Let's Do The Time Warp Agai-i-i-i-n!! (Please, $DEITY, no...)

For those who may somehow not be aware of it, LinkedIn is a (generally quite good) professionally-oriented social-networking site. This is not Facebook, fortunately. It's not geared towards teenagers raving about the latest corporate boy band du jour. It often can be, however, a great place to network with people from a variety of vocational, industry and/or functional backgrounds to get in contact with people, share information, and so on.

One of the essential features of LinkedIn is its groups, which are primarily used for discussions and job postings. In the venerable Usenet tradition, these discussions can have varying levels of insightful back-and-forth, or they can degenerate into a high-fidelity emulation of the "Animal House" food fight. As with Usenet, they can often give the appearance of doing both at the same time. Unlike Usenet, one has to be a member of LinkedIn to participate.

One of the (several) groups I follow is LinkedPHPers, which bills itself as "The Largest PHP Group" on LinkedIn. Discussions generally fall into at least one of a very few categories:

• How do I write code to solve "this" problem? (the 'professional' version of "Help me do my homework");

• What do people know/think about "this" practice or concept?

• I'm looking for work, or people to do work; does anybody have any leads?

As veterans of this sort of discussion would expect, the second type of discussion can lead to long and passionate exchanges with varying levels of useful content (what became known on Usenet as a "flame war.") The likelihood of such devolution seems to be inversely proportional to its specificity and proportionally to the degree which the concept in question is disregarded/unfamiliar/unknown to those with an arguable grasp of their Craft.

It should thus be no surprise that a discussion on the LinkedPHPers group of "Procedural vs Object Oriented PHP Programming" would start a flame war for both of the above reasons. With 58 responses over the past month as I write this, there are informational gems of crystal clarity buried in the thick, gruesome muck of proud ignorance. As Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."

What's my beef here? Simply that this discussion thread is re-fighting a war that was fought and settled over a quarter-century ago by programming in general. The reality is that any language that has a reasonable implementation of OOP (with encapsulation/access control, polymorphism and inheritance, in that order by my reckoning) should be used in that way.

Several of the posts trot out the old canard about a performance 'penalty' when using OOP. In practice, that's true of only the sharpest edge cases – simple, tiny, standalone classes that should never have been developed that way because they don't provide a useful abstraction of a concept within the solution space, generally by developers who are not professionally knowledgeable of the concepts involved and quite often by those copying and pasting code they don't understand into their own projects (which they also don't understand). That bunch sharply limited the potential evolution and adoption of C++ in the '80s and '90s, and many of their ideological brethren have made their home in Web development using PHP.

Yes, I know that "real" OOP in PHP is a set of tacked-on features, late to the party; first seriously attempted in PHP 4, with successively evolving implementations in 5.0, 5.2 and 5.3, with the semi-mythological future PHP 6 adding many new features. I know that some language features are horribly unwieldy (which is why I won't use PHP namespaces in my own code; proven idea, poor implementation). But taken as a whole, it's increasingly hard to take the Other Side ("we don' need no steeeenkin' objects") at all seriously.

The main argument for ignoring the "ignore OOP" crowd is simply this: competent, thoughtful design using OOP gives you the ability to know and prove that your code works as expected, and data is accessed or modified only in the places and ways that are intended. OOP makes "software-as-building-blocks" practical, a term that first gained currency with the Simula language in the mid-1960s. OOP enables modern software proto-engineering practices such as iterative development, continuous integration and other "best practices" that have been proven in the field to increase quality and decrease risk, cost and complexity.

The 'ignore OOP in PHP' crowd like to point to popular software that was done in a non-OOP style, such as Drupal, a popular open-source Web CMS. But Drupal is a very mature project, by PHP standards; the open-source project seems to have originated in mid-2000, and it was apparently derived from code written for a project earlier still. So the Drupal code significantly predates PHP 5, if not PHP 4 (remember, the first real whack at OOP in PHP). Perusing the Drupal sources reveals an architecture initially developed by some highly experienced structured-programming developers (a precursor discipline to OOP); their code essentially builds a series of objects by convention, not depending on support in the underlying language. It is a wonder as it stands – but I would bet heavily that the original development team, if tasked with re-implementing a Web CMS in PHP from a blank screen, would use modern OO principles and the underlying language features which support them.

And why would such "underlying language features" exist and evolve, especially in an open-source project like PHP, if there was not a real, demonstrable need for them? Saying you're not going to do OOP when using PHP is metaphorically akin to saying you intend to win a Formula One race without using any gear higher than second in the race.

Good luck with that. You might want to take a good, hard look at what your (more successful) colleagues are doing, adopt what works, and help innovate your Craft further. If you don't, you'll continue to be a drag on progress, a dilettante intent upon somehow using a buggy whip to accelerate your car.

It doesn't work that way anymore.

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.

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.