When Development DOES Go Horribly Wrong™

I just finished watching Ian Cooper's talk at NDC Oslo, TDD, where did it all go wrong. If you're doing any flavour of TDD (BDD, etc.), this will likely be one of the more important hours you spend this year. Ian helped me wrap my head around the details of what some of those voices screaming in the back of my mind as I (and likely you) write code, were trying to make me understand.

Bear in mind that I've been doing test-driven development for a decade, and some form of behaviour-driven, outside-in development for perhaps half that. I was once known as a "crazy blue-sky hacker", who composed symphonic-length pieces of software at a single sitting. (I'm explicitly disclaiming anything about the quality of that software; while it may have seemed sufficiently fit for purpose at the time, there almost certainly were bugs aplenty waiting the hapless maintainer.)

One of Ian's main points in the talk, if not the main point, is that test-driven development (and its successors such as BDD) should test behaviours of the system, not how every little internal method behaves. Lots of great insights here, from how to be more effective with fewer tests, to "write unit tests that focus on behaviours and thus can be used for acceptance". More bluntly, "the reason to test is a new behaviour, not a method or a class." I'm as guilty of that as anybody.

That last has been something I've been trying to work toward for well over a year. Unfortunately, one of the poisonously bad habits I've picked up working in Rails is the idea that there's a one-for-one mapping of specs/tests to implementation classes and methods (model, controller, helper, etc.). These are the trees that keep me from seeing the forest of what I'm ultimately trying to accomplish, and more often than not, have me polishing the nodules on each root of each tree.

One of the things that comes out of this understanding for Rails or, to be fair, for any framework in any language that focuses more on implementation classes than expressed behaviours, is that I for some time now have avoided use of the generators, particularly scaffolds, for core application components (models, controllers, views, etc). My preferred workflow has evolved to something like what I list below. Note that this is my existing workflow, and does not yet incorporate the new understanding of proper TDD.

1. I'll usually do a "first whack at" a model spec and bare-bones model, just to have something "specific" to work with in the later steps. I am beginning to see the way I have been doing this as a bad habit, particularly in "traditional" Rails. A Rails model should be concerned with persistence and validation, and an absolutely minimal amount beyond that. What I really want to start out with is my initial idea of a "business" domain object, which is Not The Same Thing;
2. I'll write what in the Rails world is called a "feature spec" and most of the rest of the omniverse knows as some form of "integration spec", modelling how a specific feature works. ("As a Member, I want to create a new BlogPost, to begin a discussion about a topic.") The initial "high-level" spec may or may not evolve into a series of specs which each demonstrate an individual sub-feature, but will always be expressed from the outside in, mocking what does not yet exist;
3. Next is a controller spec and the controller that it specifies, as a "traditional" developer-oriented spec (or set of specs). When done, I should be able to integrate this controller into the feature spec written previously (still using mock models) and demonstrate that the controller works;
4. Now, I re-look at the model(s) involved, turning those into "live" specs and "real" code that works correctly with what I've written thus far; my feature specs and controller specs still pass;
5. After the models and controllers are done and working with the feature specs, I'll do the views. I should have a very firm idea what's needed for these by now, as they've been used throughout (in mock or throwaway form) by the feature specs; this is where I write the code that emits the HTML, CSS and Script code for the UI.

That was my old workflow. I'm going to explore how to adapt and adjust this to more effectively and efficiently get the job done in light of Ian Cooper's talk and a (very near-future) reread of Kent Beck's Test-Driven Development: By Example. I say "effectively and efficiently" as my current project's spec-to-live-code ratio (in LOC) is approximately 13:4. I think most of us would agree that that's a very strong code smell.

Tap-Dancing on the Shoulders of Giants, Cont'd

(after Bernard of Chartres)

Some days you wake up feeling old. Some things that happen during the day make you feel much, much older.

In times technologically ancient but historically recent, people wrote computer programs by writing code for virtually every instruction to be executed by that program. Later, as capabilities grew (and we learned better), we used underlying systems and libraries to reduce the amount of new code we had to write for increasingly complex programs. Later still, networks and the Internet augmented the resources we could use in our creations. As anyone who's written desktop applications for a recent major operating system can attest, the complexity of these applications can meet and often exceed what one person can keep in his or her head. Consequently, a high priority became "doing more with less", while still delivering an efficient, usable, correct-enough system.

