July 30, 2015 2:45 PM

The Word Came First

James Somers's article You're Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary describes well how a good dictionary can change your life. In comparing a definition from Webster's 1913 Revised Unabridged Dictionary with a definition from the New Oxford Dictionary, which he offers as an exemplar of the pedestrian dictionaries we use today, he reminds us that words are elusive and their definitions only approximations:

Notice, too, how much less certain the Webster definition seems about itself, even though it's more complete -- as if to remind you that the word came first, that the word isn't defined by its definition here, in this humble dictionary, that definitions grasp, tentatively, at words, but that what words really are is this haze and halo of associations and evocations, a little networked cloud of uses and contexts.

Such poetry is not wasted on words; it is not, too use his own example from the essay, fustian. Words deserve this beauty, and a good dictionary.

There is also a more general reminder just beneath the surface here. In so many ways, more knowledge makes us less certain, not more, and more circumspect, not less. It is hard to make sharp distinctions within a complex web of ideas when you know a little about the web.

I strongly second Somers's recommendation of John McPhee's work, which I blogged about indirectly a few years ago. I also strongly second his recommendation of Webster's 1913 Revised Unabridged Dictionary. I learned about it from another blog article years ago and have been using it ever since. It's one of the first things I install whenever I set up a new computer.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: General

July 29, 2015 2:10 PM

How Do You Know If It Is Good? You Don't.

In the Paris Review's Garrison Keillor, The Art of Humor No. 2, Keillor thinks back to his decision to become a writer, which left him feeling uncertain about himself:

Someone once asked John Berryman, How do you know if something you've written is good? And John Berryman said, You don't. You never know, and if you need to know then you don't want to be a writer.

This doesn't mean that you don't care about getting better. It means that you aren't doing it to please someone else, or at least that your doing it is not predicated on what someone else thinks. You are doing it because that's what you think about. It means that you keep writing, whether it's good or not. That's how you get better.

It's always fun to watch our students wrestle with this sort of uncertainty and come out on the other side of the darkness. Last fall, I taught first-semester freshmen who were just beginning to find out if they wanted to be programmers or computer scientists, asking questions and learning a lot about themselves. This fall, I'm teaching our senior project course, with students who are nearing the end of their time at the university. Many of them think a lot about programming and programming languages, and they will drive the course with their questions and intensity. As a teacher, I enjoy both ends of the spectrum.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Software Development, Teaching and Learning

July 27, 2015 2:23 PM

The Flip Side to "Programming for All"

a thin volume of William Blake

We all hear the common refrain these days that more people should learn to program, not just CS majors. I agree. If you know how to program, you can make things. Even if you don't write many programs yourself, you are better prepared to talk to the programmers who make things for you. And even if you don't need to talk to programmers, you have expanded your mind a bit to a way of thinking that is changing the world we live in.

But there are two sides to this equation, as Chris Crawford laments in his essay, Fundamentals of Interactivity:

Why is it that our entertainment software has such primitive algorithms in it? The answer lies in the people creating them. The majority are programmers. Programmers aren't really idea people; they're technical people. Yes, they use their brains a great deal in their jobs. But they don't live in the world of ideas. Scan a programmer's bookshelf and you'll find mostly technical manuals plus a handful of science fiction novels. That's about the extent of their reading habits. Ask a programmer about Rabelais, Vivaldi, Boethius, Mendel, Voltaire, Churchill, or Van Gogh, and you'll draw a blank. Gene pools? Grimm's Law? Gresham's Law? Negentropy? Fluxions? The mind-body problem? Most programmers cannot be troubled with such trivia. So how can we expect them to have interesting ideas to put into their algorithms? The result is unsurprising: the algorithms in most entertainment products are boring, predictable, uninformed, and pedestrian. They're about as interesting in conversation as the programmers themselves.

We do have some idea people working on interactive entertainment; more of them show up in multimedia than in games. Unfortunately, most of the idea people can't program. They refuse to learn the technology well enough to express themselves in the language of the medium. I don't understand this cruel joke that Fate has played upon the industry: programmers have no ideas and idea people can't program. Arg!

My office bookshelf occasionally elicits a comment or two from first-time visitors, because even here at work I have a complete works of Shakespeare, a thin volume of William Blake (I love me some Blake!), several philosophy books, and "The Brittanica Book of Usage". I really should have some Voltaire here, too. I do cover one of Crawford's bases: a recent blog entry made a software analogy to Gresham's Law.

