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Code Reads progress report and schedule

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I’m very happy with the knowledgeable and far-ranging discussions we’ve been having in the first two Code Reads (The Mythical Man-Month and “Go To Statement Considered Harmful”). The discussion of Dijkstra’s famous essay led us to some other related readings that I’m going to lay out for the next reading (which, like this week’s, will probably post a day late, on Tuesday rather than Monday — because it’s my kids’ birthday this weekend!). This will be a Dijkstra triple header: Notes on Structured Programming, “What led to ‘Notes on Structured Programming'”, and “The Humble Programmer.” Together these papers provide a deeper understanding of the perspective Dijsktra offered in the celebrated “Go To Statement” piece.

Then, the following week (Oct. 23), let’s look at Donald Knuth’s “Structured Programming with go to Statements”. The Knuth is almost certainly way over my head, but I’ll give it a go, and maybe you guys can help me out.

The week after (Oct. 30), let’s change the scene entirely, and look at Mitch Kapor’s Software Design Manifesto, which extends the discussions we’ve been having about the development process (Brooks) and coding discipline (Dijkstra) into the realm of design process.

I’ve added a permanent link in this blog’s sidebar to the Code Reads category archive and also a link to the RSS feed for the category, if you ‘re only interested in the software discussions and not in keeping up with my other topical ravings. I’ll also try to keep a link there to the post that lists the next reading(s).

Thanks to the denizens of Lambda the Ultimate, joel.reddit.com (the Reddit category created for devotees of Joel on Software), and programming.reddit.com for linking here and pointing people to the conversations. Also thanks to these individual bloggers for linking in: Rafe Colburn, Anarchaia, Hacia la Cuarta Generacion del Software, danvk.org, Superficie Reflexiva, Strange Quarks, Honey of an Anklet, and Ralph Johnson (one of the so-called “gang of four” authors of the original Design Patterns book). If I missed you (I’m relying on Technorati), let me know!

As for that book giveaway, here’s my plan: When I have the books in hand, I will award them at random from the list of people who have made what I consider substantive contributions to the discussion (which means nearly everyone so far). Then I’ll email you if I have an email address, or post here if I don’t, to let the winners know.

Microsoft sniffed at “acquiring YouTube’s technology”

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This little tidbit from the Journal’s day-one story on the Google/YouTube deal caught my eye:

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company “evaluated acquiring this type of technology several months ago” but decided to build its own service, a test version of which opened recently.

It may be foolish to read too much into an unnamed spokesperson’s boilerplate wording, but it is unwittingly illuminating.

YouTube’s “technology” is smart: the company made a good bet on making posting videos really easy — it did for Web video what AOL did a decade ago to help people get online. But the technology itself is something that Google, or Microsoft, could duplicate for a tiny fraction of YouTube’s price tag.

Google traded its stock not for YouTube’s technology but for its massive and growing community of users. That Microsoft would describe the deal as “acquiring technology” is an indication that it’s still thinking like a packaged-software-goods company.
[tags]google, youtube, microsoft[/tags]

North Korea in 60 words or less

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Josh Marshall has crisply debunked the Bush team’s attempt to throw smoke in the world’s eyes at the failure of its “we don’t talk with the axis of evil” stance in regard to North Korea’s nuclear test. With the administration desperately trying to cloud the issue, it is worth simply reposting his description:

“Failure” =1994-2002 — Era of Clinton ‘Agreed Framework’: No plutonium production. All existing plutonium under international inspection. No bomb.

“Success” = 2002-2006 — Bush Policy Era: Active plutonium production. No international inspections of plutonium stocks. Nuclear warhead detonated.

Face it. They ditched an imperfect but working policy. They replaced it with nothing. Now North Korea is a nuclear state.

[tags]north korea, nuclear proliferation, bush administration[/tags]

Code Reads #2: Dijkstra’s “Go To Statement Considered Harmful”

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Code ReadsThis is the second edition of Code Reads, a weekly discussion of some of the central essays, documents and texts in the history of software. You can go straight to the comments and post something if you like. Here’s the full Code Reads archive.

