TITLE: IAWTP -- More on Sharing the Thrill
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: August 10, 2005  3:17 PM
DESC: Is this the finest eulogy one could give for computing ever written?
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BODY:
Not too long ago, I
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2005-06.html#e2005-06-22T10_25_42.htm">
   wrote about</A>
an an opinion piece by Sanjeev Arora and Bernard
Chazelle that, in part, decried the lack of good
story-telling by computer scientists.  Not the
stories we tell each other, because there are
plenty of those and many are wonderful.  What's
missing are stories we tell the rest of the world
about just how thrilling our discipline is and
can be.

A
<A HREF="http://3dpancakes.typepad.com/ernie/2005/08/college_dropout.html">
   recent post</A>
at Ernie's 3D Pancakes returns to this theme of
story-telling.  The article begins as a discussion
on Bill Gates' much-discussed interview with Maria
Klawe.  Toward the end, though, Ernie gets to what
for me was his killer point.  First, he catalogs
the most common stories that non-CS folks hear and
tell about computing:
<UL>
<LI> Dammit!  This Thing Never Works!
<LI> Be Afraid!  Be Very Afraid!
<LI> Revenge of the Nerds
<LI> How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
</UL>

When people do hear or tell the "Oh Wow!  This Is So
Cool!", he writes, it's usually just a cover for one
of the other story lines.

And here is the paragraph that we computer scientists
should wake up and recite each day:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
This lack of stories is an endless source of frustration
for those of us who say "Oh Wow!" every day.  We see power
and beauty in computer science, even while we rage against
the limitations of the technology that grows out of it.
We see our field not (just) as a way to make boxes that
beep, but as a fundamentally new way of thinking about the
world.  We are craftsmen, taking great satisfaction in the
structures we build.  We drag abstractions kicking and
screaming from Plato's cave, and we make them real.  We are
explorers, proud of our hard-won discoveries but humbled by
the depth of our ignorance.  We have changed the world,
utterly and irreversibly.  Our influence on your daily life
may be less immediate than the influence of doctors,
lawyers, politicians, bankers, and soldiers, but it is no
less profound.  And we are just barely getting started.

Oooh.  Drama.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

More importantly, we need to find entertaining and
compelling ways to tell our friends and the rest of
the world -- and, yes, our sons and our daughters.
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