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?

permalink Ω 27 June 2004, Helsinki

Periodic Updating

Sometime last week I was reacquainted with an internet classic, the colour version of the F.N.O.R.D version of the Table of Condiments that Periodically Go Bad. Both of them look so dated and the HTML shows its age too. So, since I've got far too much free time on my hands and a copy of BBEdit, I spent an hour and brought it up to 21st century HTML/CSS, fixed a few typos and restyled the durations to look more like atomic orbital notation: Another Periodic Table of Condiments That Periodically Go Bad. I'm thinking of adding family headings as well as some of the radioactive condiments like sriracha sauce and others. The Periodic Table of Rejected Elements, The Periodic Table of Dessert, The Periodic Table of Candy and The Periodic Table of Haiku may provide me with some inspiration.

While I was updating the HTML, I was thinking about how many of the golden oldies of the net are moldering away and how long before they are completely lost. I squirrel away a lot of pages, documents and other information that might be of interest to Perl people sometime in the future, but how long before today's PDFs are unreadable by any readily available application? There are things from only 20 years ago that require quite a lot of machinations to decipher from formats that are only a footnote in the annals of computing. And what about jpegs? I know a few people who didn't make backups of their digital photo archives and accidentally deleted them all in just a few keystrokes - *poof* gone. A lot of archivists, real archivists, are concerned about the persistence of data since they don't live in internet time and think about 100 or more years into the future. SunSITE has a nice page filled with preservation resources for the digital age, but given the vast amount of data that's already disappearing, I think many of the goals are too lofty and dated for the current grim reality that the likelihood of large holes in the historical record from the 80s, 90s, 00s and beyond is a reasonable certainty. Relying on metadata and periodic updating of all the data out there on the net is just not very realistic in a time where most newspaper websites still can't render a single page in valid HTML and all current storage and backup media have a short shelf life in archival timelines.

permalink Ω 9 May 2004, Helsinki

Get your Game On

The Taideomuseo Tennispalatsi has a new exhibit opening on Thursday, Game On: The History, Culture and Future of Video Games., which covers the past 40 years of video game culture. I've never quite outgrown my arcade phase and still think of ZaXXon rather wistfully whenever I play one of the far more elaborate new games of today.

There are a number of books that try to cash in on the nostalgia of the kids who grew up in the 70s with the advent of arcade games but the only one worth reading is The First Quarter: A 25-year History of Video Games.

permalink Ω 15 September 2003, Helsinki

A little bit of history repeating...

I've been reading the new From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly and I have been impressed with both his approach and his analysis of the subject matter. He notes the fleeting and mostly disappearing bits of computing history from even as recently as a decade ago. I have also noticed this just by the culling of bits from the Perl history project which are few, far between and often lacking a public interest in preserving for posterity. I save what I can in hopes that it may someday be useful and appreciated. Much of the book owes its research to corporate archives which aren't public but which the author was able to obtain access to.

The book stops at 1995 for various good reasons so those looking for an open source software history will have to wait, but he does mention open source in the very beginning which immediately gives him credibility as a historian with a clue:

"A second limitation of this book is the cutoff date of 1995. Naturally historians have a professional reluctance to write about very recent events on which they lack a proper perspective, so I have no fear of criticism from other historians on that score. However, any self-respecting industry analyst or software journalist would bring the story up to date and would, for good measure, project a few years into the future. This involves a set of skills different from that of the historian. It is not mere pusillanimity that makes me reluctant to attempt to do the same, but the fact that such projections are often wrong and therefore that contemporary obsessions often miss the real drama and turning points. For example, in the last 5 years there has been an enormous amount of press coverage of the Java programming language, the Linux operating system, and open-source software. I have no idea whether these will turn out to be turning points in the industry or not, and my opinion is certainly no better than the average pundit's. On the other hand, I find it quite fascinating that in the business press of the early 1990s the Internet was one of the least-written-about subjects, getting perhaps one-tenth the column inches devoted to Microsoft Windows or the tribulations of WordPerfect. I don't know what it is, but I bet there is something much more important going on right now than Java, Linux or open-source software, and that it will be 2010 before it becomes fully apparent."

