Knowing and Doing

A couple of weeks back, I saw an article in which Malcom Gladwell noted that he did not know The Triggering Town, a slim book of essays by poet Richard Hugo. I was fortunate to hear about Hugo many years ago from software guru Richard Gabriel, who is also a working poet. It had been fifteen years or more since I'd read The Triggering Town, so I stopped into the library on my way home one day and picked it up. I enjoyed it the second time around as much as the first.

I frequently make notes of passages to save. Here are five from this reading.

Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.

That advice works for budding software developers, too.

Emotional honesty is a rare thing in the academic world or anywhere else for that matter, and nothing is more prized by good students.

Emotion plays a much smaller role in programming than in writing poetry. Teaching, though, is deeply personal, even in a technical discipline. All students value emotional honesty, and profs who struggle to be open usually struggle making connections to their students.

Side note: Teachers, like policemen, firemen, and service personnel, should be able to retire after twenty years with full pension. Our risks may be different, but they are real. In twenty years most teachers have given their best.

This is a teacher speaking, so take the recommendation with caution. But more than twenty years into this game, I know exactly what Hugo means.

Whatever, by now, I was old enough to know explanations are usually wrong. We never quite understand and we can't quite explain.

Yet we keep trying. Humans are an optimistic animal, which is one of the reasons we find them so endearing.

... at least for me, what does turn me on lies in a region of myself that could not be changed by the nature of my employment. But it seems important (to me even gratifying) that the same region lies untouched and unchanged in a lot of people, and in my innocent way I wonder if it is reason for hope. Hope for what? I don't know. Maybe hope that humanity will always survive civilization.

This paragraph comes on the last page of the book and expresses one of the core tenets of Hugo's view of poetry and poets. He fought in World War 2 as a young man, then worked in a Boeing factory for 15-20 years, and then became an English professor at a university. No matter the day job, he was always a poet. I have never been a poet, but I know quite well the region of which he speaks.

Also: I love the sentence, "Maybe hope that humanity will always survive civilization."

The week after Strange Loop has been a blur of catching up with all the work I didn't do while attending the conference, or at least trying. That is actually good news for my virtual conference: despite attending Strange Loop from the comfort of my basement, I managed not to get sucked into the vortex of regular business going on here.

A few closing thoughts on the conference:

• Speaking of "the comfort of my basement", here is what my Strange Loop conference room looked like:

The big screen is a 29" ultra-wide LG monitor that I bought last year on the blog recommendation of Robert Talbert, which has easily been my best tech purchase of the pandemic. On that screen you'll see vi.to, the streaming platform used by Strange Loop, running in Safari. To its right, I have emacs open on a file of notes and occasionally an evolving blog draft. There is a second Safari window open below emacs, for links picked up from the talks and the conference Slack channels.

On the MacBookPro to left, I am running Slack, another emacs shell for miscellaneous items, and a PDF of the conference schedule, marked up with the two talks I'm considering in each time slot.

That set-up served me well. I can imagine using it again in the future.

• Attending virtually has its downsides, but also its upsides. Saturday morning, one attendee wrote in the Slack #virtual-attendees channel:

Virtual FTW! Attending today from a campsite in upstate New York and enjoying the fall morning air

I was not camping, but I experienced my own virtual victories at lunch time, when I was able to go for a walk with my wife on our favorite walking trails.

• I didn't experience many technical glitches at the conference. There were some serious AV issues in the room during Friday's second slot. Being virtual, I was able to jump easily into and out of the room, checking in on another talk while they debugged on-site. In another talk, we virtual attendees missed out on seeing the presenter's slides. The speaker's words turned out to be enough for me to follow. Finally, Will Byrd's closing keynote seemed to drop its feed a few times, requiring viewers to refresh their browsers occasionally. I don't have any previous virtual conferences to compare to, but this all seemed pretty minor. In general, the video and audio feedbacks were solid and of high fidelity.

