Category: edjercashun

Two Schools

Graham / / edjercashun

There always seem to be two schools in software, though exactly where the gates are varies. Alan Kay described how Edsger Dijkstra noticed that “the Atlantic has two sides”.

It was basically all about how different the approaches to computing science were in Europe, especially in Holland and in the United States. In the US, here, we were not mathematical enough, and gee, in Holland, if you’re a full professor, you’re actually appointed by the Queen, and there are many other uh important distinctions made between the two cultures. So, uhm, I wrote a rebuttal paper, just called On the fact that most of the software in the world is written on one side of the Atlantic.

Or maybe both schools are on the same continent.

The essence of [the MIT/Stanford approach] can be captured by the phrase the right thing. […] The worse-is-better philosophy is only slightly different […] and I will call the use of this design strategy the New Jersey approach.

Or they could be ways of thinking, school curricula, or whatever.

Maybe both schools have something to teach us. Maybe it’s the same thing.

No True Humpty-Dumpty

Graham / / advancement of the self, edjercashun

Words change meaning.

Technical words change meaning.

Sometimes, you need to check out a specific commit of a word’s meaning from the version control, to add context to a statement.

“I’m talking about Open Source in its early meaning of Free Software without the confusion over Free, not its later meaning as an ethically empty publication of source code.”

“I mean Object-Oriented Programming as the loosely-defined bucket in which I can put all the ills of software that I’m claiming are solved by Haskell, not the earlier sense of modelling business processes in software with loosely-coupled active programs communicating by sending messages.”

“The word Agile here refers to the later sense of Agile where I run a waterfall with frequent checkpoints and get a certification from a project management institute.”

The problem is that doing so acts as a thought-terminating cliche to people who are not open to hearing a potentially valuable statement about Open Source, Object-Oriented Programming, or Agile development.

If your commit is too early in history, then you can easily be dismissed as etymologically fallacious, or as somebody who won’t accept progress and the glorious devaluation of the word you’re trying to use.

If your commit is too recent in history, then you can easily be dismissed as a Humpty-Dumptyist who’s trying to hide behind a highfalutin term that you have no right to use.

What I’ve come to realise is that my technique for dealing with people who use these rhetorical devices can be as simple as this: ignore them. If they do not want to hear, then I do not need to speak.

There is no browser, only Zuul

Graham / / edjercashun

My short-lived first plan for a career was in Physics. That’s what my first degree was in, but I graduated with the career goal “do something that isn’t a D.Phil. in Physics” in mind. I’d got on quite well with computers as a hobbyist, and the computing and electronics practicals in my course labs. A job as systems administrator for those very systems (a hotchpotch of NeXTSTEP, Solaris, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X) came up at the time that I graduated so I applied, got it, and became a computerer.

Along the way, I met people who thought that some people should not be computerers because their backgrounds were not exactly identical. The Google manager who could not believe that as an applicant for the lowest-grade QA role, I had not encountered the travelling salesman problem. The software engineer at Facebook who was incensed that someone applying to build a web application in PHP and Javascript did not know that there are eight bits in a byte (never mind that there aren’t, necessarily, eight bits in a byte). And now the random on Twitter who insists that people who don’t fully know browsers aren’t allowed to write web applications.

It’s easy to forget two things: the first is that at some point in the past, you didn’t know what you know now, but you learnt it because you were allowed to participate and were taught. Even if you think you were a self-learner, you had access to playground materials, books, tutorials, online documentation…and someone made those for you and allowed you to use them.

The second is what it was like not to know those things. I remember not understanding how OOP was anything more than putting dots in the name of your function, but now I understand it differently, and don’t know what the thing was that changed.

The second of these things shows how easy it is to be the gatekeeper. If you don’t remember what not understanding something was like, then maybe it came naturally, and if it isn’t coming naturally to someone else well maybe they just don’t get it. But the first shows that you didn’t get it, and yet here you are.

When faced with a gatekeeper, I usually react flippantly. Because of my Physics background, I explain, I know how quantum physics works, and how that enables semiconductors, and how to build a semiconductor transistor, then a NAND gate, then a processor, and basically what I’m saying is I don’t see how anyone who doesn’t know that stuff can claim to know computers at all.

But what I say to everyone else is “this stuff is really interesting, let me show it to you“.

Be the keymaster, not the gatekeeper.

Bottom-up teaching

Graham / / academia, architecture of sorts, edjercashun

We’re told that the core idea in computer programming is problem-solving. That one of the benefits of learning about computer programming (one that is not universally accepted) is gaining the skill of problem decomposition.

