Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts

Saturday, 14 July 2012

Getting Your Stuff Done, or Stuff Done To You

This is the response I wanted to leave to "MrChimei" on the spot-on YouTube video, "Steve Jobs Vs. Steve Ballmer". Since YouTube has such a tiny (but understandable) limit on comment size, a proper response would not fit. Therefore...


Let me put it this way. It doesn't matter whether you're speaking out of limited experience, or limited cognition, or what; your flippant attitude will not survive first contact with reality (to paraphrase von Moltke).

I'm a Windows developer who's been developing for Windows since Windows 1.0 was in early developer beta, on up to Windows 8. I had nearly ten years professional development experience on five platforms before I ever touched Windows. I had three stints at Microsoft back when that was cool, and sold most of my stock when it was still worth something.

I've also supported users of Windows and various operating systems, from groups of 3-5 small businesspeople on up to being comfortably high in the operational support pecking order in a Fortune 100 company. I've seen what helps and doesn't help intelligent non-geeks get their work done.

Both in that position, and in my own current work, I've observed and experienced order-of-magnitude-or-better differences in productivity, usability, reliability, supportability… all in Apple's favour. I've worked with and for people who became statistics junkies out of an emotional imperative to "prove" Windows better, in any way, than other systems. The next such individual I meet who succeeds, out of a sample of over 20 to date, will be the very first.

In 25 years, I have never experienced a Windows desktop machine that stayed up and fully functional for more than approximately 72 hours, *including* at Redmond, prior to a lightly-loaded Windows 7 system.

In the last 6 years of using Macs and clones half-time or better, I have never experienced a Mac that failed to stay up and working for less than a week. In the last five years, my notes show, I've had two occasions where a hard reset to the Mac I'm typing this on was necessary; both turned out to be hardware faults. Prior to Windows 7, any Windows PC that did not need to be hard-rebooted twice in a given fortnight was a rarity. Windows 7 stretched that out to 6 weeks, making it by far the most stable operating system Microsoft have shipped since Windows NT 3.51. (Which I will happily rave about at length to any who remember it.)

For many years, I too was a Windows bigot. The fact that Unix, then OS/2, then Mac OS had numerous benefits not available in Windows was completely beneath my attention threshold. The idea that (on average over a ten-year period) some 30% of my time seated at a Windows PC was devoted to something other than demonstrably useful or interesting activity was something that I, like the millions of others bombarded by Ziff-Davis and other Microsoft propaganda organs, took as the natural order of things.

Then I noticed that Mac users were having more fun. "Fine," I thought, "a toy should bring amusement above all." Then I noticed that they were getting more and better work done. "Well," I said to myself, "they're paying enough extra for it; they should get some return on their investment. I'm doing well enough as is."

And then, within the space of less than a year, all five of my Windows systems were damaged through outside attack. "Why," I asked. "I've kept my antivirus current. I've installed anti-spyware and a personal firewall in addition to the (consumer-grade) router and firewall connecting me to the Internet. I don't browse pr0n or known-dodgy sites. I apply all security patches as soon as they're released. Why am I going to lose this development contract for lack of usable systems?"

I discovered a nasty little secret: it's technically impossible to fully protect a Windows PC from attacks, using tools that a reasonably-bright eight-year-old can master in a Saturday afternoon. People responsible for keeping Windows PCs have known this for over a decade; it's why the more clueful ones talk about risk mitigation than prevention, with multi-layered recovery plans in place and tested rather than leaving all to chance. For as long as DSL and cable Internet connections have been available, it's taken less time to break into a new, "virgin" Windows PC than to fully patch and protect it against all currently-likely threats.

People used to think that using cocaine or smoking tobacco was healthy for you, too.

What I appreciate most about the Mac is that, no matter what, I can sit down in front of one and in a minute or less, be doing useful, interesting work. I don't have the instability of Windows. I don't have the sense that I'm using something that was designed for a completely different environment, as Windows too closely resembles the pre-network (let alone pre-Internet) use of isolated personal computers. Above all, I appreciate the consistency and usability that let me almost forget about the tools I'm using to work with my data, or with data out in the world somewhere, than on what I'm trying to accomplish.

One system treats its users as customers, whose time, efficiency and comfort are important and who know they have choices if they become dissatisfied. The other platform treats its users as inmates, who aren't going to leave no matter what... and if that's true, then quality sensibly takes a back seat to profitability.