The title of Edsger Dijkstra’s 1968 “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” is among the best-known phrases in the history of programming. Interestingly, the phrasing of the title — which has become so regular a cliche in the field it inspired Eric Meyer to compose the waggish “‘Considered Harmful’ Essays Considered Harmful” — was not Dijkstra’s work at all. As Dijkstra explained it:

Finally a short story for the record. In 1968, the Communications of the ACM published a text of mine under the title “The goto statement considered harmful,” which in later years would be most frequently referenced, regrettably, however, often by authors who had seen no more of it than its title, which became a cornerstone of my fame by becoming a template: we would see all sorts of articles under the title “X considered harmful” for almost any X, including one titled “Dijkstra considered harmful.” But what had happened? I had submitted a paper under the title “A case against the goto statement”, which, in order to speed up its publication, the editor had changed into a “letter to the Editor”, and in the process he had given it a new title of his own invention! The editor was Niklaus Wirth.

How did Wirth come up with the odd phrase? My hunch is: some combination of English-as-a-second-language (though, since Wirth got his PhD here at Berkeley, that may be completely wrong) combined with the essential trait of radical concision drummed into the heads of programmers of that era. Fewer words! Fewer characters! Less space in memory!

[Read more…]

Google and YouTube — just add fizz?

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I don’t think the Google acquisition of YouTube is in itself an indication of dotcom-bubble-style thinking, as much of the mainstream coverage must inevitably suggest. YouTube is unprofitable — it hasn’t had much revenue to speak of at all till recently, from what I can tell. But it’s a great site and service and has a vast audience. It is, in short, much like Google was for the several years before Google stumbled on the brilliant revenue model that has propelled it to giddy peaks of valuation. Google wants to lead the Net video field; YouTube needs deep pockets to fund its bandwidth bills and build out the infrastructure to support its growth, and corporate help steering through the intellectual-property maze its business represents. It also needs a brain trust that has experience figuring out how to make money from a service with millions of users but no business model. That’s a good match.

$1.65 billion is a lot of money, but the tut-tutting chatterboxes are forgetting that, er, this isn’t cash changing hands, it’s stock. At Google’s current valuation this amount represents very roughly one percent of the company. One of the chief reasons companies like Google go public in the first place — aside from rewarding early investors and management — is so it can leverage market enthusiasm for these sorts of acquisitions. Google’s leaders know — or they ought to know — that its stock won’t stay over $400 forever. They’re doing the smart thing, playing their cards while their deck’s value is high.

No, neither Google nor YouTube is engaging in bubble-think — but watch for the onset of that condition in coming days and weeks, as the GoogTube deal gets turned into a valuation yardstick by hungry also-rans and competitors. “Let’s see, YouTube had X users and sold for $1.6 billion — therefore my company with 1/20th X users is worth at least $80 million!” That sort of talk is cheap. It was already beginning to turn up on the cover of Business Week, even before this deal. If and when people start investing on the basis of such logic, we’ll know that the awful era of TheGlobe.com has truly been reborn.
[tags]google, youtube, deals, bubble[/tags]

Code Reads notes

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Thanks to the good folks at Lambda the Ultimate, a programming-languages blog that I have subscribed to for several years, we’re getting a little more of a discussion going on The Mythical Man-Month. Several people have noted that few of us have the time to read a book a week for a discussion group like this. That would certainly include me (if I hadn’t already read a lot of the books already).

My plan for Code Reads has always been to mix up longer essays and books with shorter works. This week’s reading is Edsger Dijsktra’s “Go To Statement Considered Harmful,” which really isn’t long at all. I’ll post my thoughts tomorrow — I’m running just slightly behind this week — and we’ll see how it goes.

Over the next month, as we build a little more momentum here, I will try to post a longer schedule of topics so there’s a little chance to read more in advance — or, if you see a half-dozen topics but only one in particular interests you, you can cherry-pick it.

Fallows on Iraq

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We’d sent James Fallows my book because I knew he’d had a longstanding interest in software — how it’s created and how creative people use it — and so I figured there was a chance he’d enjoy it. I’d chatted briefly with him when he interviewed me last spring for an article he was writing about Chandler. But I’d never met him in person.

So when I learned that he was scheduled for a book-tour stop right here in Berkeley today, on the publication of his new Blind Into Baghdad, I rolled myself down the hill to the UC Journalism School for his packed lunchtime talk on Iraq.