• One final note, not related to The Virtual Experience. Like many conferences, Strange Loop has so many good talks that I usually have to choose among two or three talks I want to see in each slot. This year, I kept track of alt-Strange Loop, the schedule of talks I didn't attend but really wanted to. Comparing this list to the list of talks I did attend gives a representative account of the choices I faced. It also would make for a solid conference experience in its own right:

• FRI 02 -- Whoops! I Rewrote it in Rust (Brian Martin)
• FRI 03 -- Keeping Your Open Source Project Accessible to All (Treva Williams)
• FRI 04 -- Impacting Global Policy by Understanding Litter Data (Sean Doherty)
• FRI 05 -- Morel, A Functional Query Language (Julian Hyde)
• FRI 06 -- Software for Court Appointed Special Advocates (Linda Goldstein)
• SAT 02 -- Asami: Turn your JSON into a Graph in 2 Lines (Paula Gearon)
• SAT 03 -- Pictures Of You, Pictures Of Me, Crypto Steganography (Sean Marcia)
• SAT 04 -- Carbon Footprint Aware Software Development Tejas Chopra
• SAT 05 -- How Flutter Can Change the Future of Urban Communities (Edward Thornton)
• SAT 06 -- Creating More Inclusive Tech Spaces: Paths Forward (Amy Wallhermfechtel)

There is a tie for the honor of "talk I most wanted to see but didn't": Wallhermfechtel on creating more inclusive tech spaces and Marcia on crypto steganography. I'll be watching these videos on YouTube some time soon!

As I mentioned in Day 1's post, this year I tried to force myself out of usual zone, to attend a wider range of talks. Both lists of talks reflect this mix. At heart I am an academic with a fondness for programming languages. The tech talks generally lit me up more. Even so, I was inspired by some of the talks focused on community and the use of technology for the common good. I think I used my two days wisely.

That is all. Strange Loop sometimes gives me the sort of inspiration overdose that Molly Mielke laments in this tweet. This year, though, Strange Loop 2021 gave me something I needed after eighteen months of pandemic (and even more months of growing bureaucracy in my day job): a jolt of energy, and a few thoughts for the future.

I am usually tired on the second day of a conference, and today was no exception. But the day started and ended with talks that kept my brain alive.

• "Poems in an Accidental Language" by Kate Compton -- Okay, so that was a Strange Loop keynote. When the video goes live on YouTube, watch it. I may blog more about the talk later, but for now know only that it included:

• "Evenings of Recreational Ontology" (I also learned about Google Sheet parties)
• "fitting an octopus into an ontology"
• "Contemplate the universe, and write an API for it."

Like I said, go watch this talk!

• Quantum computing is one of those technical areas I know very little about, maybe the equivalent of a 30-minute pitch talk. I've never been super-interested, but some of my students are. So I attended "Practical Quantum Computing Today" to see what's up these days. I'm still not interested in putting much of my time into quantum computing, but now I'm better informed.

• Before my lunch walk, I attended a non-technical talk on "tech-enabled crisis response". Emma Ferguson and Colin Schimmelfing reported on their experience doing something I'd like to be able to do: spin up a short-lived project to meet a critical need, using mostly free or open-source tools. For three months early in the COVID pandemic, their project helped deliver ~950,000 protective masks from 7,000 donors to 6,000 healthcare workers. They didn't invent new tech; they used existing tools and occasionally wrote some code to connect such tools.

My favorite quote from the talk came when Ferguson related the team's realization that they had grown too big for the default limits on Google Sheets and Gmail. "We thought, 'Let's just pay Google.' We tried. We tried. But we couldn't figure it out." So they built their own tool. It is good to be a programmer.

• After lunch, Will Crichton live-coded a simple API in Rust, using traits (Rust's version of interfaces) and aggressive types. He delivered almost his entire talk within emacs, including an ASCII art opening slide. It almost felt like I was back in grad school!

• In "Remote Workstations for Discerning Artists", Michelle Brenner from Netflix described the company's cloud-based infrastructure for the workstations used by the company's artists and project managers. This is one of those areas that is simply outside my experience, so I learned a bit. At the top level, though, the story is familiar: the scale of Netflix's goals requires enabling artists to work wherever they are, whenever they are; the pandemic accelerated a process that was already underway.

• Eric Gade gave another talk in the long tradition of Alan Kay and a bigger vision for computing. "Authorship Environments: In Search of the 'Personal' in Personal Computing" started by deconstructing Steve Jobs's "bicycle for the mind" metaphor (he's not a fan of what most people take as the meaning) and then moved onto the idea of personal computing as literacy: a new level at which to interrogate ideas, including one's own.

This talk included several inspirational quotes. My favorite was was from Adele Goldberg:

There's all these layers in everything we do... We have to learn how to peel.

(I have long admired Goldberg and her work. See this post from Ada Lovelace Day 2009 for a few of my thoughts.)

As with most talks in this genre, I left feeling like there is so much more to be done, but frustrated at not knowing how to do it. We still haven't found a way to reach a wide audience with the empowering idea that there is more to computing than typing into a Google doc or clicking in a web browser.

