The Wealth of Applications

Posted on 2014-08-07 by Graham

Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations opens by discussing the division of labour. How people are able to get more done when they each pick a small part of the work to be done and focus on that, trading their results with others to gain access to the common wealth. He goes on to explain that while what people are really trading is labour, it’s hard to think about that so the more comprehensible stand-in of money is used instead.

Smith’s example is a pin factory, where one person might draw out metal into wire, another cut it to length, a third sharpen one end, a fourth flatten the opposite end. He says that there is a

great increase in the quantity of work, which, in consequence of the division of labour, the same number of people are capable of performing

Great, so dividing labour must be a good thing, right? That’s why a totally post-Smith industry like producing software has such specialisations as:

Oh, this argument isn’t going the way I want. I was kindof hoping to show that software development, as much a product of Western economic systems as one could expect to find, was consistent with Western economic thinking on the division of labour. Instead, it looks like generalists are prized.

[Aside: there really are a few limited areas of specialisation, but then generalists co-opt their words to gain by association a share of whatever cachet is associated with the specialists. For example, did you know that writing UNIX applications makes you an embedded programmer? Another specialisation is kernel programming, but it’s easy to find sentiment that it’s just programming too.]

Maybe the conditions for division of labour just haven’t arisen in programming. Returning to Smith, we learn that such division “is owing to three different circumstances”:

  • the increase of dexterity in every particular [worker]

This seems to be true for programmers. There is an idea that programmers are not fungible resources, and that the particular skills and experiences of any individual programmer can be more or less relevant to the problems your team is trying to solve. If all programmers can truly be generalists, then programmers would basically be interchangeable (though some may be faster, or produce fewer defects, than others).

Indeed Harlan Mills proposed that software teams be built around the idea that different people are suited to different roles. The Chief Programmer Team unsurprisingly included a chief programmer, analogous to a surgeon in a medical team. As needed other specialists including a librarian, technical writers, testers, and “language lawyers” (those with expertise in a particular programming language) could be added to support the chief programmer and perform tasks related to their specialities.

  • the saving of time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another

Programmers believe in this, too. We call it, after DeMarco and Lister, flow.

Which leaves only one place in which to look for a difficulty in applying the division of labour, so let’s try that one.

  • to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour

So we could probably divide up the labour of computing if only we could invent machines that could do the computing for us.

Hold on. Isn’t inventing machines what we do? Yet they don’t seem to be “facilitating and abridging labour”, at least not for us. Why is that?

At the technical level, there are two things holding back the tools we create:

  • they’re not always very good. Building your software on top of a tool as a way to save labour is perceived as a lottery: the price is the labour involved in working with or around the tool, and the pay-off is the hope that this is less work than not using the tool.

  • they only really turn computers into other computers, and as such aren’t as great a benefit as one might expect. We’re trying to get to “the computer you have can solve the problem you have”, and we only really have tooling for “the computer you have can be treated the same way as any other computer”. We’re still trying to get to “any computer (including the one you have) can solve the problem you have”.

This last point demonstrates that the criterion of facilitating and abridging labour is partially solved. The goal of moving closer to the end state, where our automated machines help with solving actual problems, seems to have come up a few times (mostly around the 1980s) with no lasting impact: in object-oriented programming, artificial intelligence and computer-aided software engineering; specifically Upper CASE.

Why not close that gap, particularly if there is (or at least has been) both academic and research interest in doing so? We have to leave the technology behind now, and look at the economics of software production. Let’s say that computing technology is in the middle of a revolution analogous to the industrial revolution (partly because Brad Cox already went there so I don’t have to overthink the analogy).

The interesting question is: when will we leave the revolution? The industrial revolution was over when mechanisation was no longer the new, exciting, transformative thing. When the change was over, the revolution was over. It was over when people accepted that machines existed, and factored them into the costs of doing their businesses like staff and materials. When you could no longer count on making a machine as a profitable endeavour in itself: it had to do something. It had to pay for itself.

