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Michi Henning on Computing Fallacies
Karma Sucks writes "Check out this summary of a keynote at Linux.conf.au by Michi Henning of CORBA fame. It really hits the nail on several points. I especially liked the point about people constantly rewriting letters in these modern times, as opposed to say 1945 where it just wasn't worth the pain of re-typing a letter. The only point that didn't made sense in this summary was the one about "source code being useless"."
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Fallacy 10: Open Source is the Answer
;)
- Economic model is doubtful
- Source code is useless
- Motivation for Open Source is inappropriate for most software
- Nerd culture is counter-productive
I'd like to see him come here and say that.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Penicillin - 1920's technology
Iowa/Yamoto class battleships - 1920's technology
Apollo moonrockets - 1940's with a dash of 50's
Polio vaccine - 1880's with a dash of 1940's
Transistor - 1930's
Bulk transport system, rail - 1860's
Bulk transport system, car/truck - 1920's
Airplane - 1910's
Fast airplane - 1950's
Yup, makin progress fast.
sPh
> Nerd culture is counter-productive
.. very creative, with a propensity to desire to push boundries. Their influences may not be approrpiate for the masses, but they lay the frame work for those who compute and program (or write pop and rock) to achieve practical purposes. Practical people see no value in thinking outside the boundries of current methods, but are more than happy to stand on the shoulders of those that do (as well it should be.)
Nerds are the computer equivilent of the Enos, the Yoko Onos, the Peter Gabriels
Whats wrong with different people born for different goals? Even if you don't directly contribute the masses, most changes in fundemental social systems (and technical systems) starts with someone rejecting the norm. As well it should be. Leave them alone and let them nerd!
"Old man yells at systemd"
It really hits the nail on several points.
I like my metaphores stirred not mixed.
Fallacy 9: Programming is About Date Structures and Algorithms
I'll agree here, although I see it most in database design. With the advent of such super-fast DBs such as MySQL there has been a FLOOD of horribly written applications that utilizes them. For instance, you'll see every column defined as CHAR( 255 ), or every table prepended with AUTO_INCREMENT columns even when they are not necessary. Indexing is poor or non-existent, and tables are horribly in need of normalization.
Some finer points in design; I see some stuff like this a lot as well:
function bob( varlist ) { $var = $joe + 12345; return $var; }
You're wasting memory and such for the variable declaration and assignment, simply return $joe + 12345;.
Fallacy 12: We are Making Progress
- Progress in quality assurance has been remarkably slow
I used to work in QA for a software company and I wouldn't say that I was the worst programmer there, but I think the problem is that 90% of the QA staff WERE NOT PROGRAMMERS or didn't have access to the source. Basically, QA reports bugs, they go into the queue, and then a developer, if they have the time when compared to all their code development, meetings and such, may have a chance to get to the bug. It would be nice if the QA staff, who may have software programming skills, would be allowed to be developers as well (e.g. all the rights of a developer but QA is their main focus). They attend the same dev meetings and such which gives them the insight to the architecture to allow them to fix bugs which have been approved by management.
So in effect, have two programming teams.
Thanks,
--
Matt
but now is ok for ppl 2 put 42 typos in inrnet msg & hit submitt
Well, that is redundant. But even so, it make me think of the book, "Sex for dummies" which gave me a whole new perspective on RTFM.
Fight Spammers!
From the article:
"The best UI people on the planet are those working in the car industry.
We need to make it a criminal law to change certain API's. There are potentially
huge impacts. When we produce a new drug, we can't just release it to millions of
people without some sort of testing."
yeah, but how long should the testing cycle be? For example, we hear all the time about drugs being recalled because of illnesses caused by its use. Beta testing is a great way to do this, however, even then you can't know until your program is running on a lot of machines in different environments, with different variables.
So, what can you do? Well, you release the software after doing as much testing as possible, and wait to see the results...then patch, patch, patch..which is the way it's being done now. That's why early adopters know (or should know)what they are getting into, and why most of the companies I have dealt with, (running win2k) waited for SP2 to come out before upgrading.
Or, you could establish some sort of body, like the FDA does, that tests the heck out of software for a while before shipping. Problem with that though, is that by the time it is approved, its obsolete.
Other than that, this was a most excellent read.
Sent from your iPad.
If you found some of his earlier points interesting, you may want to read the 1995 book "The trouble with computers" by Tom
Landauer. I think its kind of controversial, but he points out that a lot of the promised and perceived productivity gains due to computers have never come about.
"The only point that didn't made sense in this summary was the one about "source code being useless"."
Source code *is* useless to about 99% of the people that use the program. My aunt Benita isn't going to track down a Microsoft Word bug and fix it even if she HAD the source. She wouldn't care - she'd just wait for the update. So in that context, the source code is useless.
Where the source code does become useful is in the hands of developers, but for users it's just another disk of stuff they get in the package that they'll never use.
----- rL
"Don't write software because 'it's cool'. That only leads to burnout. Write it for money. At least you get something back and don't ruin the market for the rest of us."