Which would you recommend to your best friend? Or even to a respected enemy?

Tuesday, 21 December 2010

Keywords (aka "tags") ARE NOT Structure

And I understand that's the whole point. But sometimes, you're dealing with a concept or with data that is most naturally and properly organised in a structured hierarchy. While keywords1 are a very convenient tool for filtering ad hoc queries2, they're a poor stand-in for truly structured information.

One (possibly trivial) case in point: managing your browser bookmarks. What I want to be able to do is to organise bookmarks3 and be able to view them in the hierarchy and order that they will be in in the browser "Bookmarks" menu. That way, regardless of which file format4 is being imported from or exported to, while you're using the bookmark manager, you have an accurate view of how the ("folder"-based) organisation of the bookmarks will appear in your browser.

So why not, as several managers do, use keywords to imply structure? Let's take a look at that idea, with a scenario. Let's say you have 4,000-5,000 bookmarks in a fairly deep and wide hierarchy of about 800 folders, some nested five and six levels from the root. While that may sound like a 1996-era Yahoo!, that's roughly what I deal with, and I know quite a few long-time Web users who have significantly more.

OK, so you're going to do your internal organisation using keywords. You're a Web developer, so you might have a few bookmarks in a folder with the path Development/Web Development/PHP/Frameworks/Agavi. Each bookmark's reference in the bookmark-manager software would have the keywords Development, Web Development, PHP, and so on. It clutters up the keyword list, and it necessarily complicates the display and editing of those bookmarks within the software. It also means that more data is stored for each and every bookmark. Disk drives are cheaper than they have ever before been, but they're not free.

And, what's worse, if you accidentally (or otherwise) delete one of the keywords from one of the bookmarks, when you export your list again, that bookmark will be in a brand-new folder somewhere else in the hierarchy. Finding and fixing that, if you have a reasonably complex bookmark list, can be difficult. If you don't find and fix it, of course, then it won't be there when you go looking in what should be the right place.

And finally, you're twisting the whole structure of the way people (and browsers) view bookmarks; you're distorting the semantics of the system. This may seem a fine point in today's "get-it-done-yesterday!" way of doing everything. It's not. By not having a clean, self-consistent, efficient conceptual organisation for your software, you make it more difficult to learn, more difficult to use, more complex to develop, more expensive to maintain, and more likely to have more severe problems over the lifetime of the software5.

One final mental exercise. Think of that CD collection I alluded to at the beginning of this post, that's now stored on your computer using whatever music player you like. If I delete the Wakeup Music keyword from the track info for "Come Fly With Me," and then I play the album, nothing has changed. That's metadata. But if I change the bit-rate of the recording, or move the track into the folder for the album "My Way," that's different, isn't it? That's a change to the data, or to the organisation of the data. One is a matter of choice; the other is a matter of history.

By conflating data and metadata (literally, "data about data,") we do a disservice to both.

And now, if either of you happen to know of a (preferably not browser-based) bookmark manager that does things The Right Way™ — or reasonably close to it — I'm all ears.

Thanks for reading, and replying.

Footnotes

1. Though they're popularly called "tags" by all the Kool Kids™ these days, and "Labels" here on Blogger, I'm going to refer to the data items as "keywords" because that's what the library- and information-sciences worlds call them, as well as any programmer who started his Craft before, oh, about 1995. (Return)

2. "List all my Frank Sinatra album CD titles that I've tagged as Wakeup Music." (Return)

3. Each "bookmark" should store URL and page title at an absolute minimum; keywords are good to have; additional metadata optional. (Return)

4. XBEL, OPML, LSMFTML, or whatever the new "standard" is next month. (This would be a good feature to think about some sort of plugin architecture for.) (Return)

5. Look at practically any Windows program for examples of this, or, better, any three Windows programs together. It's not that they don't work, but after a few hours of use you can think of several ways that each could be more consistent with itself and with others. (Return)

Wednesday, 10 February 2010

NIH v. An Embarrassment of Riches

One thing most good developers learn early on is not to "reinvent" basic technology for each new project they work on, The common, often corporate, antithesis to this is NIH, or "Not Invented Here." But sometimes, it's hard to decide which "giants" one wants to "stand on the shoulders of."