The book is full of interesting little tidbits such as the Computer Usage Company [ CUC ], the first software contracting firm, was a start-up whose first four programmers were all women who were recent science or math grads. His style is a wee bit dry but that's understandable when you're working with this kind of project where there are lots of facts, big gaps in information and few personal accounts of the subject matter to give it a more human dimension. Every story in this book has a much larger story to tell, you can feel it, but people die and their story dies with them unless they have made an attempt to preserve it. Perhaps this will be a wake-up call to some whom history is important.

The author is also working on The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets which is due out by August and should be very interesting to read as well.

permalink Ω 2 May 2003, Helsinki

Synergy archive

There is a new Dot-bomb Business Plan Archive that is collecting business plans for posterity to learn from and possibly explain how so many utterly stupid ideas managed to get funding.

permalink Ω 22 September 2002, Helsinki

Digital Babel

The June issue of Wired has a nifty timeline tracing the roots of computer languages [ caution: 500k file ] from 1954 through 2001. It is interesting to see what has lived and what has not and that Perl sorta stops at Perl4.000 :) A sidebar also mentions Larry as a charismatic leader which is something I don't think has had that much influence on Perl's continued usage and survival as a computational tongue since Larry isn't that active outside of a small developer circle.

One visual effect of the timeline is just how much congestion in the number of languages there is after 1990, a computational Tower of Babel. Diversity isn't a good thing everywhere and, since Microsoft gained much of it's monopoly through Microsoft Office as the standard application which eased file exchanges, I suspect a majority of these languages will die off in the next few years. Speak: A Short History of Language may also provide some insight into survival of the fittest languages. After reading the 5th Apocalypse I have a feeling that Perl6 will need all the help it can get to survive.

permalink Ω 10 June 2002, Helsinki

When we only had 0's

Since TPC is in San Diego again this year, The Computer Museum should be on the list of things to see as it just opened last May and appears to have some pretty interesting exhibits. Not to be confused with The Computing History Museum or The Computer History Museum.

If you're wondering what we did to look busy before the advent of computers in every cube, check out Yesterday's Office which has a nice collection of articles.

permalink Ω 22 April 2002, Helsinki

Technology and Culture

The Society for the History of Technology publishes a terrific quarterly journal Technology and Culture. The winter issue has a really interesting article, Voluntarism and the Fruits of Collaboration: The IBM User Group, Share on how the IBM user group Share began and what implications it had on collaboration and innovation. Since computing history seems to be coming into vogue this should be on every techno-historian's reading list.

permalink Ω 22 April 2002, Helsinki

And now, a word from our sponsor

According to TV is 75, TV and I share the same birthday though I'm not quite 75 this year. TV is a Virgo :) The History of the first 75 years of TV is really intriguing, especially how the TV itself has changed over the years much like the computer has evolved over time to become smaller and more easily integrated into our daily lives. The TV omnipresent in American life; from the laundromat to the pub, to the grocery store, to the shopping mall to the automobile.

The TV, like the computer, started life as a big, clunky, expensive, esoteric device that eventually became a fixture in every home. So many moments in the past century have been vicariously enjoyed by those tuning in to witness events that would otherwise have just been a front page story with a photo in a newspaper. Who doesn't remember watching the assasination of JFK, the lunar landing, Watergate, the Vietnam War, the Challenger explosion, Chernobyl, the falling of the Berlin Wall, the first shots of Desert Storm or the attack on the WTC and Pentagon? I hate the TV. I love the TV. It's difficult to articulate the affection for something that makes you feel like a vegetable, a passive voyeur. Love it or hate it but it was the printing press of the 20th Century and the internet is just a speedbump on the way to something even more revolutionary I suspect. The perfect popculture delivery system.

Tube: The Invention of Television is part of the Sloan Technology Series and is the best book to date on the history of television. A new book about Farnsworth and the early development of TV, The Boy Genius and the Mogul has just been published. Another pre-history, Please Stand By and The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind [ companion website ] deal with more of the effects of TV on society.

permalink Ω 10 April 2002, Helsinki

Spring Forward

I've always been late to rise and late to bed so "Daylight Saving Time" or "Summer Time" has often left me a bit miffed since everything in the US seems to revolve around the people who are early to rise and are early to bed. After 9pm it's nearly impossible to find a restaurant or shops that are open unless you live in a city centre. This appears absurd considering we are not an agrarian society that rises with the sun to tend the crops anymore, but makes more sense in the energy conservation rationale.