Recent development, especially Web development, has taken that priority and raised it to an imperative. To be a good developer, you don't just have to be able to code well, you must be able to efficiently find, evaluate, learn, use, and collaborate on further development of these components. Write code once, that's fine. Write code twice, write it again in a more easily reusable form, and rewrite the first two to use the new one. What used to take a team months and thousands of lines of code can now be accomplished by a single developer in days or weeks, with dozens to scores of lines of more readily understandable code — that uses ever-more-complete and -complex underlying libraries.

I was reminded of this yet again by a recent blog post by David Guttman (with accompanying Heroku demo and source code). There's a moderate amount of framework-type boilerplate around it, but the source file I linked does all the heavy lifting.

It's less than fifty source lines of CoffeeScript. Fifty. Lines.

Not since the heyday of APL has a fifty-line program done so much. However, fifty lines of CoffeeScript is far more readily understandable by mere mortals than fifty characters of APL. (Browse this to get an idea of what I'm talking about.)

When I was a wee lad in uni, I wrote code, in ALGOL 68 on a Burroughs B6700, to drive a Tektronix graphics display to produce graphics similar to Guttman's. My program, when complete, nearly filled two 1600-character-per-inch 9-track tapes. (Yes, those erratically whirring reels you see in old newsreels and oddball posts on YouTube.) Each tape stored about 40 megabytes. (Less space than the music file I'm listening to at the moment; about 1/8 of a CD altogether.)

That project took the better part of two school quarters, about four months.

You can still spend months researching if you have to learn some Brave (totally) New Domain and a Strange New Language at the same time, but to actually write a fifty-line program? Days? Hours?

And that brings me to the point of the title; too many of us, not just younger developers, now take these new tools for granted. The problem in doing so, in not understanding how things were done before, blinds us to important details about the now-modern tools we use today. By not having a clear understanding of the problems solved by our tools, by not understanding the tradeoffs and alternatives involved in developing the tools we use every day, it's practically impossible for us to make the most effective use of those tools. And that can have some serious, project-endangering consequences, obvious in hindsight to those who have hit them at least once or twice..

We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Don't get too cocky with your tap-dancing, lest you follow in the shuddering footfalls of one Wile E. Coyote.

Cover Yourself: Toolchains Are Agile, Too

As people who know me professionally and/or read my blog know well, I have been a (raucously) loud evangelist for test-first development (TDD, BDD, Scrum, whatever your flavour) for years now. If I write even an exploratory bit of code and don't have tests in place first, I get very uncomfortable. As complexity increases, without tests (preferably automated, repeatable tests), I argue that I simply can't know what's really going on, because I can't prove it.

A major corollary to this is test coverage reporting. If I can't see what's been tested and what hasn't, then in a very real sense nothing has been, since I can't document/prove what has been and what hasn't. And the better (more productive) teams I've worked in have established, and regularly hit, coverage testing better than 95%, with 100% being a common (and commonly attained) goal. (Edit: Note that this is for C0 and C1 test coverage; tools that cover C3 and C4 are rare to nonexistent in most languages, such as Ruby.)

As you may also know, I've been getting (back) into Ruby development, using Rails 3 on Ruby 1.9. Ruby's long-time de facto standard coverage tool for many years was rcov, which generally worked well. However, Rob Sanheim has stated that "RCov does not, and will not support C based Ruby 1.9.x implementations due to significant changes between 1.8 and 1.9.". He recommends either SimpleCov or CoverMe. Ripping out RCov and replacing it with CoverMeSimpleCov on a test project took all of five minutes and left me with attractive, functional, (so far apparently) quite accurate reports.

One of the basic principles of agile development is that the team must actively embrace constructive change as their project evolves. It's often easy for harried, hurried people to forget that that applies to their tools as much as it does to what they produce using those tools.

Just a thought as my evening winds down.

Automating So You Don't Forget

This is a bit of an introductory-level post/rant/tutorial, but I've been peppered by enough "why on earth would you do this?" questions by various (seemingly experienced) project team members and on various mailing lists that I thought I'd just write my own take on this and point people to it when useful.