During the industrial revolution, you could get venture capital just for building a cool-looking machine. You could make money from a machine just by showing it off to people. The bear didn’t have to dance well: it was sufficient that it could dance at all.

We’re at this stage now, in the computer revolution. You can get venture capital just for building a cool-looking website. Finding customers who need that thing can come later, if at all. So we haven’t exited the revolution, and won’t while it’s still possible to get money just for building the thing with no customers.

How is that situation supported? In Smith’s world, the transparent relationship between supply and demand drove the efficiency requirements and thus the division of labour and the creation of machines. You know how many pins you need, and you know that your profits will be greater if you can buy cheaper pins. The pin factory owners know how many employees they have and what wages they need, and know that if they can increase the number of pins made per person-time, they can sell pins for less money and make more profit.

How do supply and demand work in software? Supply exists in bucketloads. If you want software written, you can always find some student who wants to improve their skills or even a professional programmer willing to augment their GitHub profile.

[This leads to another deviation from Adam Smith’s world, but one that can be left for later: he writes

In the advanced state of society, therefore, they are all very poor people who follow as a trade, what other people pursue as a pastime.

This is evidently not true in software, where many people will work for free and others are very well-paid.]

There’s plenty of supply, but the demand question is trickier to answer. In the age of supply, not demand Aurel Kleinerman (via Bob Cringely) suggests that supply is driving demand. That people (this seemingly limitless pool of software labour) are building things, then showing them to people and seeing whether they can find some people who want those things. I think this is true, but also over-simplified.

It’s not that there’s no demand, it’s that the demand is confused. People don’t know what could be demanded, and they don’t know what we’ll give them and whether it’ll meet their demand, and they don’t know even if it does whether it’ll be better or not. This comic strip demonstrates this situation, but tries to support the unreasonable position that the customer is at fault over this.

Just as using a library is a gamble for developers, so is paying for software a gamble for customers. You are hoping that paying for someone to think about the software will cost you less over some amount of time than paying someone to think about the problem that the software is supposed to solve.

But how much thinking is enough? You can’t buy software by the bushel or hogshead. You can buy machines by the ton, but they’re not valued by weight; they’re valued by what they do for you. So, let’s think about that. Where is the value of software? How do I prove that thinking about this is cheaper, or more efficient, than thinking about that? What is efficient thinking, anyway?

Could it be that knowledge work just isn’t amenable to the division of labour? Clearly not: I am not a lawyer. A lawyer who is a lawyer may not be a property lawyer. A lawyer who is a property lawyer may only know UK property law. A lawyer who is a UK property lawyer might only know laws applicable to the sale of private dwellings. And so on: knowledge work certainly is divisible.

Could it be that there’s no drive for increased efficiency? Maybe so. In fact, that seems to be how the consumer economy works: invent things that people want so that they need money so that they need to work so that there are jobs in making the things that people want. If it got too easy to do middle-class work, then there’d be less for the middle class to do, which would mean less middle class spending, which would mean less demand for consumer goods, which would… Perhaps knowledge work needs to be inefficient to support its own economy.

If that’s true, will there ever be a drive toward division of labour in the field of software? Maybe, when the revolution is over and the interesting things to create for their own sake lie elsewhere. When computers are no longer novel technology, but are simply a substrate of industry. When the costs and benefits are sufficiently well-understood that business owners can know what they need, when it’s done, and how much it should cost.

That’ll probably be preceded by another software-led recession, as VCs realise that the startups they’re funding are no longer interesting for their own sake and move on to the (initially much smaller) nascent field of the next revolution. Along with that will come the changes in regulation, liability and insurance as businesses accept that software should “just work” and policy adjusts to support that. With stability comes the drive to reduce costs and increase quality and rate of output, and with that comes the division of labour predicted by Adam Smith.

Posted in economics, futurology | Leave a comment

One decade in

Posted on 2014-08-04 by Graham

The first working week of August 2014 comes ten years after the first working week of August 2004. You knew that. The first working week of August 2004 was the first week since completing my degree that I worked for a living: the start of a sequence of (paid) events that led me to here.

