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.

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...

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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?

A Blessing is ALWAYS A Curse (and Vice Versa)

I've recently started as Senior Architect at Savant Degrees, a Singapore-based Web consultancy. Quite often, I feel like my job is as much "Senior Curmudgeon" as anything. According to Wiktionary.org, a curmudgeon is "[a]n ill-tempered (and frequently old) person full of stubborn ideas or opinions." I'm undoubtedly the oldest person among any of my colleagues that I've met, and I was told fairly explicitly that I was being hired on the basis of the variety and depth of my experience — i.e., for my ideas and opinions. And, like most people, I think I'm only stubborn when I'm right.

Naturally enough, I'm doing a lot of learning, too. This is my first experience with Groovy, a nicely dynamic language which runs atop the Java VM. Like any language worth its weight, a rich ecosystem is growing around it. Like the ecosystems around most languages, there is at least one ultra-massive tool that takes new folk some time to wrap their minds around. With PHP, for instance, it's the Zend Framework, which arguably makes the C++ Standard Library look minimalistic. With Java, it's pretty much anything having to do with J2EE1 (to which Groovy itself is a reaction).

The biggest tool I've yet stubbed my toe on in the Groovy world is, unquestionably, Gradle2. In the grand Zend tradition, the PDF version of the user guide is nearly 300 pages long and, also like Zend, is considerably out-of-date. It's considerably easier to argue that Gradle justifies the bulk, however, since Gradle is a "let's build anything" build manager/dependency tracker/dessert topping/floor wax. The basics can be understood in half a day, even if you've only nodding familiarity with Groovy3. To truly master it, however, requires significant extra time — as much as you feel you derive benefit from.

And that (finally) brings me to the point of this post. The group I'm working with now has some very talented and moderately experienced developers in it; they're open to new ideas and new ways of doing things, more than is the local cultural norm. In our craft, that's not just a Good Thing™; it's necessary for continuing success4. But that enthusiasm is tempered by a keen consciousness of impending deadlines, particularly the "curse of success;" a month, later this year, when we will be spread extremely thin amongst several important projects. The ways we've done things have been successful, but we see the down-sides of success as well.

So, new ways of doing things, and the hope of new, increasing success. New things like continuous integration using automated builds and unit tests, among other such recently-popular tools and techniques. (They're popular because they generally work better than Ye Olde Ways.) I'm arguing for the team to use tools that will, at the click of a button or the tick of the clock, automatically check out, build, test and package the code and associated resources for our project. The team is new to this, having used "traditional" "waterfall" processes in the past. Knowing one is to be hanged, as Mark Twain said, tends to focus the mind wonderfully; a rational person (or team) will avoid being put in that position. My job, so to speak, is to make the tools that help us cut the hangman's rope, and teach their use. Presenting already-busy people with several hundred pages of documentation is probably not the most effective way to do that.

So, at the moment, the most pressing blessing is that we have such wonderful tools available, with more on the way. Most categories of tools have several at-least-usable alternatives available; it's very easy to go into information overload. When that happens, often you just choose to use what some exemplar, say a tool vendor, use themselves. It becomes tragically ironic when a development group pursuing a more agile process has their agility and effectiveness limited by their "agile" tools. (I don't mean to be commenting on any specific company or team here; I've seen this effect on numerous projects over the years.)

Choosing deliberately increases the odds that you will choose wisely, and those odds will increase along with your experience. Experience is perhaps the ultimate professional blessing-and-curse-combined; "you never learn anything from doing it right the first time." I prefer the Nietzsche:

That which does not kill you, makes you stronger.

We're not dead yet — so we must be strong, yes? Another "stubborn idea and opinion."

Comments?

Footnotes:

1. Now known as JEE, because "Java 2" (1.2) is so last decade; we're on 1.6 now. (Return)

2. No, I haven't looked at Grails yet. Being a close of Ruby on Rails, I expect that to be the proverbial "kitchen sink with subdivisions attached." Fortunately (?), we're a Tomcat shop. (Return)

3. But, of course, experience counts; Gradle rewards your groovy Groovy skills with more efficiently expressive power in your project automation. (Return)

4. There's another curmudgeonly opinion for you. (Return)

In Praise of Robust Tools and of The Future™

One of the best points about doing Web development in PHP is that it's so widely used; several respectable estimates by organizations that get paid to find these things out say that some varying number north of 50% of all sites on the World Wide Web use PHP as their implementation language. This includes numerous content management systems, or CMS, such as WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.

