September 14, 2019 2:56 PM

Listen Now

In a YC Female Founder Story, Danielle Morrill gives a wise answer to an old question:

Q: What do you wish someone had told you when you were 15?
I think people were telling me a lot of helpful things when I was 15 but it was very hard to listen.

This may seem more like a wry observation than a useful bit of wisdom. The fifteen-year-olds of today are no more likely to listen to us than we were to listen to adults when we were fifteen. But that presumes young people have more to learn than the rest of us. I'm a lot older than 15, and I still have plenty to learn.

Morrill's answer is a reminder to me to listen more carefully to what people are telling me now. Even now that can be hard, with all the noise out there and with my own ego getting in my way. Setting up my attention systems to identify valuable signals more reliably can help me learn faster and make me a lot more productive. It can also help future-me not want to look back wistfully so often, wishing someone had told me now what I know then.


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

September 13, 2019 3:12 PM

How a government boondoggle paved the way for the expansion of computing

In an old interview at Alphachatterbox, economist Brad DeLong adds another programming tale to the annals of unintended consequences:

So the Sage Air Defense system, which never produced a single usable line of software running on any piece of hardware -- we spent more on the Sage Air Defense System than we did on the entire Manhattan Project. And it was in one sense the ultimate government Defense Department boondoggle. But on the other hand it trained a whole generation of computer programmers at a time when very little else was useful that computer programmers could exercise their skills on.
And by the time the 1960s rolled around we not only ... the fact that Sage had almost worked provided say American Airlines with the idea that maybe they should do a computer-driven reservations system for their air travel, which I think was the next big Manhattan Project-scale computer programming project.
And as that moved on the computer programmers began finding more and more things to do, especially after IBM developed its System 360.
And we were off and running.

As DeLong says earlier in the conversation, this development upended IBM president Thomas Watson's alleged claim that there was "a use for maybe five computers in the world". This famous quote is almost certainly an urban legend, but Watson would not have been as off-base as people claim even if he had said it. In the 1950s, there was not yet a widespread need for what computers did, precisely because most people did not yet understand how computing could change the landscape of every activity. Training a slew of programmers for a project that ultimately failed had the unexpected consequence of creating the intellectual and creative capital necessary to begin exploring the ubiquitous applications of computing. Money unexpectedly well spent.


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

September 12, 2019 3:57 PM

Pain and Shame

Today's lecture notes for my course include a link to @KentBeck's article on Prune, which I still enjoy.

The line that merits its link in today's session is:

We wrote an ugly, fragile state machine for our typeahead, which quickly became a source of pain and shame.

My students will soon likely experience those emotions about the state machines; they are building for lexers for their semester-long compiler project. I reassure them: These emotions are normal for programmers.


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