TITLE: OOPSLA Day 1: Gabriel and Goldman on Conscientious Software
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: October 25, 2006  2:13 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
The first episode of
<A HREF="http://www.oopsla.org/2006/submission/onward/introduction_to_onward.html">
   Onward!</A>
was a tag team presentation by
<A HREF="http://research.sun.com/people/mybio.php?c=642">
   Ron Goldman</A>
and
<A HREF="http://www.dreamsongs.com/">
   Dick Gabriel</A>
of their paper
<A HREF="http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/goldman_qa.html">
   Conscientious Software</A>.
The paper is, of course, in the proceedings and so the ACM Digital
Library, but the presentation itself was performance art.  Ron gave
his part of the talk in a traditional academic style, dressed as
casually as most of the folks in the audience.  Dick presented an
outrageous bit of theater, backed by a suitable rock soundtrack,
and so dressed outrageously (for him) in a suit.

In the "serious" part of the talk, Ron spoke about complexity and
scale, particularly in biology.  His discussion of protein, DNA,
and replication soon turned to how biological systems suffer damage
daily to their DNA as a natural part of their lifecycle.  They also
manage to repair themselves, to return to equilibrium.  These systems,
Ron said, "pay their dues" for self-repair.  Later he discussed
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotaxis">
   chemotaxis</A>
in E.Coli, wherein "organisms direct their movements according to
certain chemicals in their environment".  This sort of coordinated
but decentralized action occurs not among a bacterium's flagella
but also among termites as they build a system, and elephants as
they vocalize across miles of open space, and among chimpanzees
as they pass emotional state via facial expression.

We have a lot to learn from living things as we write our programs.

What about the un-"serious" part of the talk?  Dick acted out a
set of vignettes under title slides such as "Thirteen on Visibility",
"Continuous (Re)Design", "Requisite Variety", and "What We Can
Build".

His first act constructed a syllogism, drawing on the theme that
the impossible is famously difficult.  Perfect understanding
requires abstraction, which is the ability to see the simple truth.
Abstraction ignores the irrelevant.  Hence abstraction requires
ignorance.  Therefore, perfect understanding requires ignorance.

In later acts, Dick ended up sitting for a while, first listening
to his own address was part of the recorded soundtrack and then
carrying on a dialogue with his alter ego, which spoke in a
somewhat ominous Darth Vader-ized voice in counterpoint.  The
alter ego espoused a standard technological view of design and
modularity, of reusable components with function and interface.
This left Gabriel himself to embody a view centered on organic
growth and complexity -- of constant repair and construction.

Dick's talk considered Levittown and the intention of "designed
unpredictability", even if inconvenient, such as the placement
of the bathroom far from the master bedroom.  In Levittown, the
'formal cause' (see my notes on
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2006-10.html#e2006-10-24T23_31_30.htm">
   Brenda Laurel's keynote</A>
from the preceding session) lay far outside the "users", in
Levitt's vision of what suburban life should be.  But today
Levittown is much different than designed; it is <EM>lived-in</EM>,
a multi-class, multi-ethnic community that bears "the complexity
of age".

On requisite variety, Dick started with a list of ideas (including
CLOS, Smalltalk, Self, Oaklisp, ...) disappearing one by one to
the background music of Fort Minor's
<A HREF="http://www.metrolyrics.com/lyrics/2147426878/Fort_Minor/Where'd_You_Go">
   Where'd You Go</A>.

The centerpiece of Gabriel's part of the talk followed a slide
that read

<CENTER><TT>Ghazal
<BR/> (google it)
<BR/> on
<BR/> "Unconventional Design"</TT></CENTER>

He described an experiment in the artificial evolution of electronic
circuits.  The results were inefficient to our eyes, but they were
correct and carried certain advantages we might not expect from a
human-designed solution.  The result was labeled "...  magical  ...
unexpected  ...".  This sort system building is reminiscent of
what neural networks promise in the world of AI, an ability to
create (intelligent) systems without having to understand the
solution at all scales of abstraction.  For his parallel, Dick
didn't refer to neural nets but to cities -- they are sometimes
designed; their growth is usually governed; and they are built
(and grow) from modules: a network of streets, subways, sewers.

Dick closed his talk with a vignette whose opening slide read
"Can We Get There From Here" (with a graphical flourish I
can't replicate here).  The coming together of Ron's and Dick's
threads suggest one way to try: find inspiration in biology.
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