One of the far-less-good points about doing Web development in PHP is that it's so widely used; the (evolving) "standard" set of tools, in true open-source fashion, are assembled and maintained by an ad-hoc band of individual and small-corporate luminaries, on infrastructure that worked just fine back when any given server was hit a couple of thousand times a year; by continuing to rely on (what to the outside Net appear to be) individual servers without terribly huge pipes connecting them to the larger Internet, the infrastructure completely fails when that's scaled up by a factor of a thousand or ten.

Web developers using PHP are highly dependent on an extension architecture/platform called PEAR, the "PHP Extension and Application Repository." Singular. Well, for any given extension or application, it's singular. So, as the user base scales upwards, popular tools that go through a vigorous release cycle, the servers they're hosted on (and network choke points between large subsets of users and those servers) start having reliability problems; transfers slow to a crawl, or fizzle out entirely. (One such transfer this evening proceeded at a sedate 600 bytes per second. Not kilobytes: bytes. That's 1980s dial-up speed.)

Developers in other languages have similar tools; Rubyists have gems available from sites like rubygems.org; Pythonistas have eggs. But somehow I hear a lot less grumbling, and do less of my own, when the subjects of gems or eggs come up; they seem to Just Work™ – which indicates that the network infrastructure is a lot more robust; either larger "pipes" and/or more, distributed servers such as with a CDN.

Trying to access servers like this from Second World cities like Singapore that apparently devote more resources to content filtering/monitoring than easing congestion doesn't help either. Hey, SingNet and M"D"A, how come it takes ten hops to get off an island that's barely that many miles across? If we want to plug Singapore into the "new global economy," having grotesquely under-resourced connections is not helpful.

But back to the main subject: If PHP is going to continue its phenomenally successful growth, then the infrastructure is going to have to decentralise, aggressively. Having essential tools like PEAR and the PHPUnit repository available only from a single point ensures that single points of failure will continue to seriously compromise the PHP ecosystem. No access to servers, no access to tools. No access to tools, then development of PHP artifacts with reasonable efficiency and economy is severely degraded.

In other words, the status quo is a limiting factor on future growth and success. However, as many will be quick to point out, building infrastructure costs money – for hardware, for connectivity, for the paid labour of skilled craftspeople and professionals to create, install, operate and maintain this enhanced infrastructure. No explicit means of funding such an endeavour presently exists, at least not to my knowledge.

So where do we go from here, PHP community?>

What's wrong with this picture?

Apple chose the only name that ever made sense for their new change-the-world device: the iPad.

So what's not to like about it? Well, that depends on who you are and what you really wanted this to be. No surprise there.

My biggest problem with it was summed up well by James Kendrick in his post, Thoughts on the iPad — Just Push the Buy Button, says Apple: it really is primarily about media consumption - i.e., paying big corporations for temporary, passive access to data. Something to switch your creative intellect off, not on.

And those of us who are often called the "Apple faithful" were hoping, praying if you will, for something so much more. Which in fact this could still be. But for the first time in Apple history, a product with serious computing power is being positioned in the marketplace such that creative, collaborative expression by individuals is almost a subversive act.

We've fallen a long, long way from "Think Different". And it's now much, much harder to argue that Apple is as much a computer company dedicated to creativity and the pursuit of excellence, than to argue that Apple has become "just another" corporate big-media company, helping to turn the Internet from what was once called "the greatest opportunity for expressive, collaborative democratic action in human history" into just another television set. Active creation becomes passive "consumption." All hail the primacy of content, and don't even think about upsetting the applecart. That would be Thinking (too) Differently.

Responding while Forbidden; Gender and Other Issues in OSS and PHP

This post is what would have been a response to a post on Elizabeth Naramore's blog, which she titled Gender in IT, OSS and PHP, and How it Affects Us *All*. Quite a good post, actually, with a long and often thoughtful (but as often thoughtless) comment thread following. I was hoping to respond to a comment on the post, but that apparently is no longer allowed, even though the "Leave a Reply" form at the bottom of the page is functional. There's also a mysterious "Login/Password" pair on the page, but no indication of which ID one uses, or how to go about getting one.

Following is the content of the reply-that-wasn't: I (perhaps unreasonably) think this has some points worth pondering. Please do read the original post first and then come back here - where the "comment" feature definitely does work.

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@A Girl: Great that you're doing AP CompSci next year. As someone who's been in the Craft for 30 years, I have a great sentimental attachment to your idea that "teachers and professors have the chance to shape the mindsets of their students towards women in the industry". If we were a true profession, where essentially all practitioners have a certain common level and content of educational background combined with qualifying experience (e.g., apprenticeship, internship), I'd agree wholeheartedly.