I've recently done a couple of mid-sized Web projects using PHP and the Kohana framework. A framework, as most readers know, is useful a) by helping you work faster b) by including a lot of usually-good code you don't have to write and maintain (but you should understand!). Good frameworks encourage you to write your own code in a style that encourages reuse by other projects that use the same framework.

One task supported by many frameworks is logging. There have also been many "standalone" (i.e., not integrated into larger systems) logging packages. The most well-known of these, and the source of many derivatives, is the Apache log4j package for Java. This has been ported, also as an Apache project, is log4php.

Log4php has saved me countless hours of exploratory debugging. I stand firmly with the growing group of serious developers who assert that if you use a reasonably agile process (with iterative, red, green, refactor unit testing) and make good use of logging, you'll very rarely, if ever, need a traditional debugger.

What does this have to do with Kohana? Well, Kohana includes its own relatively minimalist, straightforward logging facility (implemented as static methods in the core class, grumble, grumble). There's a standard place for such logs to be written to disk, and a nice little 'debug toolbar' add-on module that lets you see logging output while you're viewing the page that generated it.

So I ought to just ditch log4php in favor of the inbuilt logging system when I'm developing Kohana apps, right? Not so fast...

Log4php, as does log4j, has far more flexibility. I can log output from different sources to different places (file, system log, console, database, etc.), have messages written to more than one place (e.g., console and file), and so on. Kohana's logging API is too simple for that.

With log4php, I have total control over the logging output based on configuration information stored in an external file, not in the code itself. That means I can fiddle with the configuration during development, even deploy the application, without having to make any code changes to control logging output. The fewer times I have to touch my code, the less likely I am to inadvertently break something. Kohana? I only have one logging stream that has to be controlled within my code, by making Kohana method calls.

Many experienced developers of object-oriented software are uncomfortable with putting more than one logical feature into a class (or closely-related set of classes). Why carry around overhead you don't use, especially when your framework offers a nice extension capability via "modules" and "helpers"?. While there may sometimes be arguments for doing so (the PHP interpreter is notoriously slow, especially using dynamic features like reflection), I have always failed to understand how aggregating large chunks of your omniverse into a Grand Unified God Object™ pays dividends over the life of the project.

So, for now, I'll continue using log4php as a standalone tool in my various PHP development projects (including those based on Kohana). One thing that just went onto my "nice to do when I get around to it" list is to implement a module or similar add-on that would more cleanly integrate log4php into the surrounding Kohana framework.

This whole episode has raised my metaphorical eyebrow a bit. There are "best practices" for developing in OO (object-oriented) languages; PHP borrows many of these from Java (along with tools like log4php and PHPUnit, the de facto standard unit-test framework). I did a fairly exhaustive survey of the available PHP frameworks before starting to use Kohana. I chose it because it wasn't a "everything including several kitchen sinks" tool like Zend, it wasn't bending over backwards to support obsolete language misfeatures left over from PHP 4, and it has what looks to be a pretty healthy "community" ecosystem (unlike some once-heavily-flogged "small" frameworks like Ulysses). I'm not likely to stop using Kohana very soon. I may well have to make time to participate in that community I mentioned earlier, if for no other reason that to better understand why things are the way they are.

But that's the beauty of open source, community-driven development, surely?

Tuesday, 22 December 2009

Blast from the Past

Another in a continuing series...

Microcomputer(as PCs were called before the IBM PC) veterans of a certain vintage well remember that most counterintuitively productive of productivity tools, WordStar 3.3 (and earlier). The hegemon of its day, WordStar used what at first (and usually fifth) inspection appeared to be whimsical, arbitrary key combinations for commands. Ctrl K-H for Help was invariably what new users first memorised. All through the 1980s and well beyond, any word-processing software that came onto the market had some degree of WordStar-compatible commands, either as their main command set or as a bolt-on to wean folks onto the "new" way of doing things. This was even true for the first several releases of WordPerfect and of Microsoft Word. (Word today has several available add-ons to add WordStar command compatibility.)