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I'm pulling my (semihemidemiexistent) hair out on four different PHP projects at the moment. Not because they take all my time (they don't, unfortunately), but because three of them are in "maintenance" mode and express that in different ways. Take version control: one uses Mercurial (my favourite DVCS package); Subversion (once "subversive;" now the "safe" non-DVCS choice); and (tragically) git. Each project has different coding standards. One of those is actually widely-enough used that PHP CodeSniffer comes with support for it right in the tin. The others are relatively easy to code "sniffs" for. (Do remember that none of the three "maintenance" projects were using CodeSniffer (or equivalent), and all three have very sporadic use of their main VCS repositories.)

Wait a minute...now I've got to remember which standards go with which projects? And oh, yeah, it would be Really Nice™ to have any changes automatically saved in version control... if they're worthy.

What do I mean by "worthy?" Well, before I worry overmuch about how code is formatted, I should be able to prove that it works properly. After all, the most beautifully-formatted code that doesn't work is still (essentially) useless. This, of course, is where a tool like PHPUnit comes in; once you have sufficient coverage of your code with automatable tests, especially if you write the tests before you write (new) code, you can make changes confidently and quickly, because a) your tests prove that the code works as expected, and b) you're making sensible use of a (D)VCS, so that when your wonderful new code goes south and doesn't come back, you can follow your virtual-breadcrumb trail back up the face of the cliff. Only after PHPUnit blesses the code should CodeSniffer get a crack at it.

The new folks are scribbling away: "first test everything, then comply with standards, and then update version control." The rest of you are saying "hang on a minute; that problem's been sorted any of several different ways."

Precisely. If you're developing in the Java world, you're spoilt for choice: you can do perfectly reasonable build/test/deploy automation using Ant, or if you want to keep a large number of people (allegedly) gainfully employed managing a J2EE-on-steroids project, you can go for Maven.

In the PHP world, we've got a nice "little" analogue to Ant called Phing. It will quickly become "dead-finger" technology; you'll wonder how (or why) you ever did a reasonably "serious" project without it. And yet, most of the open-source PHP projects I've seen (on Sourceforge and elsewhere) don't use such a tool; they rely on error-prone, manual steps. This manual process, with steps easily forgotten or mangled, is the source of many bugs in released software — in any language.

Enter Phing (or equivalent). You set up the moral equivalent of a makefile with the steps you want to have performed the same way in the same order, every time. Phing supports properties, which can be stored separately from the "master" build file that references them. This allows you to set up consistent process and policy (defined in the build file) and plug in the values for a specific project using the separate properties file.

So how much difference does all this make? Let's take an example set of steps, some variation of which I follow in my build files:

1. First, clean out all the files created by steps that come later (like test reports);
2. Then, run unit tests, displaying the output as they run. If tests fail, stop;
3. Verify compliance with your chosen coding standards; if a problem is found, stop. Either fix the problem if it's in a file you've touched or add the file to the ignore list if it's a legacy file;
4. I like to run PHPDocumentor to automatically generate developer documentation, from comments left in the code. CodeSniffer will check these, too, so by the time phpdoc gets its grubby virtual paws on your code, it shouldn't find any problems;
5. If all is well, then it's on to version control. I have Phing show a "diff" report of what's changed since the last checkin, and then prompt me for a checkin comment. If I want to run the whole process but not check in to VCS (maybe I'm coming back to a project after a while away and just want to see the earlier steps run), I can hit the Return key, and my build file will skip the VCS checkin because I've supplied an empty comment (which it checks for).

Great, so (since I've followed a few conventions), all I need to do is type ''phing'' at the command line and it's off to the races. Trivially easy to use and, much more importantly, proof against a very high level of idiocy.

What's that? You in the back... I'm putting the cart before the horse, you say? I shouldn't do a process that drives VCS checkin, but a VCS checkin "hook" that does the validation and so on instead?

To some degree, that's a matter of taste. From a very practical perspective, though, having your build-and-test automation drive VCS instead of the other way 'round means that you can use any VCS operable from a command line, with minimal pain moving between projects. Not every VCS implements a pre-commit hook in the same way; some apparently don't implement them at all. (Yes, we know they're toys, but they're "enterprisey" big-ticket toys. Some managers will buy anything.) So, by having a single-command process execution/enforcement tool, you'll generally find that the internal and external quality of your project improves considerably and quickly; you'll also find that the risk involved with sweeping changes or audacious new features drops to a more comfortably survivable level.

And that's why I always answer the question "What tools should I be using for my PHP development?" to include at least:

• Your project's version control tool of choice (again, I recommend Mercurial);
• Phing;
• PHPUnit;
• PHP CodeSniffer; and
• PHPDocumentor.