Timekeeping has been a bit of historical curiosity and contention throughout the ages and there are several books which treat the subject quite well; History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time, Calendrical Calculations and The Oxford Companion to the Year.

permalink Ω 7 April 2002, Helsinki

Weird science

I love Henry Petroski and his books like The Evolution of Useful Things, The Book on the Bookshelf, Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering and The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. He has a new book, a memoir since he won't be outdone by Oliver Sacks, Paperboy: Delivering the Press in the 50s which I'll have to read because anyone who can write an entertaining book on something as mundane as the pencil has to have had an interesting childhood.

The MIT Bookshop, a dangerous place I only dare enter a few times a year at the behest of my wallet, has a new book to interest Petroski fans, Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse. It's filled with 35 profiles of inventors and their inventions like Stephanie Kwolek the DuPont chemist who invented Kevlar and was an inspiration to me when I studied chemistry. I am a bit disappointed that Wozniak is named inventor of the personal computer since he simply created something that J.C. Licklider had laid much of the foundation for years earlier [ the biography is one of the absolute best computing history books I've ever read....read it if you haven't already ].

Inventors and their inventions are terrific reminders that being in the right place at the right time is sweet serendipity:)

permalink Ω 19 March 2002, Helsinki

double-humped fission

In yet another reason to love the web for making access to oodles of stuff we'd never see otherwise trivial the Oregon State University Library has made Linus Pauling's research notebooks available online. Treasure such as his double humped fission reprint can be found if you have the interest to wade through the collection.

permalink Ω 19 March 2002, Helsinki

Wayback when isn't so way back

Wired News today has an article about a web archive called the Wayback Machine which is a 'digital library tool' to search for and view archived versions of web sites from 1996 onward. I wish this would have been available a few years ago when I was working on the Perl history as google was only in beta at the time and much of the early years of Perl-ish stuff on the web had already long since vanished. They say the average lifespan of a web site/page is 100 days and, considering how much URL maintainence I have to give to the over 500 URLs on the Perl Timeline alone, I don't doubt it.

When I went looking for perl.org and perl.com on the wayback machine, I only got as far back as a month ago. Well, I guess it's something. However, in between the 'come back later due to higher than expected load' messages, python.org has pages all the way back to 14 April 1997. I wonder if this is a python conspiracy :) I wonder if anyone actually saved some of the original pages from perl.org, pm.org, etc. since the wayback machine doesn't have them it might be nice to archive them ourselves for grins.

n.b. Well, I knew as soon as I wrote that I'd find everything....note to self, the trailing slash on the base URL in the wayback machine is important. However, I must admit it is a treat to compare the old CPAN FAQ to the new CPAN FAQ :) I guess I'll have to go snarf the older stuff and make .pdfs out of them for the Perl history archive since the wayback machine could use way more power. Way.

permalink Ω 29 October 2001, Helsinki

WADD QSSYJEC DQFSEQVUF :)

The US would seem to be making fast and furious backwards progress in the area of crypto these days in the name of 'homeland security'. I have a keen interest in cryptologic history and have collected quite a few volumes on Bletchley Park, The NSA, WWII codebreaker memoirs, signals intelligence, Station Y,Enigma and Purple among others. Since I'm working on several historical cipher Perl modules it makes me concerned as to just how far this 'anti-crypto frenzy' will go. I've asked the people at HavenCo to keep a non-public CPAN mirror just to make me feel better. I also received Cryptologia today in the post so at least there is some hope for the continued flow of journal and historical information.

Jarkko and I visited Kayenta, Arizona on our way to Monument Valley and Kayenta is home to the Navajo Code Talkers Museum. I was rather disappointed and sad that the museum was in the local Burger King until we learned that the owner of the Burger King was the son of a Code Talker. The Navajo language was still considered classified by the US Government until 1967. This year the codetalkers have finally, at long last, received recognition for their invaluable contribution to the success of the Allies in the Pacific Theatre and there is even a movie, Windtalkers , which was about to be released in November but has been moved back to June 2002. Another movie, Enigma about the Bletchley Park efforts to crack the German cipher, was moved back from October to sometime early 2002 as well.

Stay informed on the issues and shop at Bletchley Park for a very nice selection of books and your very own "BP Britain's Best Kept Secret Rubber [ eraser ]" :) And hope that the zeal to protect the US doesn't actually become a war on privacy, civil liberties and the academic freedom to study cryptography outside the boundaries of the NSA.

permalink Ω 17 October 2001, Helsinki