Rhine in Dec 1944 without immediately, and literally, running out of gas.

This is like Colin Powell attempting to persuade Donald Rumsfeld to back off after the Turkish parliament forbid American land forces from crossing Turkey to invade the north of Iraq.

No dialog occurs. Even as Klemperer saw language die, dialog dies because words are things turned to stone as heavy as the Moon, and after the meeting, your supervisor instructs you not to speak in these weekly meetings anymore before reviewing it with him.

And it's at this point I look for a job teaching English in dar es Salaam.

I'm gonna make a graceful exit, this much I can control.