If you look at real teaching of computing, it seems to have more to do with solution composition than problem decomposition. The latter seems to be background noise: here are the things you can build solutions with, presumably at some point you’ll come across a solution that’s the same size and shape as one of your problem components though how is left up to you.

I have many books on programming languages. Each lists the features of the language, and gives minimally complex examples of the use of those features. In that sense, Kernighan and Ritchie’s “The C Programming Language” (section 1.3, the for statement) is as little an instructional in solving problems using a computer as Eric Nikitin’s “Into the Realm of Oberon” (section 7.1, the FOR loop) or Dave Thomas’s “Programming Elixir” (section 7.2, Using Head and Tail to Process a List).

A course textbook on bitcoin and blockchain (Narayanan, Bonneau, Felten, Miller and Goldfeder, “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies”) starts with Section 1.1, “Cryptographic hash functions”, and builds a cryptocurrency out of them, leaving motivational questions about politics and regulation to Chapter 7.

This strategy is by no means universal: Liskov and Guttag’s “Program Development in Java” starts out by describing abstraction, then looks at techniques for designing abstractions in Java. Adele Goldberg and Alan Kay described teaching Smalltalk by proposing exploratory projects, designing the objects that model the problem under consideration and the way in which they will communicate, then incrementally filling in by designing classes and methods that have the desired properties. C.J. Date’s “An Introduction to Database Systems” answers the question “why databases?” before introducing the relational model, and doesn’t introduce SQL until it can be situated in the context of the relational model.

Both of these approaches, and their associated techniques (the bottom-up approach and solution construction; the top-down approach and problem decomposition) are useful; the former leads to progress and the latter leads to understanding. But both must be taken in concert, because understanding without progress leads to the frustration of an unsolved problem and progress without understanding is merely the illusion of progress.

My guess is that more programmers – indeed whole movements, when we consider the collective state of things like OOP, functional programming, BDD, or agile practices – are in the “bottom-up only” group than in the “top-down only” or “a bit of both” groups. That plenty more copies of Introduction to Programming in [This Week’s Hot Language] have been sold than Techniques for Making Your Problem Amenable to Computation. That the majority of software really does comprise of solutions looking for problems.

On books

Graham / / advancement of the self, books, edjercashun, learning

I’d say that if there’s one easy way to summarise how I work, it’s as an information focus. I’m not great at following a solution all the way to the bitter end so you should never let me be a programmer (ahem): when all that’s left is the second 90% of the effort in fixing the bugs, tidying up edge cases and iterating on the interaction, I’m already bored and looking for the next thing. Where I’m good is where there’s a big problem to solve, and I can draw analogies with things I’ve seen before and come up with the “maybe we should try this” suggestions.

Part of the input for that is the experience of working in lots of different contexts, and studying for a few different subjects. A lot of it comes from reading: my goodreads account lists 870 books and audiobooks that I’ve read and I know it to be an incomplete record. Here are a few that I think have been particularly helpful (professionally speaking, anyway).

  • Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. Adams is someone who reminds us not to take the trappings of society too seriously, and to question whether what we’re doing is really necessary. Are digital watches really a neat idea? Also an honourable mention to the Dirk Gently novels for introducing the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.
  • Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. I can think of at least three software projects that I’ve been able to implement and describe as analogies to the choose your own adventure style of book.
  • David Allen, Getting Things Done, because quite often it feels like there’s too much to do.
  • Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a book about looking for the patterns and connections in things.
  • Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World, for reminding us of the people who are going to have to put up with the consequences of the things we create.
  • Donald Broadbent, Perception and Communication, for being the first person to systematically explore that topic.
  • Steven Hawking, A Brief History of Time, showing us how to make complex topics accessible.
  • Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality, showing us how to make complex topics comprehensively presentable.
  • Douglas Coupland, Microserfs, for poking fun at things I took seriously.
  • Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender, because computering is more accessible to me than to others for no good reason.
  • Joshua Bloch, Effective Java, Second Edition, for showing that part of the inaccessibility is a house of cards of unsuitable models with complex workarounds, and that programmers are people who delight in knowing, not addressing, the workarounds.
  • Michael Feathers, Working Effectively with Legacy Code, the one book every programmer should read.
  • Steve Krug, Don’t make me think!, a book about the necessity of removing exploration and uncertainty from computer interaction.
  • Seymour Papert, Mindstorms, a book about the necessity of introducing exploration and uncertainty into computer interaction.
  • Richard Stallman, Free as in Freedom 2.0, for suggesting that we should let other people choose between ther previous two options.
  • Brad Cox, Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach, for succinctly and effortlessly explaining objects a whole decade before everybody else got confused by whether a dog is an animal or a square is a rectangle.
  • Gregor Kiczales, Jim des Rivieres, and Daniel G. Bobrow, The Art of the Metaobject Protocol showed me that OOP is just one way to do OOP, and that functional programming is the same thing.
  • Simson Garfinkel and Michael Mahoney, NEXTSTEP Programming: Step One was where I learnt to create software more worthwhile than a page of BASIC instructions.
  • Gil Amelio, On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple shows that the successful business wouldn’t be here if someone hadn’t managed the unsuccessful business first.