The fact is that many if not most of the people in the industry - both the "coders in the trenches" and the ex-coders who got promoted into management ("because they were such great coders" - thereby removing two qualified people from an organization)... far too many of these people have noformal education in CS (or, often, anything else). And by the time they realize how important that might be, they're old enough that they're facing ageism in the workplace already - they're not confident enough to put the "big hole in the middle of [their] career" and "go back" to school. It doesn't help that schools the world over do such a lousy job of outreach and marketing to those potential students - they're focused on the Executive MBAs and other graduate-level returning students, who can have their pricey programs paid for by their employer. Joe or Jane Schmuck trying to keep head above water in the face of cut-throat competition from planeloads of new arrivals with mimeographed certifications, who've been taught their entire lives to never think out of the box to begin with... things start getting really tough out there. I'm not surprised that enrollment in CS programs is down. I'm amazed beyond words that it's still as high as it is; a less starry-eyed observer might expect the number of CS majors to closely track, say, majors in Phoenician economics.

A lot of the new entrants into CS and IT over the last ten years or so have degrees - they're just not in the "obvious" field. Someone, and I wish I could find the original, wrote an article in one of the industry mags (like C/C++ Users Journal, not IEEE Computer) that, to be good at software in the modern era, one needed to have exposure to "behavioral science, psychology, linguistics, human factors, sociology, philosophy, rhetoric, ethnology, ethnography, information theory, economics, organizational politics, and a dozen other things - and please, please learn to write competently in English!" - I've had that taped above my display for years now. So it's not that we're not educated; the problem - and it is a problem - is that there is no universal common body of knowledge for software "engineering" - which is one of the necessary precursors of any true profession. We're not going to have a CBOK without either a broad consensus within the industry, or imposition of a system from outside (and very narrowly-focused) forces in government or the larger economy. Given the prevailing social and political attitudes of current practitioners ("herding libertarian-poseur cats" is a phrase not infrequently heard), that would seriously disrupt the Craft and, by extension, any industry or field dependent upon software (which by now is pretty much everything).

How to solve the problem - and, in so doing, help redress the pandemic sexism, racism and ageism (in huge parts of the world, recruiting with explicit age limits is perfectly legal, and here in South Asia, you're old for coding at 28)? I've got no idea. When I first started doing this, I thought that within the next thirty years or so (from 1979), we'd be able to turn this informal craftwork that had taken the industry away from the "educated CS types" and turn it into a real profession. Now? I'd say we're 30 to 50 years away from now - unless we have a software equivalent of the New London School explosion and a "solution" gets imposed from outside. We need to grow up, and quickly.

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.

Craft, culture and communication

This is a very hard post for me to write. I've been wrestling with it for the last two days, and yes, the timestamp is accurate. If I offend you with what I say here, please understand that it is not meant to be personal. Rather, it probably means you may want to pay close attention.

When I was in university, back in the Pleistocene, I had a linguistics professor who went around saying that

A language is the definition of a specific culture, at a specific place, at a specific time. Change the culture, the place or the time, and the language changes — and if the language changes, it means that something else has, too.

Why is this relevant to the craft of software development?

Last weekend, I picked up a great book, Agile Java™: Crafting Code with Test-Driven Development, over the weekend at Kinokuniya bookstore at KLCC. There are maybe half a dozen books that any serious developer recognises as landmark events in the advancement of her or his craft. This, ladies and gentlemen, is one of them. If you are at all interested in Java, in high-quality software development, or in managing a group of software developers under seemingly impossible schedules, and if you are fully literate in the English language as a means of technical communication, then bookmark this page, go grab yourself a copy, read it, come back, and reread it tomorrow. It's not perfect — I would have liked to see the author use TestNG as the test framework rather than its predecessor, JUnit) but those are more stylistic quibbles than substance; if you go through the lessons in this book, you will have some necessary tools to improve your mastery of the craft of software development, specifically using the Java language and platform.

I immediately started talking up the book to some of my projectmates at Cilix, saying "You gotta learn this".

And then I stoppped and thought about it some more. And pretty much gave up the idea of evangelising the book — even though I do intend to lead the group into the use of test-driven development. It is the logical extension of the way I have been taught (by individuals and experience) to do software development for nearly three decades now. It completely blew several of the premises I was building a couple of white papers on completely away — and replaced them with better ones (yes, Linda, it's coming Real Soon Now). TDD may not solve all your project problems, cure world poverty or grow hair on a billiard ball, but it will significantly change the way you think about — and practise — the craft of software development.

If you understand the material, that is.