Why was this so popular? As noted in the Wikipedia article:

...the "diamond" of Ctrl-S/E/D/X moved the cursors one character or line to the left, up, right, or down. Ctrl-A/F (to the outside of the "diamond") moved the cursor a full word left/right, and Ctrl-R/C (just "past" the Ctrl keys for up and down) scrolled a full page up/down. Prefacing these keystrokes with Ctrl-Q generally expanded their action, moving the cursor to the end/beginning of the line, end/beginning of the document, etc. Ctrl-H would backspace and delete. Commands to enable bold or italics, printing, blocking text to copy or delete, saving or retrieving files from disk, etc. were typically a short sequence of keystrokes, such as Ctrl-P-B for bold, or Ctrl-K-S to save a file. Formatting codes would appear on screen, such ^B for bold, ^Y for italics, and ^S for underscoring.

Although many of these keystroke sequences were far from self-evident, they tended to lend themselves to mnemonic devices (e.g., Ctrl-Print-Bold, Ctrl-blocK-Save), and regular users quickly learned them through muscle memory, enabling them to rapidly navigate documents by touch, rather than memorizing "Ctrl-S = cursor left."

Why is this relevant (or even interesting) today? Besides the lessons to be learnt about interface design, it's interesting to note how many editors out there still pay homage to WordStar. I stumbled across joe again this morning; it's available on essentially all Linux and BSD distributions, with versions built for other systems as well (e.g., Mac OS X and Cygwin/Windows), and source freely available if your platform isn't yet supported or you just like to tinker around on one that is.

What makes this fairly scary for us old-timers is just how quickly the old finger habits come back. If you had more than a year's experience beating your head against the original WordStar, I dare you to work with joe or its ilk for more than a few minutes before "how do I do...?" completely falls away from your thoughts and you're just typing as fast as you can think.

For that's the real beauty of this type of "primitive", what-you-see-isn't-what-you-get interface: you're not distracted by the ephemera of making your work appear "just so", and can actually focus on the work of writing. And that, in our click-and-drool modern interfaces, is what we've lost -- and no amount of clever code wizardry on the part of the interface designers can bring us back to that. Why? Because of basic human nature - if we see a button, at some point we'll want to push that button - "just to make things look better." And, all of a sudden, we notice that the entire morning has flown past while we were focusing on the first three paragraphs of a major report that's due this afternoon. Oops.

There's a reason why almost every tool aimed at professional writers -- people who make their living at x cents per word -- have "stripped down", minimalist interfaces, at least as an option. It's the same reason that far too many truly "old-school" writers give for writing on paper and then typing (or having someone type) their words into a computer: the fewer distractions you have, while still being able to do what you're trying to do, the more productive you'll be at it.

That concept extends far, far beyond the writing of prose -- and has too often been lost or forgotten in those other areas as well. Pity.

Monday, 21 December 2009

When Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, Don't Trip

I've been doing a lot of software installation lately, on Mac OS X and various BSDs and Linuxes. Doing so reminds me of one of the major banes of my life when developing for Windows. If you're a Windows usee, you're acutely familiar with the concept.

DLL Hell.

On Windows, as you install a dozen apps, each of them will try to install their own versions of many system-wide (or vendor-wide) libraries. The poster child for these is msvcrt.dll, the Microsoft C Runtime Library, upon which virtually everything in or running under Windows depends in some fashion. Many unhappy man-millenia have been spent by admins and PC owners the world over trying to resolve compatibility issues, usually introduced when a newly-installed app overwrites a more recent version with the earlier version that app shipped with. Other things — including other libraries the app may depend on or even Windows itself — may break since features and bug fixes they rely on (present in later versions of the library) are suddenly gone.

Why think about this, when I'm as likely to write (or even use) any Windows software in the next month as I am to win the local lottery without buying a ticket?

Because, one of the things I added to my new MacBook Pro was the MacPorts software, which is a Mac analogue to the BSD ports collection. The Linux equivalent to this is (more or less) your package manager, whether it be aptitude or yum or portage or whatever. Windows has no equivalent concept; every app you install is its own universe, or thinks it is (with the "benefits" noted earlier), and no central one-stop "update everything" capability.

Modern operating systems may not have DLL hell, but they do tend to have numerous different versions of different libraries and support frameworks installed. Since those can be accessed by apps as either "give me the most recent version" or "give me version x.y.z", no equivalent to DLL hell takes place. But it does tend to eat up disk space. And it makes it harder to mentally keep track of what's installed; installing the MacPorts edition of Bluefish, an HTML editor, installs some eighty other "ports" — direct or indirect dependencies of Bluefish (which itself is primarily a Linux app). Some of these dependencies are last-month recent updates; a few are several years old. But MacPorts determines which packages are needed by Bluefish (and its dependencies, and...) and installs the latest version (by default) of those dependencies, or the specific version asked for. Thus, several files with the same basic name, but different version numbers encoded into the filename, can coexist peacefully in virtually any modern OS.