In general, I think you're more likely to find a computer scientist who knows some literature than you are to find a literary professional who knows much CS. That's partly an artifact of our school system and partly a result of the wider range historically of literature and the humanities. It's fun to run into a colleague from across campus who has read deeply in some area of science or math, but rare.

However, we are all prone to fall into the chasm of our own specialties and miss out on the well-roundedness that makes us better at whatever specialty we practice. That's one reason that, when high school students and their parents ask me what students should take to prepare for a CS major, I tell them: four years of all the major subjects, including English, math, science, social science, and the arts; plus whatever else interests them, because that's often where they will learn the most. All of these topics help students to become better computer scientists, and better people.

And, not surprisingly, better game developers. I agree with Crawford that more programmers should be learn enough other stuff to be idea people, too. Even if they don't make games.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Computing, Software Development, Teaching and Learning

July 26, 2015 10:03 AM

A Couple of Passages on Disintermediation

"Disintermediation" is just a fancy word for getting other people out of the space between the people who create things and the people who read or listen to those things.

1. In What If Authors Were Paid Every Time Someone Turned a Page?, Peter Wayner writes:

One latter-day Medici posted a review of my (short) book on Amazon complaining that even 99 cents was too expensive for what was just a "blog post". I've often wondered if he was writing that comment in a Starbucks, sipping a $6 cup of coffee that took two minutes to prepare.

Even in the flatter world of ebooks, Amazon has the power to shape the interactions of creators and consumers and to influence strongly who makes money and what kind of books we read.

2. Late last year, Steve Albini spoke on the surprisingly sturdy state of the music industry:

So there's no reason to insist that other obsolete bureaux and offices of the lapsed era be brought along into the new one. The music industry has shrunk. In shrinking it has rung out the middle, leaving the bands and the audiences to work out their relationship from the ends. I see this as both healthy and exciting. If we've learned anything over the past 30 years it's that left to its own devices bands and their audiences can get along fine: the bands can figure out how to get their music out in front of an audience and the audience will figure out how to reward them.

Most of the authors and bands who aren't making a lot of money these days weren't making a lot of money -- or any money at all -- in the old days, either. They had few effective ways to distribute their writings or their music.

Yes, there are still people in between bands and their fans, and writers and their readers, but Albini reminds us how much things have improved for creators and audiences alike. I especially like his takedown of the common lament, "We need to figure out how to make this work for everyone." That sentence has always struck me as the reactionary sentiment of middlemen who no longer control the space between creators and audiences and thus no longer get their cut of the transaction.

I still think often about what this means for universities. We need to figure out how to make this internet thing work for everyone...


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Computing, General

July 24, 2015 2:07 PM

Sentences of the Day

Three sentences stood out from the pages of my morning reading. The first two form an interesting dual around power and responsibility.

The Power to Name Things

Among the many privileges of the center, for example, is the power to name things, one of the greatest powers of all.

Costica Bradatan writes this in Change Comes From the Margins, a piece on social change. We programmers know quite well the power of good names, and thus the privilege we have in being able to create them and the responsibility we have to do that well.

The Avoidance of Power as Irresponsibility

Everyone's sure that speech acts and cultural work have power but no one wants to use power in a sustained way to create and make, because to have power persistently, in even a small measure, is to surrender the ability to shine a virtuous light on one's own perfected exclusion from power.

This sentence comes from the heart of Timothy Burke's All Grasshoppers, No Ants, his piece on one of the conditions he thinks ails our society as a whole. Burke's essay is almost an elaboration of Teddy Roosevelt's well-known dismissal of critics, but with an insightful expression of how and why rootless critics damage society as a whole.

Our Impotence in the Face of Depression

Our theories about mental health are often little better than Phlogiston and Ether for the mind.

Quinn Norton gives us this sentence in Descent, a personally-revealing piece about her ongoing struggle with depression. Like many of you, I have watched friends and loved ones fight this battle, which demonstrates all too readily the huge personal costs of civilization's being in such an early stage of understanding this disease, its causes, and its effective treatment.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Computing, General

July 21, 2015 3:02 PM

'Send' Is The Universal Verb

In the mid-1980s, Ray Ozzie left IBM with the idea of creating an all-in-one software platform for business collaboration, based on his experience using the group messaging system in the seminal computer-assisted instruction system Plato. Ozzie's idea eventually became Lotus Notes. This platform lives on today in an IBM product, but it never had the effect that Ozzie envisioned for it.