Obviously it’s not the start of the sequence at all, but I’ve already covered that story. It’s not even when I first learned Objective-C: that was about a year earlier. However, stories are easier to tell if they begin once upon a time, rather than in the middle of a collection of events, the connections between which being subtle and hard to examine.

It would be nice to give a recommendation to people who are in the position now that I was ten years ago, but it’s unlikely that the same things that worked back in 2004 are still applicable. Should you want to try, then my suggestion is this: bet your whole career on some apparently minuscule niche, and hope against hope that the only vendor supporting it creates a whole new industry within about four years so that your seemingly poor decision cashes out.

As an aside, you can draw clear lines around the things I was using back then that I’m still using now. Some of the lines are fuzzy: I’m still using “UNIX”, though that doesn’t mean the same thing (nor did it mean then anything that would’ve been recognisable to a user from 1994, 1984 or 1974).

It would perhaps be less nice to give a list of lessons that I claim to have learned over those ten years. Those would, of course, be lessons that I derive now from my recollection of that time, and would mostly serve to add to the corpus of folklore that permeates our field.

Which brings me on to the one thing I unequivocally do know after ten years in [IT, computers, whatever you want to call it]: that I still don’t know a lot. I definitely know more about programming computers than I did then, but that’s only an infinitesimal part of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

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PADDs, not the iPad

Posted on 2014-07-21 by Graham

Alan Kay says that Xerox PARC bought its way into the future by paying lots of money for each computer. Today, you can (almost) buy your way into the future of mobile computers by paying small amounts of money for lots of computers. This is the story of the other things that need to happen to get into the future.

I own rather a few portable computers.

Macs, iPads, Androids and more.

Such a photo certainly puts me deep into a long tail of interwebbedness. However, let me say this: within a couple of decades this photo will look reasonable, for the number of portable computers in one office room. Faster networks will enable more computers in a single location, and that will be an interesting source of future applications.

Here’s the distant future. The people in this are doing something that today’s people do not do so readily.

PADD

One of them is giving his PADD to the other. Is that because PADDs are super-expensive, so everybody has to share them? No: it’s because they’re so cheap, it’s easy to give one to someone who needs the information on it and to print/replicate/fax/magic a new one.

We can’t do that today. Partly it’s because the devices are pretty expensive. But their value isn’t just associated with their monetary worth: they’ve got so many personalisations, account settings and stored credentials on them that the idea of giving an unlocked device to someone else is unconscionable to many people. The trick is not merely to make them cheap, but to make them disposable.

Disposable pad computers also solve another problem: that of how to display multiple views simultaneously on the pad screen.

PADDs

You can go from rearranging metaphorical documents on a metaphorical desktop, back to actually arranging documents on a desktop. Rather than fighting with admittedly ingenious split-screen UI, you can just put multiple screens side by side.

The cheapest tablet computer I’m aware of that’s for sale near me is around £30, but that’s still too expensive. When they’re effectively free, and when it’s as easy to give them away as it is to use them, then we’ll really be living in the future.

Just as it started, this post ends with Xerox PARC, and the inspiration for this post:

Pads are intended to be “scrap computers” (analogous to scrap paper) that can be grabbed and used anywhere; they have no individualized identity or importance.

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The reasonable effectiveness of developer tools

Posted on 2014-07-20 by Graham

In goals upon goals upon goals, I suggested that a fixation on developer tools is misplaced. This is not to say that developer tools are unhelpful, nor that they can’t have a significant impact on our work.

Consider the following, over-restricted, definition of what a programmer does:

A programmer’s responsibility is to turn a computer into a solution to somebody’s problem.

We have plenty of tools designed to stop you having to consider the details of this computer when doing that: assemblers, compilers, device drivers, hardware abstraction layers, virtual machines, memory managers and so on. Then we have tools to speed up aspects of working in those abstractions: build systems, IDEs and the like. And tools that help make sure you moved in the correct direction: testing tools, analysers and the like.