Recent Microsoft system software, particularly the "managed" software using the .NET Framework, avoids most of the cavalier instances of DLL hell, but introduces other quirks and brittleness in compensation.

But I'm still a bit unnerved by a software package — any package mdash; that has 80+ designated dependencies. I'm certainly thankful that I don't have to manage that dependency matrix myself.

If modern software development is "standing on the shoulders of giants", to appropriate a Newton paraphrase, then careless dependency introduction would be the functional equivalent of drunken tap-dancing: almost impossible not to trip.

Tuesday, 11 August 2009

Tutorials, best practices and staying current

A gent by the name of Brian Carey has written a very nice little tutorial on "Creating an Atom feed in PHP", and gotten it published on the IBM DeveloperWorks site. In the space of about ten pages, Brian gives a stratospheric overview of what Atom is and why PHP is a good language for developing Atom-aware apps, and then gets into the tutorial - defining a MySQL database table to hold the data used to 'feed' the Atom feed, and writing code to get the data out and put it into the form that a reader such as NetNewsWire expects an Atom feed to be in.

Now, to be fair, Brian describes himself as "an information systems consultant who specializes in the architecture, design, and implementation of Java enterprise applications", and the paper is clearly meant as a whirlwind tutorial, not to be taken by the careful/experienced reader as necessarily production-quality code. And if this had been published in, say, 2002 or so, I'd have thought it a great how-to for banging out some PHP 4 code. But this is 2009 PHP 4 is a historical artifact, and blogs and industry journals of seemingly every stripe are decrying the poor quality (security, maintainability, etc.) of PHP code... much of which is still written as if it were the turn of the century, ignoring PHP 5's numerous new features and the best practices that both spawned them and grew from them.

So what's really wrong with doing things like they did in Ye Olden Tymes™?

  • Procedural code makes it harder to make changes (fix bugs, add features, change to reflect new business rules) and be certain that those changes don't introduce new defects. This is largely because...
  • While it is possible to test procedural code using automatable tools like PHPUnit, it's a lot harder and more complex than testing a clean, object-oriented design.
  • Hard-coding everything, interspersing 'magic values' throughout code, is a major hindrance to future reuse - or present debugging;
  • Using quick-and-dirty, old-style database APIs exposes you to the risk of input data that is more 'dirty' than it should be - opening the door to SQL injection and other nastiness;
  • Not staying current exposes your code to the risk that it's either using features that have since been deprecated or removed entirely, or (arguably worse), the risk that new features (such as standard library additions) make some of your existing code redundant at best.
Each of these, to varying degrees, is true of much of the PHP code I've read in the last couple of years, including that in the DeveloperWorks paper. For example, the DW paper's code makes use of the old-style PHP4 mysql_* API rather than the more abstract/portable MDB2 database abstraction layer. And there's also the rather terse implementation of a date3339() function for converting a timestamp to RFC 3339 output format, that's now nicely handled through the standard PHP DateTime class.

How would I have done things instead? Read the next few posts in this blog to find out. And, of course, comments are always welcome.

Monday, 20 July 2009

Tools, Continued

UPDATED 2 November 2010; see last paragraph.


This blog, fairly obviously, is published on blogger.com, which is now owned by Google. Blogger.com is geared primarily towards people who want to write but don't want to have to worry about the nitty-gritty technical details involved (such as HTML, CSS and so on). Sign up, click the 'New Post' button, and off you go...almost easier than falling out of your chair.

For the Web wizards among you, you can get into the guts of how your blog and posts are laid out and formatted; there are several in-the-tin and numerous third-party templates that can be used to style your blog any way you like it, and those can then be hand-tweaked by you to get things just so.

As with any click-and-go interface, the Blogger new-post window (what I'm typing in right now) has a "Preview" button (or actually, link); click on it and you'll see a more-or-less-reasonable facsimile of what your breathless prose will look like to the next visitor who stumbles across your blog. I did say "more-or-less-reasonable"...