If any American journalist has a right to shout “I told you so!” about everything that’s gone wrong in Iraq, it’s Fallows: his Nov. 2002 Atlantic piece, “The 51st State,” foretold the endless difficulties the U.S. would face in the wake of a successful assault on Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Shouting isn’t Fallows’ style. Instead he spoke forcefully and thoughtfully for 45 minutes. He argued that, right now, there are simply no good alternatives or “right” choices for the U.S., just varying degrees of bad options. The Democrats, he said, shouldn’t fall into the trap of offering specific proposals about what to do to fix things. Instead, they should point to the upcoming elections as a simple moment of accountability — a chance to offer a vote of no confidence in a president who says “stay the course!” and a vice president who says he’d do everything “exactly the same” if he had another chance. Then, if Democrats succeed in winning any share of power, they’ll need to devise an “adaptive” policy, since no one can predict how events will unfold.

Asked about how future historians will view the Bush administration, Fallows pointed to 2002 as a pivotal year, in which the nation started with a budget surplus, considerable national unity and unprecedented global support. Where did it all go? Why did Bush throw so much down the Iraq hole? Ten days after 9/11 the president delivered a great speech — then he did nothing in the months that followed to summon national resolve, develop an energy policy or express a broader strategy.

Questioned about the prospect of military action against Iran, Fallows said an attack would be “the most reckless military action in my lifetime. And I don’t think it’s going to happen.” The U.S. military is “100 percent” opposed, he said. He guessed that the Bush administration’s hints and leaks about possible military moves against Iran were part of a “crazy man negotiating strategy.”

This gave me a flashback to fall of 2002, when I’d returned to my high school alma mater for the celebration of its newspaper‘s centennial, and hosted an alumni panel of journalists and political insiders discussing the prospect of an invasion of Iraq.

The consensus of the panel — Robert Caro, Marc Fisher, Mark Penn, and Nicholas Horrock — was that the Bush administration was unlikely to deliver on its threats to invade Saddam’s Iraq. The sabre-rattling was a negotiating tactic — a big game of chicken.

Oops. That was one inaccurate consensus — composed, I imagine, of part wishful thinking and part underestimation of the Bush administration’s recklessness. I dearly hope Fallows’s guess on Iran isn’t rooted in a similar thought-mix.
[tags]James Fallows, Iraq, Iran, Blind into Baghdad[/tags]

Fallows on Dreaming in Code

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In his technology column in the new Atlantic, James Fallows had some extremely nice things to say about my book. In a sidebar to a piece that reviews lots of different information-organizer programs, he names Dreaming in Code as “this month’s tech-literature pick”:

The book is the first true successor to Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine, and is written with a combination of technical sophistication and narrative skill not seen in many years. Read it to understand what all these software wizards actually do.

I’m grateful for the advance enthusiasm. (The book won’t be in stores till January, but there’s always Amazon pre-order…) To be associated favorably with The Soul of a New Machine in the pages of the magazine that served as its author’s home is an honor. I hope I can live up to it!

I’ve always been a little cautious about connecting Dreaming in Code with The Soul of a New Machine. Kidder’s book is a non-fiction classic that I’ve always admired. But the comparison sets a high bar and raises expectations to daunting levels. If people end up feeling that my book is one-quarter as good as Soul of a New Machine, I’ll take it as a compliment.

Kidder’s book — exactly a quarter century old this year — introduced a whole generation to the romance and the nightmare of building computers. It didn’t matter that he was writing about refrigerator-sized minicomputers just as the IBM PC was bringing the “microcomputer” into the spotlight and ushering in the computer-on-every-desk era. The book’s great achievement was its glimpse into the world of Route 128 engineers and managers — the intense, focused way they lived their work and worked their minds.

That world has become a widely familiar one in our era of “knowledge work” and startup-company culture. The opportunity for a writer today lies not in exploring this realm for the first time, but instead in trying to fathom some of its enduring mysteries. I’ve always been fascinated by the minds and work of programmers, and I wanted my book to tell a story that would capture some of their pleasures and terrors — and tell us something about why, 50 years into the computer era and 25 since The Soul of a New Machine came out, writing the software that runs our world remains a singularly unpredictable undertaking.
[tags]james fallows, dreaming in code[/tags]

Foley: With so much mud flying, it’s hard to think clearly

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The Foley scandal has reached that point of implosion where the endangered pols are flinging anything and everything against the wall, praying that something will stick. So before the air becomes completely unbreathable, let’s just lay out a handful of principles that should be obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention:

(1) This isn’t about homosexuality, or, for that matter, homophobia. Certainly, the fact that Foley’s sexual come-ons were directed at teenage males rather than females grosses out some Republican leaders, along with most of their “base.” But this scandal’s offenses would be identical whether Foley was hitting on male or female pages. This story is about abuse of the power of office, betrayal of the responsibility not to take advantage of young people who are under your protection, and a party that placed protecting its majority over protecting those kids.

