Dreaming in Code on NPR’s Weekend Edition
Rick Kleffel did a really nice piece about Dreaming in Code for NPR’s Weekend Edition, and it aired this morning. I was traveling back from Seattle today so I entirely missed the broadcast. But the piece has its online home here.
There’s some nicely edited bits from the interview Kleffel did with me earlier this year, shaped to fit the context of a series Kleffel has been doing about first-time authors. He presents the book as both a product of my personal obsession and a chronicle of the OSAF team’s obsession with their product. There’s even a Moby Dick reference. Check it out!
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August 17th, 2007 at 8:05 am
I’m looking forward to reading your book, Dreaming in Code. Programming has been a “black art” for me ever since I took a rudimentary home-study programming course while working in the Bell System in the mid-70’s. The only concept I remember is that if you could get the computer to do something over and over again until it was done you had a good program.
Once a switching center that served major hospitals went down. Something malfunctioned in the conversion from electromechanical to electronic technology. The people who authored the code at Bell Labs and those who built the hardware at Western Electric all got on the phone with the local Bell phone company. In the end they had to rush out new solid state cards and essentially re-install the system.
That has been my impression of computer technology ever since — you rarely figure out what’s really wrong, you just do it all over again and hope it works.
August 17th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Heard your interview on Chicago radio. Scott, I’ve read most of the book ( I’m up to Methods) and it is much better than any write-up I’ve seen so far. There are times in the book that I’m sitting there and rooting for you. And then as you move from one history making moment to the next - I can see failure pushing it’s face into each picture.
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Software = if you can’t learn from history, “They” say: you will relive it. I loved the many references to: “we don’t have time to fix it”.
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My background is AT&T Labs, transistor = free to the world (give it to Toshiba), Unix = free to the world (give it to Sun and let them develop it), and quality control free to the world.