A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Ed Cone about Dreaming in Code. I first met Cone years ago when he was organizing the panel I spoke on at the first BloggerCon. I’ve always enjoyed his work; like me, he’s someone who is equally interested in politics and technology, and blogs about both of them.
The Cone interview is now up at CIO Insight. It was fun to talk about the issues in the book for a relatively expert readership, where I could skip over some of the basics and jump right to the harder questions. Cone did a great job of drawing me out and then trimming the verbal excess from my responses.
CIO Insight: Are we just being impatient with a branch of knowledge that is still fairly new? Or is there something inherent to software development that makes it so weird and vexing?
Rosenberg: You get one perspective that says, hey, we now have a computer on every desk that does things that were unimaginable 20 years ago, and they’re all connected in this network that gives us instant answers and instant connections. These are miraculous things. And then you find other people who say, you know what? We’re still writing code basically by picking out characters one at a time, we still have programs that are laid low when a single bug creeps in, we still have projects that take ten times longer than they should, we need to rethink everything from the ground up.
I don’t have an answer between them. My personal temperament is more towards the optimistic. In the end, what you’ve got is this industry that’s been conditioned by Moore’s Law, and by its own fantastic financial success, to assume that the curve is always an upward curve, that everything gets better at an exponential pace. That’s the experience of the technology industry. You have that smacking up against the reality of human experience, of creativity, of people working in teams. We have these basic human factors, psychology, the limits of the conceptual capacity of the human brain—things that do not move at an exponential pace. They simply don’t. They tend to move linearly, if they are improving at all. People in the technology industry are loath to accept that.
This theme is also at the heart of another piece that occupied me for a considerable part of the fall — a profile of Charles Simonyi that is on the cover of the new issue of Technology Review. I covered Simonyi and his Intentional Software project just a little bit in Dreaming in Code, and I’m grateful to Jason Pontin at TR for giving me the chance to look at him, and it, more fully.
The first part of the profile, “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta,” is up at the TR Web site now; the second part is slated to go up tomorrow. Since the piece was written as one integral whole, you might want to wait till you can read it all at once — I’ll post the link. It was fun to be writing for print again, and Technology Review is looking very spiffy these days, so this is one that you just might be better off reading on paper.
[tags]charles simonyi, ed cone, technology review[/tags]
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