There are really only three (human) languages that matter for engineering and for software: English, Russian and (Mandarin) Chinese, pretty much in that order. Solid literacy and fluency in Business Standard English and Technical English will enable you to read, comprehend and learn from the majority of technical communication outside Eastern Europe and China (and the former Soviet-bloc engineers who don't already know English are learning it as fast as they can). China was largely self-reliant in terms of technology for some time, for ideological and economic reasons; there's an amazing (to a Westerner) amount of technical information available in Chinese — but English is gaining ground there too, if initially often imperfect in its usage.

Coming back to why my initial enthusiasm about the book has cooled, for those of you who aren't actually from my company, I work at an engineering firm in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia called Cilix. We do a lot of (Malaysian) government contract work in various technical areas, but we are also trying to grow a commercial-software (including Web applications) development group. Until recently, I managed that group; after top management came to its senses, I am now in an internal-consulting role. As Principal Technologist, I see my charter as consulting to the various groups within the Company on (primarily) software-related and development-related technologies, techniques, tools and processes, with a view to make our small group more effective at competition with organisations hundreds of times our size.

Up to now, we've been in what a Western software veteran would recognise as "classic startup mode": minimal process, chaotic attempts at organisation, with project successes attained through the heroic efforts of specific, talented individuals. My job is, in part, to help change that: to help us work smarter, not harder. Enter test-driven development, configuration management, quality engineering, and documentation.

Documentation. Hmmm. Oops.

One senior manager in the company recently remarked that there are perhaps five or six individuals in the entire company with the technical abilities, experience and communication abilities to help pull off the type of endeavour — both in terms of the project and how we go about it. Two or at most three of those individuals, to my knowledge, are attached to the project, and one of these is less than sanguine about the currency of technical knowledge and experience being brought to bear.

Since arriving on the project, I have handed two books to specific individuals, with instructions to at lesat skim them heavily and be able to engage in a discussion of the concepts presented in a week to ten days' time. Despite repeated prodding, neither of those individuals appeared to make that level of effort. This is not to complain specifically about the individuals; informally asking developers within the group how many technical books they had read in the last 18 months averaged solidly in the single digits. A similar survey taken in comparable groups at Microsoft, Borland, Siemens Rolm or Weyerhaeuser — all companies where I have worked previously — would likely average in the mid-twenties at least. So too, I suspect, would surveys at Wipro, Infosys or PricewaterhouseCoopers, some of our current and potential competitors.

While American technical people are rightly famous for living inside their own technical world and not getting out often enough, that provides only limited coverage as an excuse. In a craft whose very raison d'ètre is information, an oft-repeated truism (first attributed, to my knowledge, to Grace Hopper, that "90% of what you know will be obsolete in six months; 10% of what you know will never be obsolete. Make sure you get the full ten percent." If you don't read — both books and online materials — how can a software (or Web) developer have any credible hope of remaining current or even competent at his or her craft?

That principle extends to organisations. If the individual developers do not exert continuous efforts to maintain their skills (technical and linguistic) at a sufficiently high level, and their employer similarly chooses not to do so, how can that organisation remain competitive over the long term, when competitiveness may be directly linked to the efficiency and effectiveness with which that organisation acquires, utilises and expands upon information — predominantly in English? How can smaller organisations compete against larger ones which are more likely to have the raw manpower to scrape together a team to accomplish a difficult, leading-edge project? "Learn continuously or you're gone" was an oft-repeated mantra from business and industry participants in a recent Software Development Conference and Expo, an important industry conference. What of the individuals or organisations who choose not to do so?

Those of us involved in the craft of software and Web development have an obvious economic and professional obligation to our own careers to keep our own skills current. We also have an ethical, moral (and in some jurisdictions, fiduciary, legal) obligation to encourage our employers or other professional organisations to do so. There is no way of knowing whether, or how successfully, any given technology, language or practise will be in ten years' time, or even five. How many times has the IT industry been rocked by sudden paradigm shifts — the personal computer, the World Wide Web — which not only created large new areas of opportunity, but severely constrained growth in previously lucrative areas? I came into this industry at a time when (seemingly) several million mainframe COBOL programmers were watching their jobs go away as business moved first to minicomputers, then to PCs. History repeated itself with the shift to graphical systems like the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, and again with the World Wide Web and the other Internet-related technologies, and yet again with the offshoring craze of the last five years. What developer, or manager, or director, has the hubris to in effect declare that it won't happen again, that there own't be a new, disruptive technology shift that obsoletes skills and capabilities?

But whatever shift there is, whatever new technology comes along that turns college dropouts into megabillionaires, that changes the professional lives of millions of craftspeople... it will almost certainly be documented in English.