Disbelieving

In the May issue of the Believer Magazine is an article that looks interesting from the title, V 4.0 - The dilemma of the programmer: How can the best and the brightest grow in intellectual maturity without becoming ensnared in eternal servitude and professionalized infantilization? I had hoped that it might be an intelligent discourse on the coming age of programming and the ensuing commoditisation of software, but it is an article so disorganised and so marred with inaccuracies that it makes me wonder if the magazine employs editors or fact checkers. This issue of the Believer is really the Disbeliever.

The author claims to be or have been a programmer, but within the first page his credibility is damaged by:

A true appreciation of programming culture means immersing yourself in these elephantine tomes, absorbing their cryptic cryptology as if it were some strange and unknowable potion. Where does one begin? I started with Perl--a tireless workhorse of a language that, despite its age (over twenty years old, i.e., positively ancient), continues to surprise with its durability, like a late-career Clint Eastwood.

Perl isn't 20 years old and anyone has the ability to figure that out with a simple perldoc perlhist command if they have perl installed on their computer or a browser that can get to a search engine on the net. The year now is 2004 and perl was released on 18 December 1987. Doing the math would indicate that Perl is not yet 17 years old. And, in terms of computing languages it really isn't all that terribly ancient when you consider C, FORTRAN, BASIC and plenty of other languages that are still alive and well today pre-date Perl by as much as 30 years. Wired printed a nice timeline of computing languages [500k] a couple of years ago that does a good job of illustrating just how recent many languages are. And, a late-career Clint Eastwood does crap films like The Bridges of Madison County which make anyone who has seen his earlier films pity him for not getting out at the top rather than the bottom of his career.

He continues to ramble about how real [Perl] programmers love inscrutible compact code with a nugget of ugly looking perl code to prove it, how real programmers only carry O'Reilly books [and in his case, don't seem to read them] and how COBOL and FORTRAN are "extinct" with C getting there soon. I wonder if he ever bothered to look at the source code for perl or anything else.

The article rambles further with quotes and analysis from The Bug, microserfs, The Cryptonomicon and others but without any kind of cohesive thread. Sure, they're all geeky books, but this article wasn't claiming to be a geek book listing and review. However, the absolute end of credibility comes when he speaks of C as an FSF project.

For veteran coders, the open source movement is hardly news, frankly. (The C programming language and many other Unix tools were born from the Free Software Foundation's GNU project which was intended to create an entire operating system for free.) Sharing programs--and more importantly making their source code publicly available--is as fundamental to programming as cheese doodles and high-caffeine beverages.

I hope K&R manage to keep their teeth in when they come across that gem. The History of C and the History of the GNU project are both online and refute the egregiously inaccurate statement [and I really hope Brad Kuhn from the FSF writes a letter to the editors]. How does someone who claims to be a programmer write an article so clearly ignorant of the well documented history of his topic and doesn't obsessively check his facts 20 times over before publishing? The dot.com legacy lives on.

At the conclusion of the article is a revelation of disillusionment which does, in retrospect, tie a few bits of the article together.

Of all of the declarations of machine love in Coupland's novel, this steadfast belief in the salvational power of computing seems the most dated. As more undergrads flee the confines of engineering halls for the spacious atria of business schools, the future of the computer science appears increasingly sparse and anemic. And yet, attemps by Bill Gates and the like to promote the profession as fun and exciting ultimately belie a hard truth. Programming devours you. It maims, it scars, it cripples. It feeds vampirically on the minds of those who have dedicated themselves to its maintenance. If computing is in fact mankind's saviour, it demands sacrifice in return.

Jesus, if you're a programmer you better just go kill yourself now and spare yourself the protracted agony and suffering ahead of you if you believe the author. I mean, sure, programming in the dot.bomb age is a lot less sexy than the days spent in anonymity in the basement on a university campus somewhere while doing some really cutting edge stuff, but that's the price we pay for ubiquity.

I really do despise media that promote geek stereotypes and inaccuracies because we tend to do a good enough job at that ourselves with RMS, ESR and other fanatics who tend to give people the false impression that programmers are a largely insane, unwashed crowd with a love for handguns. I suppose that we'll have to wait until programming becomes so mainstream that it is no longer common to portray its practitioners as freaks whose minds have been crippled by 72-hour coding jags to read articles that don't have to rely on stereotypes to liven up the writing and make the profession seem, if not exciting, like a soul-sucking hellhole. In the interim though, would it be too much to ask the writers and editors to at least get the verifiable facts right?