There were probably others.

This is fine

Graham / / edjercashun, Responsibility

The BBC micro:bit is a tool for introducing young people to programming. It’s a little embedded computer with a few inputs and a matrix of LEDs for output, as well as some control lines. In principle it’s quite easy to use, I made a 1d6 simulator:

from microbit import *
from random import randint

class Die:
    ONE = Image("00000:"
                "00000:"
                "00900:"
                "00000:"
                "00000")
    TWO = Image("00000:"
                "09000:"
                "00000:"
                "00090:"
                "00000")
    THREE = Image("00000:"
                  "09000:"
                  "00900:"
                  "00090:"
                  "00000")
    FOUR = Image("00000:"
                 "09090:"
                 "00000:"
                 "09090:"
                 "00000")
    FIVE = Image("00000:"
                 "09090:"
                 "00900:"
                 "09090:"
                 "00000")
    SIX = Image("00000:"
                "09090:"
                "09090:"
                "09090:"
                "00000")
    ALL = [ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX]
    @classmethod
    def throw(self):
        return self.ALL[randint(0,5)]


display.show(Die.ALL, delay=100, wait=False, loop=True)

while True:
    if button_a.is_pressed():
        display.show(Die.throw())
    elif button_b.is_pressed():
        display.show(Die.ALL, delay=100, wait=False, loop=True)

Simple (I mean, simple if you know what the word randint means (hint: it means “random integer” as long as you know what an integer is), that programming languages that aren’t Fortran call the first element of an array element zero, even though it’s obviously ONE as far as a die is concerned, and you’re OK with the word classmethod).

Here it is in action: woo! I AER PROGRAMMER!!!

And here’s the litany of things I did to get there:

  • I opened the “details.txt” file on the micro:bit, which tells me a load of build numbers and flash dates. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that. This is hard.
  • I opened the “microbit.html” file on the micro:bit, which redirects me to microbit.co.uk, which tells me that as part of the BBC’s restructuring of its online content, I will be redirected to microbit.org. I decided this was probably OK, and ended up looking at the same site but with a different URL (whatever one of those is).
  • I clicked on the introductory video and was told that I need an Adobe Flash Player, whatever one of those is.
  • I eventually found enough buttons to find a website that is a python editor that lets me write code for my micro:bit, and a tutorial for writing Python for the micro:bit. I know what a python is, but do not know why I would want a snake for my micro:bit.
  • The tutorial tells me to use a thing called a “mu”, which is apparently not the website python editor but is another python editor. I do not know what a mu is, but I must download it.
  • There are three different download buttons, depending on whether I have a Windows, a Mac, or a Linux, whatever they are.
  • If I have a Windows, then I to enable the REPL (whatever that is) I must download a serial driver (whatever that is).
  • The driver site tells me that if I have a Windows 10 (whatever that is), then I should not download the serial driver.
  • If I have a Mac, then the first time (but maybe not other times, that’s not clear) I open the mu I have to right click it.
  • If I have a Linux, then I must chmod u+x the mu and make sure my user (isn’t that me?) is in the dialout (whatever that is) group (whatever that is).
  • Now I can write my python. To put it on the micro:bit, I must “flash” it. I guess that is because I have an Adobe Flash Player from earlier.
  • The micro:bit shows me helpful messages when I get something wrong. It scrolls the message “id=41 SyntaxError: invalid syntax” when I flash my python. I do not know what this means, but I was told that it’s helpful. Therefore I am stupid.

I am not singling out the BBC, the micro:bit makers, the mu creators, Microsoft, or any of the other individuals or organisations involved with creating this easy-to-use educational environment. This is fine. This is how computers work, nay this is how computers work when we are making it easy to work them. This is our industry.