One thing the preview area doesn't do — sensibly in hindsight — is to apply your template's formatting to the post being previewed. So that, for instance, if your template specifies that you want 9-point Gentium Book Basic, Times New Roman or Times (in that order) for your body, you won't see it that way in the preview.

What you also won't see — and this is what tripped me up for the longest time — is other styling for the post body, particularly justification. You may notice that all my posts are displayed with justified left and right margins; the default, and most commonly used setting, is for a justified left and ragged right margin, which I find unattractive. I've tweaked the template I use several times over the years to try and get the effect I was looking for. Each time, the post-preview showed no changes to the text formatting, and so I undid the change without viewing the entire blog normally. I have been instead hand-wrapping the content of an entire post in a <div>...</div> element pair whose only reason for existence was to set text-align: justify;.

This isn't the first time I've blogged about my learning-experiences-that-shouldn't-have-been, and just to be perfectly clear about this, I'm not trying to dis Blogger.com about this. The preview-while-composing feature is merely to let you see the content of the post you're working on without all the editing framework around it. It won't, and arguably shouldn't try to render that content in its final form. You do, after all, have the ability to go back and edit posts you've already published.

This is, at its heart, a cautionary tale for those of us tasked with making the Web easier to use for a wide variety of users. Be careful especially with interface design. Recognise that, barring explicit cues to the contrary, people's assumptions about How Things Work on your site may have only a nodding acquaintance with your own — but if you have some appropriate description in the right place, users are often happy to adjust. But there has to be a balance, or your 'power users' will feel like they're being stifled. How you achieve that balance is, of course, up to you to find out. Good luck.

UPDATE: Blogger have, since I wrote the original post, changed their preview feature (at least for "Blogger in Draft," their next-gen interface, which I use and recommend.) When you click the Preview button now, Blogger opens a new tab (or window, if you're old-school enough not to use tabs) with the preview of your draft post. This preview is exactly as a visitor to the published post would see it, with the exception of a great big Preview stripe in the upper-left corner. A wonderful improvement; thanks, guys!

Wednesday, 27 May 2009

News Flash: Microsoft Reinvents Eiffel, 18 Years On

One of the major influences on the middle third of my career thus far was Bertrand Meyer's Eiffel programming language and its concept of design by contract. With such tools, for the first time (at least as far as I was aware), entire classes of software defects could be reliably detected at run time (dynamic checking) and/or at compile time (static checking). I worked on a couple of significant project teams in the mid- to late '90s that used Eiffel quite successfully. Further, it impacted my working style in other languages; for several years, I had a reputation on C and C++ projects for putting far more assert statements than was considered usual by my colleagues. More importantly, it made me start thinking in a different way about how to create working code. Later, as I became aware of automated testing, continuous integration and what is now called agile development, they were all logical extensions of the principles I had already adopted.

This all happened over a period of 15 or so years, in a field where anyone with more than 2 or 3 years' experience is considered "senior". But for me, and most other serious practitioners who I knew and worked with, two to three years was really just about as long as it took to answer more questions than we raised. That, in most crafts, is considered one of the signs of becoming a journeyman rather than a wet-behind-the-ears apprentice.

Then, a few hours ago, I was reading a blog entry by one David R. Heffelfinger which mentioned a project at Microsoft DevLabs called "SmallBasic". Another project that the same organization developed is called "Code Contracts"; there's a nice little set of tools (which will be built into the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 product), and a nice introductory video. Watch the video (you'll need Silverlight to view it), and then do some research on Eiffel and design-by-contract and so on, and it's very difficult not to see the similarities.

So, on the one hand, I'm glad that .NET developers will finally be getting support for 20-year-old concepts (by the time significant numbers of developers use VS 2010 and .NET 4.0). Anything that helps improve the developer and user experiences on Windows (or, in fact, any platform) is by definition a Good Thing™.

On the other hand, I see more evidence of Microsoft's historical Not Invented Here mentality; beating the drum for "new and wonderful ideas for Windows development" that developers on other platforms have been using effectively for some time. While the Code Contracts project indirectly credits Eiffel — the FAQ page links to Spec# at Microsoft Research, which lists Eiffel as one of its influences — it would have been nice to see acknowledgement and explanation of precursor techniques be made more explicitly. Failure to do so merely reinforces the wisdom of Santayana as applied to software: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", as well as "Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." This last is something that we who wish to improve our craft would do well to remember.

What do you all think?