In Office, Messaging, and Verbs, Benedict Evans tells us that Ozzie's idea is alive and well and finally taking over the world -- in the form of Facebook:

But today, Facebook's platform on the desktop is pretty much Ray Ozzie's vision built all over again but for consumers instead of enterprise and for cat pictures instead of sales forecasts -- a combination of messaging with embedded applications and many different data types and views for different tasks.

"Office, Messaging, and Verbs" is an engaging essay about how collaborative work and the tools we use to do it co-evolve, changing each other in turn. You need a keyboard to do the task at hand... But is the task at hand your job, or is it merely the way you do your job today? The answer depends on where you are on the arc of evolution.

Alas, most days I need to create or consume a spreadsheet or two. Spreadsheets are not my job, but they are way people in universities and most other corporate entities do too many of their jobs these days. So, like Jack Lemmon in The Apartment, I compute my cell's function and pass it along to the next person in line.

I'm ready for us to evolve further down the curve.

~~~~

Note: I added the Oxford comma to Evans's original title. I never apologize for inserting an Oxford comma.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Computing, General

July 20, 2015 2:59 PM

Rethinking Accounting Software and Interfaces in the 1980s

In Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface, Bret Victor reminds us that the dominant style of user interface today was created long before today's computers:

First, our current UI paradigm was invented in a different technological era. The initial Macintosh, for example, had no network, no mass storage, and little inter-program communication. Thus, it knew little of its environment beyond the date and time, and memory was too precious to record significant history. Interaction was all it had, so that's what its designers used. And because the computer didn't have much to inform anyone of, most of the software at the time was manipulation software -- magic versions of the typewriter, easel, and ledger-book. Twenty years and an internet explosion later, software has much more to say, but an inadequate language with which to say it.
William McCarthy, creator of the REA model of accounting

Victor's mention of the accounting ledger brings to mind the work being done since the early 1980s by Bill McCarthy, an accounting professor at Michigan State. McCarthy is motivated by a similar set of circumstances. The techniques by which we do financial accounting were created long before computers came along, and the constraints that made them necessary no longer exist. But he is looking deeper than simply the interaction style of accounting software; he is interested in upending the underlying model of accounting data.

McCarthy proposed the resources, events, agents (REA) model -- essentially an application of database theory from CS -- as an alternative to traditional accounting systems. REA takes advantage of databases and other computing ideas to create a more accurate model of a business and its activity. It eliminates many of the artifacts of double-entry bookkeeping, including debits, credits, and placeholder accounts such as accounts receivable and payable, because they can generated in real time from more fine-grained source data. An REA model of a business enables a much wider range of decision support than the traditional accounting model while still allowing the firm to produce all the artifacts of traditional accounting as side effect.

(I had the good fortune to work with McCarthy during my graduate studies and even helped author a conference paper on the development of expert systems from REA models. He also served on my dissertation committee.)

In the early years, many academic accountants reacted with skepticism to the idea of REA. They feared losing the integrity of the traditional accounting model, which carried a concomitant risk to the trust placed by the public in audited financial statements. Most of these concerns were operational, not theoretical. However, a few people viewed REA as somehow dissing the system that had served the profession so well for so long.

Victor includes a footnote in Magic Ink that anticipates a similar concern from interaction designers to his proposals:

Make no mistake, I revere GUI pioneers such as Alan Kay and Bill Atkinson, but they were inventing rules for a different game. Today, their windows and menus are like buggy whips on a car. (Although Alan Kay clearly foresaw today's technological environment, even in the mid-'70s. See "A Simple Vision of the Future" in his fascinating Early History of Smalltalk (1993).)

"They were inventing rules for a different game." This sentence echoes how I have always felt about Luca Pacioli, the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping. It was a remarkable technology that helped to enable the growth of modern commerce by creating a transparent system of accounting that could be trusted by insiders and outsiders alike. But he was inventing rules for a different game -- 500 years ago. Half a century dwarfs the forty or fifty year life of windows, icons, menus, and pointing and clicking.

I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I had pursued McCarthy's line of work more deeply. It dovetails quite nicely with software patterns and would have been well-positioned for the more recent re-thinking of financial support software in the era of ubiquitous mobile computing. So many interesting paths...


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Computing, General

July 13, 2015 2:51 PM