• The closing keynote was delivered by Will Byrd. "Strange Dreams of Stranger Loops" took Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach as its inspiration, fitting both for the conference and for Byrd's longstanding explorations of relational programming. His focus today: generating quines in mini-Kanren, and discussing how quines enable us to think about programs, interpreters, and the strange loops at the heart of GEB.

As with the opening keynote I may blog more about this talk later. For now I give you two fun items:

• Byrd expressed his thanks to D((a(d|n))oug), a regular expression that matches on Byrd (his father), Friedman (his academic mentor), and Hofstadter (his intellectual inspiration).
• While preparing his keynote, Byrd clains to have suffered from UDIS: Unintended Doug Intimidation Syndrome. Hofstader is so cultured, so well-read, and so deep a thinker, how can the rest of us hope to contribute?

Rest assured: Byrd delivered. A great talk, as always.

Strange Loop 2021 has ended. I "hit the road" by walking upstairs to make dinner with my wife.

On this first day of my first virtual conference, I saw a number of Strange Loop-y talks: several on programming languages and compilers, a couple by dancers, and a meta-talk speculating on the future of conferences.

• I'm not a security guy or a cloud guy, so the opening keynote "Why Security is the Biggest Benefit of Using the Cloud" by AJ Yawn gave me a chance to hear what people in this space think and talk about. Cool trivia: Yawn played a dozen college basketball games for Leonard Hamilton at Florida State. Ankle injuries derailed his college hoops experience, and now he's a computer security professional.

• Richard Marmorstein's talk, "Artisanal, Machine-Generated API Libraries" was right on topic with my compiler course this semester. My students would benefit from seeing how software can manipulate AST nodes when generating target code.

Marmorstein uttered two of the best lines of the day:

• "I could tell you a lot about Stripe, but all you need to know is Stripe has an API."
• "Are your data structures working for you?"

I've been working with students all week trying to help them see how an object in their compiler such as a token can help the compiler do its job -- and make the code simpler to boot. Learning software design is hard.

• I learned a bit about the Nim programming language from Aditya Siram. As you might imagine, a language designed at the nexus Modula/Oberon, Python, and Lisp appeals to me!

• A second compiler-oriented talk, by Richard Feldman, demonstrated how opportunistic in-place mutation, a static optimization, can help a pure functional program outperform imperative code.

• After the talk "Dancing With Myself", an audience member complimented Mariel Pettee on "nailing the Strange Loop talk". The congratulations were spot-on. She hit the technical mark by describing the use of two machine learning techniques, variational auto encoding and graph neural networks. She hit the aesthetic mark by showing how computer models can learn and generate choreography. When the video for this talk goes live, you should watch.

Pettee closed with the expansive sort of idea that makes Strange Loop a must-attend conference. Dance has no universal language for "writing" choreography, and video captures only a single instance or implementation of a dance, not necessarily the full intent of the choreographer. Pettite had expected her projects to show how machine learning can support invention and co-creation, but now she sees how work like this might provide a means of documentation. Very cool. Perhaps CS can help to create a new kind of language for describing dance and movement.

• I attended Laurel Lawson's "Equitable Experiential Access: Audio Description" to learn more about ways in which videos and other media can provide a fuller, more equitable experience to everyone. Equity and inclusion have become focal points for so much of what we do at my university, and they apply directly to my work creating web-based materials for students. I have a lot to learn. I think one of my next steps will be to experience some of web pages (session notes, assignments, resource pages) solely through a screen reader.

• Like all human activities, traditional in-person conferences offer value and extract costs. Crista Lopes used her keynote closing Day 1 to take a sober look at the changes in their value and their costs in the face of technological advances over the last thirty years.

If we are honest with ourselves, virtual conferences are already able to deliver most of the value of in-person conferences (and, in some ways, provide more value), at much lower cost. The technology of going virtual is the easy part. The biggest challenges are social.

~~~~~

A few closing thoughts as Day 1 closes.

As Crista said, "Taking paid breaks in nice places never gets old." My many trips to OOPSLA and PLoP provided me with many wonderful physical experiences. Being in the same place with my colleagues and friends was always a wonderful social experience. I like driving to St. Louis and going to Strange Loop in person; sitting in my basement doesn't feel the same.

With time, perhaps my expectations will change.

It turns out, though, that "virtual Strange Loop" is a lot like "in-person Strange Loop" in one essential way: several cool new ideas arrive every hour. I'll be back for Day Two.