Whether we have tools that help you move from an abstract view of your computer to even an abstract view of your problem depends strongly on your problem domain, and the social norms of programmers in that space. Science is fairly well-supplied, for example, with both commercial and open source tools.

But many developers will be less lucky, or less aware of the tools at their disposal. Having been taken from “your computer…” to “any computer…” by any of a near-infinite collection of generic developer tools, they will then get to “…can solve this problem” by building their own representations of the aspects of the problem. In this sense, programming is still done the way we did it in the 1970s, by deciding what our problem is and how we can model bits of it in a computer.

It’s here, in the bit where we try to work out whether we’re building a useful thing that really solves the problems real people really have, that there are still difficulties, unnecessary costs and incidental complexity. Therefore it’s here where judicious selection and use of tools can be of benefit, as their goals support our goals of supporting our users’ goals.

And that’s why I think that developer tools are great, even while warning against fixating upon them. Fixate on the things that need to be done, then discover (or create) tools to make them faster, better and redundant.

Posted in software-engineering, tool-support | Comments Off on The reasonable effectiveness of developer tools

Goals upon goals upon goals

Posted on 2014-07-15 by Graham

As I read Ed Finkler’s piece on losing excitement in technology, I found myself recognising pieces of my own story. The prospect of a new language or framework no longer seems like a new toy, an excuse to stay up all night studying it, using it and learning its secrets as I would have done a few years ago. Instead I find myself asking what new problems are introduced, whether they’re worth accepting over the devils we know are in our existing tools and how many developer-decades are soon to be lost in reimplementing libraries that have been in CPAN for decades in a new language and delivered via a new packaging system.

Because, as I alluded to when not really talking about Swift and as more eloquently described by Matt Gemmell, our problems do not, for the most part, come from our tools and will not be solved by adding more tools. Indeed a developer’s fixation on their tools will allow the surrounding business, market, legal and social problems to go unchecked. No change of programming language will turn customers who don’t want to pay $0.99 into customers who do want to pay $99. Implicitly unwrapped optionals might catch the occasional bug in development but they just aren’t worth a 100x increase in value to people on the sharp end of our creations.

What will be of benefit to them? I think we’re going to have to go through the software equivalent of the consolidation that the consumer goods industry has already seen in hardware. Remember the introduction to the iPhone?

An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator, these are NOT three separate devices!

Actually it’s none of those things. Well, it is, in that it’s all of those and more. Fundamentally, it’s a honking great handheld control unit with hundreds of buttons on, just like Sony used to make for their TV remotes. One of those buttons will turn it into a phone, one will turn it into an iPod, one will turn it into a web browser, another lets you add other buttons that do other things. They don’t all do their things in the same way, and just to keep things interesting the buttons will arbitrarily change location and design and behaviour every so often. The Sony remotes didn’t do that.

The core experience of an iPhone, or Android phone, or Windows phone—the thing you see when you switch it on and wait long enough—is a launcher. It’s the Program Manager from Windows 3.0, packaged up in a shiny interactive box. Both Program Manager and today’s replacement offer the same promise: you’ve got a feeling that you left a button around here somewhere that probably starts you doing the thing you need to do.

So we still need to make good on the promise that you have just one device, by making that one device act like just one device (preferably one which works properly and does what people expect, which is what I spend a lot of time thinking about and working on). How we get there will be the interesting problem for at least another decade. How our tools support that journey will be a fun sideshow, certainly important but hardly the focus. The tools support the goals that support our goals that support the world’s goals.

Posted in futurology, philosophy after a fashion | Comments Off on Goals upon goals upon goals

Intra-curricular activities

Posted on 2014-07-04 by Graham

I’m apparently fascinated by the idea of defining curricula for learning programming. I’ve written about how we need to be careful what we try to pay forward from the way we learned in the past, and I’ve talked about how we do need to pay it forward so that the second hundred years see faster progress than the first hundred years.