To quote Freddie Mercury: is this the world we created? We made it on our own. Is this the world we devastated, right to the bone? If there’s a God in the sky looking down what can he think of what we’ve done to the world that we created?

On the extremes of computer science

Graham / / advancement of the self, edjercashun, learning

I didn’t study computer science at school or university, and still manage to work as a programmer.

That is not to say that I don’t need to know some things that are taught on computer science courses. Just this week I’ve had to build a couple of different data structures and understand their running time: very CS.

I’ve also needed to know things that aren’t on a CS degree, too. The acceptance criteria for one of my projects are written in French, and none of the CS courses I’ve seen in UK universities include that in the syllabus.

I’m neither arguing for nor against the validity of a CS background in professional software development. I’m arguing against taking either side. You need to know some CS things to write software, you need to know some other things, multiple backgrounds are appropriate and welcome.

“When I had that problem”

Graham / / advancement of the self, edjercashun

A common lie in programming is that every project is new, that no problem has been seen before. This is the reason given for estimates being bad, for plans being bad, for design being bad…for anything other than diving in uninformed being bad.

But I’ve noticed that more and more frequently my discussions about problems-technical problems, organisational problems, personal problems-involve the phrase “when I had that problem”. That somebody (and, as time goes on, that’s more frequently me) has seen this problem or one with many similarities before.

It’s time to stop pretending that your UI fronting a database table is up there among the Hilbert problems as one of the big research questions of the 21st century. We have seen that before, or something like it, and we tried things, some of them worked. They probably weren’t the best possible solutions but they were solutions.

Learning phases

Graham / / advancement of the self, edjercashun

I’ve been trying to learn things this week (specifically Haskell). So
far I’ve been through a lot of different moods, and I thought it’d be
handy to write them down so that next time I’m the teacher I can
remember what it’s like to be on the receiving end. I’m not sure I
(and certainly not anyone else) goes through all of these every
time, nor necessarily in the same order which I can’t remember anyway.

Frustration

These symbols all have no meaning to me, what is even going on here?

Atomic comprehension

If this symbol means that, and this symbol means that, then
combining these two must mean…

Holistic comprehension

OK, so this whole thing does this, which means that these parts must
somehow contribute to doing this. Let’s see…

Argument by analogy

Oh, hold on, what they’re saying is exactly like this other thing from
a different area of my experience. I’ll just pretend it’s the same for
the moment.

Paralysis of choice

I have a problem, and I’ve been given a bunch of tools, and I don’t
know which to apply.

All I have is a hammer

Well, I understood how to apply a lambda function to a collection with
map, so I’m going to contort this problem until it looks like I need
to apply a lambda function to a collection with map.

Progress by context

I have no idea what I’m supposed to do here, but I just read a section
on list comprehension so I bet I’m supposed to use [x | x <- xs]
somehow.

Confusion of dissimilarity

I have no idea how to turn that map into a comprehension or vice
versa, but I was able to produce each at different times on the same
day.

Joy of simplicity

You know what, it’s true when they say that if it type-checks, it
probably works.

Disillusion through broken dreams

Oh, off-by-one errors (and rotation of dimensions) still
type-check. This is bullshit.

Reinventing the wheel

So, I need a thing that applies this thing to all those things,
let me write a function applyFunction :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b] that
gives me one of those.

Discovering existing wheels

I have a thing and I need a different thing, let me look in the API
documentation until I find the function that does exactly that.

Rage-quitting

This error makes no sense, screw the entire city of Glasgow.

Rabbit hole tangents

This error makes no sense, but those words look sufficiently rare to
shove into Google. Ooh, three blog posts, a bug report and a PhD
thesis!

Trial and (type) error

This error makes no sense, but it’s telling me line 25 is wrong so
I’ll just rewrite line 25. Again. And again.

Stop! Hammock time

I have no idea how to solve this problem, but it’s
lunchtime. [Om nom nom] Ooh, this problem is trivial.

Minimum Viable Enlightenment

I don’t know what I got wrong, but based on the error message I think
I make this change…yes, that works. I don’t know what I got right.

Law of highfalutin words (I)

I wish someone could explain this to people who didn’t learn the word
“monoid” at school.

Law of highfalutin words (II)

Yes, I can help you with that problem, I just solved it myself. You
see, it becomes easier when you realise that these two things
constitute a monoid.