Once we get people used to a core set of tools and practices, we can then go on to the thorny religious issues like, "which PHP framework should I use?"

Next question?

We Interrupt This Program...

We interrupt this tutorial to interject an observation about goals, methods and promises. Goals we have for ourselves as people and as professionals; the method we use to pursue those dreams; perhaps most importantly, the promises we make, both to ourselves and to our customers, about what we're doing and why.

I consider this after reading the Website for some consultants who've done some (relatively nice, relatively low-key) link-dropping on LinkedIn. I'm not naming them here, not because I don't want to draw attention to them (their own site is very clean and well-done), but because the point that I'm going to be making here isn't just limited to them - we, as a craft and an industry of Web development, have some Serious Problems™.

The "problem" is nicely summarized by this group's mission statement:

Our mission is to produce the perfect implementation of your dreams.

What could possibly be wrong with that?

As a goal, implied but left unspoken, absolutely nothing; both as practitioners and as clients, we tend to set ever-higher goals for ourselves. Indeed, that's the only way the "state of the art" - any "art" - can advance. But we who practice the art and craft of software (including Web) development (as opposed to the engineering discipline of hardware development) have a history of slashed-beyond-reality schedules and budgets coupled with a tendency for stakeholders not to hear "if all goes well" as a condition to our latest schedule estimate. We have a history, perceived and actual, of promising more than we can deliver. Far more attention is paid by non-technical people to the "failures" and "broken promises" of software than to things done right. For a craft whose work is accruing increasing public-policy and -safety implications, the effect of unrealistic expectations, brought about by poor communication and technical decisions being made by people who aren't just technically ignorant but proud of the fact, is disturbing. What started as a slow-motion train wreck has now achieved hypersonic speeds, and represents a clear and present danger to the organisational health and safety of all stakeholders.

I don't mean to say that projects always fail, but an alarming number of them do. If, say, dams or aircraft were built with the same overall lack of care and measurable engineering precision that is the norm in commercial software development, we'd have a lot more catastrophic floods, and a lot few survivors fleeing the deluge by air. When I entered this craft thirty years ago (last May), I was soon led to believe that we were thirty to fifty years away from seeing a true profession of "software engineering". As a time frame beginning now, in 2009, I now think that is almost laughably optimistic.

Why have things gotten worse when we as a tool-building and -using society need them to get better? Some people blame "The Microsoft Effect" - shipping software of usually-dubious quality to consumers (as opposed to 'customers') who have bought into the (false) idea that they have no realistic choice.

It's more pervasive than that; commercial software development merely reflects the fashion of the business "community" that supports it, which has bought into one of the mantras of Guy Kawasaki's "The Art of Innovation", namely "don't worry, be crappy." Not that Kawasaki is giving bad advice, but his precondition is being ignored just as those of other software people have been: the key sentence in his "don't worry, be crappy" paragraph is "An innovator doesn't worry about shipping an innovative product with elements of crappiness if it's truly innovative" (emphasis mine). In other words, if you really are going to change the world, nobody will notice if your Deus ex Machina 1.0 has clay feet as long as you follow up quickly with a 1.1 that doesn't...and follow that with a 2.0 that changes the game again. But that space between 1.0 and 1.1 has to be fast, Kawasaki argues (in the next paragraph, titled "Churn, Baby, Churn"), and the version after that has to come along before people (like possible competitors) start saying things like "well, he just brought out 1.1 to fix the clay feet in 1.0." If the customers see that you're bringing out new versions as fast as they can adapt to the previous ones, but that each new version is a vastly superior, revelatory experience compared to the earlier release that they were already delighted by, they'll keep giving you enough money for you to finish scaling the "revolutionary" cliff and take a (brief) rest with "evolutionary" versions. Business has not only forgotten how important that whole process is to their continued survival, but they've removed the capability for their bespoke software (and Web) infrastructure to use and reuse that model. All that remains is "it's ok if we ship crap; so does everybody else." That's the kind of thinking that made General Motors the world-bestriding Goliath it is today - as opposed to the wimpy also-ran it was (emphatically NOT) half a century ago. We really don't need any more businesses going over that sort of cliff.