Thinking in Code

A conversation this morning with a student reminded me of a story one of our alumni, a local entrepreneur, told me about his usual practice whenever he has an idea for a new system or a new feature for an existing system.

The alum starts by jotting the idea down in Java, Scala, or some other programming language. He puts this sketch into a git repository and uses the readme.md file to document his thought process. He also records there links to related systems, links to papers on implementation techniques, and any other resources he thinks might be handy. The code itself can be at varying levels of completeness. He allows himself to work out some of the intermediate steps in enough detail to make code work, while leaving other parts as skeletons.

This approach helps him talk to technical customers about the idea. The sketch shows what the idea might look like at a high level, perhaps with some of the intermediate steps running in some useful way. The initial draft helps him identify key development issues and maybe even a reasonable first estimate for how long it would take to flesh out a complete implementation. By writing code and making some of it work, the entrepreneur in him begins to see where the opportunities for business value lie.

If he decides that the idea is worth a deeper look, he passes the idea onto members of his team in the form of his git repo. The readme.md file includes links to relevant reading and his initial thoughts about the system and its design. The code conveys ideas more clearly and compactly than a natural language description would. Even if his team decides to use none of the code -- and he expects they won't -- they start from something more expressive than a plain text document.

This isn't quite a prototype or a spike, but it has the same spirit. The code sketch is another variation on how programming is a medium for expressing ideas in a way that other media can't fully capture.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: Computing, Software Development

July 07, 2015 2:09 PM

Echoes: Symbols and Stories

Kevin Lawler, in Invention:

Steve Jobs gets credit for a lot of things he didn't do. Jobs himself said it best: "People like symbols, so I'm the symbol of certain things." Sometimes that means using Jobs as a stand-in for the many designers who work at Apple. Jobs usually makes for a good story. We like narratives, and we can build several entertaining ones around Jobs. Telling stories lets us gloss over other people by attributing their work to one person.

Peter Sheridan Dodds, in Homo Narrativus and the Trouble with Fame:

These two traits -- our compulsion to tell stories and our bias towards the individual -- conspire to ruin our intuitive understanding of fame.

The symbols we create and the stories we tell intertwine. Knowing that we are biased cognitively to treat them in a particular puts us in a better position to overcome the bias.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: General

July 06, 2015 4:48 PM

Echoes: Aligning Expectations with Reality

Adam Bosworth, in Say No:

Have you ever been busy for an entire week and felt like you got nothing meaningful done? Either your expectations are off or your priorities are.

Brent Simmons, in Love:

If there's a way out of despair, it's in changing our expectations.

Good advice from two people who have been in the trenches for a while.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: General, Software Development

July 03, 2015 12:50 PM

Good Music Uses Your Whole Mind

A couple of months back, someone posted a link to an interview with guitarist Steve Vai, to share its great story about how Vai came to work with Frank Zappa. I liked the entire piece, including the first paragraph, which sets the scene on how Vai got into music in the first place:

Steve Vai: I recall when I was very, very young I was always tremendously excited whenever I was listening to the radio or records. Even back then a peculiar thing happened that still happens to me today. When I listen to music I can't focus on anything else. When there's wallpaper music on the radio it's not a problem but if a good song comes on it's difficult for me to carry on a conversation or multitask. It's always odd to me when I'm listening to something or playing something for somebody and they're having a discussion in the middle of a piece of music [laughs].

I have this pattern. When a song connects with me, I want to listen; not read or talk, simply listen. And, yes, sometimes it's "just" a pop song. For a while, whenever "Shut Up and Dance" by Walk the Moon came on the radio, it had my full attention. Ah, who am I kidding? It still has that effect on me.

Also, I love Vai's phrase "wallpaper music". I often work with music on in the background, and some music I like knows how to stay there. For me, that's a useful role for songs to play. Working in an environment with some ambient noise is much better for me than working in complete silence, and music makes better ambient noise for me than life in a Starbucks.

When I was growing up, I noticed that occasionally a good song would come on the air, and my level of concentration managed to hold it at bay. When I realized that I had missed the song, I was disappointed. Invariably in those cases, I had been solving a math problem or a writing a computer program. That must have been a little bit like the way Vai felt about music: I wanted to know how to do that, so I put my mind into figuring out how. I was lucky to find a career in which I can do that most of the time.

Oh, and by the way, Steve Vai can really play.


Posted by Eugene Wallingford | Permalink | Categories: General, Personal