I’m a fan (with reservations, as seen below) of the book series as a form of curriculum. Take something like Kent Beck’s signature series, which covers a decent subset of both technical and social approaches in software development in breadth and in depth. You could probably imagine developers who would benefit from reading some or all of the books in the series. In fact, you may be one.

Coping with people approaching the curriculum from different skill levels and areas of experience is hard. Not just for the book series, it’s hard in general. Universities take the simplifying approach of assuming that everybody wants to learn the same stuff, and teaching that stuff. And to some extent that’s easy for them, because the backgrounds of prospective students is relatively uniform. Even so, my University course organised incoming students into two groups; those who had studied complex numbers at A-level and those who had not. The difference was simply that the group who had not were given a couple of lectures on complex numbers, then it was assumed that they also knew the topic from the fourth week.

Now consider selling a programming book to the public. Part of the proposal process with all of the publishers I’ve worked with has been describing the target audience. Is this a book for people who have never programmed before? For people who have programmed a little, but never used this particular tool or technique? People who have programmed a lot but never used this tool? Is this thing similar to what they have used before, or very different? For people who are somewhat familiar with the tool? For experts (and how is that defined)? Is it for readers comfortable with maths? For readers with no maths background?

Every “no” in answer to one of those questions is an opportunity to improve the experience for a subset of the potential audience by tailoring it to that subset. It’s also an opportunity to exclude a subset of the audience by making the content less relevant to them.

[I’ll digress here to explain how I worked that out for my books: whether it’s selfishness or a failure of empathy, I wrote books that I wanted to read but that didn’t exist. Therefore the expected experience is something similar to mine, back when I filled in the proposal form.]

Clearly no single publication will cover the whole phase space of potential readers and be any good. The interesting question is how much it’s worth covering with multiple publications; whether the idea of series-as-curriculum pulls in the general direction as much as scope-limiting each book pulls in the specific. Should the curriculum take readers on a straight line from novice to master? Should it “fan in” from multiple introductions? Should it “fan out” in multiple directions of interest and enquiry? Would a non-linear curriculum be inclusive or offputtingly confusing? Should the questions really be answered by substituting the different question “how many people would buy that”?

Posted in academia, advancement of the self, books, edjercashun, learning | Comments Off on Intra-curricular activities

Planet of the Apps

Posted on 2014-06-23 by Graham

Scene: in front of a green screen somewhere in the present day. Our protagonist, freshly burned out from a session of writing dynamically-typed web backend code in vim, looks up from the monitor. In the distance, some way along the beach, they see an odd shape poking out of the sand. Their curiosity piqued, they trudge out under the burning sun toward the edifice.

Running a risk of collapsing through dehydration, finally they are close enough to the object to be able to see through the heat haze that it is the top of a large statue that’s largely covered by centuries of detritus. The only discernible features are a hand holding aloft a chorded keyer, and the stern-browed head of Douglas Englebart.

Oh my God, I’m back. I’m home. All the time it was…we finally really did it. YOU MANIACS! OH DAMN YOU! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

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Things I believe

Posted on 2014-06-21 by Graham

The task of producing software is one of choosing and creating constraints, rules and abstractions inside a system which provides very few a priori. Typically we select a large collection of pre-existing constraints, rules and abstractions upon which to base our own: models of computation, programming and deployment environments, everything from the size of the register file to the way in which text is represented on the display is theoretically up for grabs, but we impose limitations in their freedom upon ourselves when we create a new product.

None of these limitations is essential. Many are conventional, and have become so embedded in the cultural practice of making software that it would be expensive or impractical to choose alternative options. Still others have so much rhetoric surrounding them that the emotional cost of change is too great to bear.

So what are these restrictions? Here’s a list of mine. I accept that they don’t all apply to you. I accept that many of them have alternatives. Indeed I believe that all of them have alternatives, and that enumerating them is the first thing that lets me treat them as assumptions to be challenged.