What we do need, and urgently, are two complementary, mutually dependent things. We need a sea change in the attitude of (most) businesses, even technology businesses, towards software - to realise and acknowledge that the Pointy-Haired Boss is not merely a common occurrence in the way business manages software, but actively threatens the success of any project (and business) so infested. Just as businesses at some point realise that "paying any price to cut costs" is an active threat to their own survival, they need to apply that reality to their view of and dealings with the technical infrastructure that increasingly enables their business to function at all.

Both dependent on that and as an enabler of that change, the software and Web development industry really needs to get its house in order. We need to get away from the haphazard by-guess-and-by-golly estimation and monitoring procedures in use by the majority of projects (whose elaborate Microsoft Project plans and PowerPoint decks bear less and less resemblance to reality as the project progresses) and enforce use of the tools and techniques that have been proven to work, and have an organised, structured quest to research improvements and New Things.. Despite what millions of business cards and thousands of job advertisements the world over proclaim, there is no true discipline of "software engineering", any more than there was "oilfield engineering" in widespread use before the New London School explosion of 1937. Over 295 people died in that blast; we have software-controlled systems that, should they fail, could in fact hurt or kill many more - or cause significant, company- or industry-ruinous physical damages. We should not wait for such an event before "someone" (at that point, almost certainly an outside governmental or trans-governmental entity) says "These are the rules." While I understand and agree with the widespread assertion that certification tests in their present form merely demonstrate an individual's capability to do well on such tests, we do need a practical, experiential system - probably one modelled on the existing systems for engineering, law or medicine. Not that people should work 72-hour shifts; there's enough of that already. But rather that there should be a progression of steps from raw beginner to fully-trusted professional, with a mix of educational and experiential ingredients to ascend that progression, and continuing educational and certificating processes throughout one's entire career. The cost for this is going to have to be accepted as "part of the system" by business; if business wants properly competent engineers, and not just the latest boatload of unknowns with mimeographed vendor certs, then they're going to have to realize that that benefit does not come without cost to all sides. The free ride is over - for all the stakeholders at the table.

The Debate between Adequacy and Excellence

I was clicking through my various feeds hooked into NetNewsWire, in this case The Apple Core column on ZDNet, when I came across this item, where the writer nicely summed up the perfectly understandable strategy Microsoft have always chosen and compared that with Apple and the Mac. Go read the original article (on Better Living without MS Office and then read the comment.

As I've commented on numerous times in this blog and elsewhere (notably here), I'm both very partial to open standards (meaning open data formats, but usually expressed in open source implementations) and to the Apple Mac. As I've said before, and as the experience of many, many users I've supported on all three platforms bears out, the Mac lets you get more done, with less effort and irritation along the way, than either Windows or Linux as both are presently constructed.

But the first two paragraphs of this guy's comment (and I'm sorry that the antispam measures on ZDNet apparently don't permit me to credit the author properly) made me sit up and take notice, because they are a great summation of how I currently feel about the competing systems:

The Macs vs. PC debate has been going on for about 25 years or so, but the underlying debate is much older. What we are really discussing is the difference between adequacy and excellence. While I doubt I would want to be friends with Frank Lloyd Wright or Steve Jobs, both represent the exciting belief in what is possible. While Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer rake in billions, their relative impact on the world of ideas is miniscule.

Bill Gates understands that business managers are on the whole are a practical, albeit uninspired and short-sighted bunch. By positioning Microsoft early on to ride into the enterprise with the implicit endorsement of one of the biggest, longest-lived, and influential suppliers of business equipment, Gates was able to secure Microsoft's future. Microsoft's goal has never seemed to me to be to change the world, only to provide a service that adequately meets business needs. Microsoft has also shown from early on a keen awareness that once you get people to use your product, your primary goal is not to innovate to keep your customers, but, rather to make leaving seem painful and even scary. Many companies do this, but Microsoft has refined this practice into an art.

He then expands on this theme for four more paragraphs, closing with

Practically speaking Microsoft is here to stay. But I am glad that Apple is still around to keep the computer from becoming dreary, to inspire people to take creative risks, to express themselves, and to embrace the idea that every day objects, even appliances like the computer, can be more than just the sum of their functions.