Which is why (2) “Blame the liberals!” is a non-starter. There is no logic to the right-wing diagnosis that Foley’s disgrace is a byproduct of liberal permissiveness and support for notions like gay marriage. (See David Brooks’s bizarre argument that “expressive individualism,” not political self-interest, is the root problem here.) Foley is a conservative Republican leader who wrote laws to protect minors from predators, remember? If making passes at pages is the inevitable end-result of support for gay rights, surely Foley would have had to wait in line for his fun behind a long list of jailbait-hunting liberal congresspeople. The only way this bizarre argument makes sense is if you believe that, beneath the surface, basically anyone who’s gay is itching to molest teenagers. Come to think of it, maybe this argument will make some headway with “the base.”

(3) It’s just like Monica? No. Why this story is different: (A) Monica wasn’t underage. (B) She was over the age of consent. (C) Did we say she was not a minor?

(4) Why it is similar to Monica: The disgraced politician(s) failed to tell the truth.

(5) Why it’s really different from Monica: The hypocrisy factor. Bill Clinton disgraced himself with his intern scandal, but the nation that ultimately forgave him understood that he’d lied about a stupid and weak mistake that really had nothing to do with the policies and ideas he stood for. Foley was a member of a GOP leadership whose party’s idea of “family values” excludes gays and which drums up votes by “tougher on pederasts than thou” positions. So his personal lapse not only harmed the kids he hit on; it made a mockery of his, and his party’s, policies.

(6) There’s no vast left-wing conspiracy here. How could there be? Dennis Hastert has echoed some of the nuttier right-wing sites in complaining that the whole Foley affair is somehow a late-election-cycle dirty trick — that it’s all the Democrats’ fault, that Democrats knew about this all along but waited till they could do maximum harm to engineer a scandal.

This notion evaporates on first contact with fact: When the page oversight committee chair heard about the complaint that started this scandal, he failed to notify the committee’s one Democratic member. And ABC’s original source for the story was no Clinton operative; it was a Republican who stepped forward. This whole saga is about information moving — or not moving — among Republicans. The whole point of the scandal is that some Republicans knew about Foley’s problem for years, and the GOP leadership failed to investigate or take action. Far better to hold onto a precious seat. They played dumb, and now they’re trying to play dirty, instead of clearing the air.
[tags]Mark Foley, Denis Hastert, David Brooks, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky[/tags]

October surprise watch

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As Josh Marshall has pointed out, the GOP argument that the Foley scandal is somehow all a political setup or dirty trick of some kind doesn’t make much sense:

Is this really a winning argument or is it, as it seems to me, a sign that the House GOP leadership is currently exploring the outer reaches of the galaxy of desperation?

I mean, is it a diabolical plot to reveal that one of members of the House leadership (Foley was a deputy whip) spent the last decade hitting on teenage pages and passed the time between votes having cybersex with them?

Is he like a plant? A pervy Manchurian candidate hived into the 1994 Republican Revolution by the Dems?

Foley’s downfall was no October surprise. But now that it is crowding the headlines and threatening to deep-six Republican hopes to hold onto Congress, I’ve set my timer. I’m just not going to be too surprised if some time in the next few days we wake up to read one of the following:

  • Terror alert level raised (only to be lowered after the polls close)
  • Justice Department nabs group of plotters in Florida/upstate New York/North Dakota (later we learn that they’re just doofuses who fell for an FBI sting)
  • Osama bin Laden captured at last!

In other words, October still has a long way to go, and the party in power has the October surprise controls, so — look out. As it is, we’ve already got Hastert arguing that if he loses his job over this, it’s a win for the terrorists. Anything is possible in the dying days of a corrupt regime (alas, we’re only talking about the GOP Congressional regime — the Bush administration is likely to be thrashing in lame duck-ness for two more years no matter what).
[tags]bush, october surprise, mark foley[/tags]