  1. Computers use the same memory for programs and data. I know the alternatives exists but wouldn’t know how to start using them.
  2. Memory is a big blob of uniform storage. Like above, except I know this one isn’t true but that I just ignore that detail.
  3. Memory and bus wires can be in one of two states.
  4. There probably is a free-form hierarchical database available.
  5. There is a thing called a stack and a thing called a heap, and the difference between the two is important.
  6. There is no point trying to do a better job at multiprocessing than the operating system.
  7. There is an operating system.
  8. The operating system, file system, indeed any first system on which my thing is a second system; those first systems are basically interchangeable.
  9. I can buy a faster thing (except in mobile, where I can’t).
  10. Whatever processor you gave me behaves correctly.
  11. Whatever compiler you gave me behaves correctly.
  12. Whatever library you gave me probably behaves correctly.
  13. Text is a poor way to represent a computer program but is the best we have.
  14. The way to write a computer program is to tell the computer what to do.
  15. The goal of the industry for last few decades has been the DynaBook.
  16. I still do not need a degree in computer science.
  17. I should know what my software does before I give it to the people who need to use it.
  18. The universal runtime environment is the C system.
  19. Processors today are basically like faster versions of the MC68000.
  20. Platform vendors no longer see lock-in as a goal, but do see it as a convenient side-effect.
  21. You will look after drawing pictures, playing videos, and making sounds for me.
  22. Types are optional.
Posted in advancement of the self, architecture of sorts | Leave a comment

Wristwatches in the Future

Posted on 2014-06-16 by Graham

[Int: Moscone West convention center third floor ballroom. A presentation is taking place.]

So that was an update on our existing products, which I’m proud to say have never been stronger. Now I’d like to talk to you about our watch. We think you’re gonna love it.

When thinking about recent attempts to make wristwatches by some of our competitors, you’re probably thinking whatever happened to the retina display?

Eliminate Blake

I’ll tell you what happened: you’re looking at it in the wrong size. The pixel density is fine, but the screen’s smaller than it looks on this projector.

Avon Calling!

No, smaller than that.

Ulysse Nardiaaaaaaaaahn!!!!

Hmm, eye strain doesn’t sound like a future thing does it? Shouldn’t we come up with something a bit more ergonomic?

…actually, no, it’s a reasonable compromise. Centuries of user experience research have shown that future people find it most natural to talk into their scaphoid bones. That’s even true when they’re plastic people who don’t actually have scaphoid bones!

Stand by for wrist action!

[Sidenote: No, I will not be apologising for the alt text on that image.]

The technology was originally introduced as part of the struggle to end the Cold War, when one key application was in the unification of Germany.

Rembrandt's Knight Watch.

After seeing how people tried to use these devices, we came up with the breakthrough form factor: five pounds of computer-machined aluminum and an incomprehensible user interface.

This watch is Bullock's.

So that’s the watch. We can’t wait to see what you do with it!

Posted in whatevs | Comments Off on Wristwatches in the Future

Reflections on “Is TDD Dead”

Posted on 2014-06-15 by Graham

The first thing I noticed that I needed to change as a result of watching the Is TDD Dead? series is that I started out with a defensive mindset. If I believe in the dogma of a rule, then presumably I’m still a beginner who hasn’t yet learned that there are other rules, each of which has limited applicability. So lesson one is to practise more, to find the limitations of the techniques I use, and to understand what to do when those limits are met.

An unsurprising aspect of the discussion was that the thing I call TDD is not the thing that others call TDD. At some point recently I got converted to the Mockist school. Part of me (the part that doesn’t value my social life) is inclined to write a second edition of test-driven iOS development but then keep both editions available, because the style will have changed so much between the two.

Anyway it is more germane to note that none of the three speakers has a lot of time for mocks. I need to understand this, the experiences they have had that I have not, and the things that I do not know about mocks. Perhaps they view the sorts of tests that I build as the structural tests that they would delete once the system is working.

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