Aux barricades! it may or may not be, depending on your existing preferences and prejudices. But it does nicely sum up, more effectively and efficiently than I have been able to of late, the reasons why Apple is important as a force in the technology business. Not that Microsoft is under imminent threat of losing their lifeblood to Apple; their different ways of looking at the world and at the marketplace work against that more effectively than any regulator could. But the idea that excellence is and should be a goal in and of itself, that humanity has a moral obligation to "continually [reach] well past our grasp", should stir passion in anyone with a functioning imagination. Sure, Microsoft have a commanding lead in businesses, especially larger ones — though Apple's value proposition has become much better there in the last ten years or so; it's hard to fight the installed base, especially with an entrenched herd mentality among managers. But, we would argue, that does not argue that Apple have failed, any more than the small number of buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and his direct professional disciples argue for his irrelevance in architecture. If nobody pushes the envelope, if nobody makes a habit of reaching beyond his grasp, how will the human condition ever improve? For as Shaw wrote,

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.

And that has been one of my favourite quotes for many years now.

It's Time to Grow Up

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes over at ZDNet has a very interesting post up, titled "Sticking with XP / Upgrading to Vista / Waiting for Windows 7 / Switching to Mac or Linux — There’s no single right answer". He puts forward the blitheringly-obvious elephant-in-the-room answer to the perennial food-fight question, "Which system is best?" Namely, "use what works for you."

As I read through the post and the comments that had been added to it, I thought about all the man-centuries (if not -millennia) that had been "invested" in the topic. Naturally, I had my own two rupiah worth to say on the topic. Following is the text of the comment I left at approximately 1645 GMT on Friday 27 June. Let me know what you think. (There aren't any links in the post reprinted below; to the best of my knowledge, ZDNet's commenting software hates links, and it definitely hates Macs; every single comment I've posted has given me the error "You must enter the text to post" — on a clean, empty comment form — after I've hit the "Add your opinion" button. Fix it, guys!

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"Use what you like, and like what you use."

That's excellent advice for those of us who've been bouncing around in the funhouse for a while, who know which mirrors make us look weird (or, worse, are broken and likely to cut us if we're not careful)...and, granted, there are blessed few truly "new" users now; statistically, nearly everybody's used a PC with one form or another of Windows, and increasing numbers of us have used Mac and/or Linux, but...

We still do have the FNG syndrome with folks who haven't upgraded for a while, and finally they get tired of their molasses-slow Win98 box when they see this zippy new PC or Mac they've been handed at work. "Gee, we use XP at work, but I heard Microsoft isn't going to sell it anymore... what should I use?" Many of us, professionally or otherwise, are tasked with advising those people. Too often, the advice becomes "this is what I use; try it" without really understanding the (often vast) difference between the adviser and the user in question. And when "advisers" try and hash things out among themselves, it almost universally degenerates into an Animal House food fight scene — which doesn't bring any value to the discussion and actually makes us LESS able to give good advice.

Mental hands up: How many of you reading this have ever spent a month using Leopard? Vista? At least two of Ubuntu, Fedora or SuSE Linux? How many raised your hand all three times? Yeah, I see you, way back in the back.... but blessed few others.

In any other endeavour that dared call itself a craft, let alone aspire to an engineering discipline, this would be malfeasance if not negligence; you just DO NOT give advice on matters in which you are not qualified — and if you don't have experience and/or training with Technology X, you're NOT qualified to present advice as being any more valuable than used toilet paper.

In that light, Adrian has performed a major public service here. Given the reality that most people whose job relies on using and/or developing for one of the major platforms are quite unlikely to be as current and proficient on any of the others, this is the best advice that will just let us get along with our jobs without pissing in each other's lemonade each and every single day (Mike Cox and No_Axe, you know who you are).

But in the increasingly unlikely event that we're ever to make something professional out of this hobby that we are lucky enough to get paid for, the fact that this "solution" is seen as viable to any degree, let alone the MOST viable solution, is absolutely, reprehensibly unacceptable. And since computers and software have become absolutely central to nearly everything in modern life, including not least public policy, if we don't get our house in order under our own power, sooner or later some governmental organization or group thereof is going to step in and exert adult supervision. Is that what we want?

The days when Windows geeks and Mac users and Linux hackers could happily putter away, each in their own walled garden with tactical nuclear landmines guarding against any encroachment by reality, are gone as surely as the clipper ship. In the world of the Internet, where information is what's important and how it's processed/generated/visualized/stored is at best secondary, we're faced with the same choice as every biological or cultural organism at an evolutionary shift: adapt or die. Keep the lemonade clean, or drink the purple Kool-Aid. Our choice. Each and every one of us.