Um, no, doing stuff you don't like to do just "for the money" is what leads to burnouts. Nobody ever says "Boy am I burned out playing around carefree...I gotta take a vacation and do some drudgery!". That said, the concepts of *sound design*, *quality*, *maintainability*, *lifespan*, etc., have to be built into the "programming curriculum". I mean, they don't just hand soldiers a bazooka and say "Ok, if you can pull the trigger, you're ready! Off you go!".
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
No, it didn't make much sense...not to someone simply sitting down and reading it. However, if you were to imagine someone standing on a stage, going through slides, making quips or whatnot... Then it makes perfect sense. It reads like a presentation.
As far as source code being useless... Let me ask you - how many times do you actually go through the code itself and change things? I would be willing to bet that most people here simply download, unzip, untar, make, make install and go on with their lives. If this is even 70% true, then actually *having* the source code IS useless. The only reason you have it is so that you can 'make install' to the path of your choosing. That, in and of itself, is not the reason the source code exists.
Having said that, I disagree with his blanket argument. He should have quantified it somewhat, because some people *do* look at the source code. Some people *do* make additions, and some people *do* feel more secure having it available in case something goes awry. I certainly feel more secure knowing that there is a body of peers overlooking every code change that goes into Our Favorite Operating System (tm). Do I use it? Not usually - most of the time I apt-get install [the binary]. But I like having the *option*.
GIR: I'm going to sing the Doom song now. Doom doom doom doom doom doom de-doom doom doom doom doom doom doom...
Girls - don't have sex because 'it's cool'. That only leads to burnout. Do it for money. At least you get something back and don't ruin the market for us whores.
--
E_NOSIG
Nerd culture is counter productive??
Hello?... 'nerds' are the whole impetus behind the electronics industry. Without nerds wanting to show off with faster processors, cooler video boards or better OS's a few billion dollar industries wouldn't exist today.
Hell, Star Wars would have earned $1.50 at the theater without nerds creating the cult that propells it. Nerds created pong on a friggen mainframe just to goof off and sparked the video game industry, quickly gaining as the most widespread form of mass entertainment on the earth.
I am nerd, hear me calculate!
I am somewhat indignant at this remark. I write software because it is useful to me, and because I feel it might be useful to others. I release it as Free Software because I feel the this is the way people will get the most use out of it, and possibly improve it for everyone else, as well.
As for Fallacy 10.2 and 10.4, it's easily shown to be invalid via counterexample. Linux, gcc, XFree86, etc., are all case in point here.
Fallacy 10.3 is my own personal business. Who are you to tell me my motivation is inappropriate? I think the sole desire to make money is an inappropriate motivation. Should I tell you to stop writing software for money? Of course not.
As for F10.1, I consider this highly irrelevant. I don't give two hoots about Open Source or Free Software as an economic model. (In fact, if my Free Software ruins your market, I'd be more than apathetic, I'd be somewhat gleeful. ;-))
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
That's a really interesting summary of what looks like a talk I would have liked to have attended. Of course, a lot of the points were matters of opinion, and I disagree on some of them.
Fallacy 1 (Computing is Easy) I think is spot on. I shudder when I see some of the "For Dummies" titles out there now.
Fallacy 6 (Computers are Getting Faster), I would have to say I disagreed with him on. Sure, my desktop boots slower than my old 386 from 10 years ago. But my Handspring Visor has more memory and boots instantly. Web pages load faster with my DSL connection then they did over my modem (where could you get that 5 years ago?) Most of my compiles are shorter than they were 3 years ago. Sure, people tend to put bloat in, but Moore's law is still wining overall.
This ones really a quibble, but a subpoint of Fallacy 7 asks "How often do you need to do a Fourier transform?" I don't know if it's need per se, but I kind of like some of the music visualizations that use a whole bunch of frequency domain stuff.
One of the subpoints to Fallacy 13 (The Industry Knows where it's going) is
"There haven't been any new ideas in a decade"
My response
"There is no new thing under the sun"
--Ecclesiastes
That said, he certainly seemed to bring up a lot of food for thought. Do you think he'd be willing to do a Slashdot Interview?
Don't write software because 'it's cool'. That only leads to burnout. Write it for money.
Sounds ok, but s/cool/fun and I disagree completely.
Don't do anything just because it's "cool". What kind of person does that? Some mindless MTV wannabee?
OTOH, if it's fun, well, why not do it?
Fun doesn't lead to burnout, it leads to well, children. erm, no, that's something else...
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
Apparently you and I are very different people. I get burned out writing software for money. Writing software that is 'cool', on the other hand, is fun.
At least you get something back and don't ruin the market for the rest of us.
I get something back from my 'cool' software -- reputation and job opportunities. When I want a job with XYZ-Corp, I don't have to make do with just a (mostly unverifiable) resume; I can point them to places on the internet where my code is in use every day, let them download source code of my work and look at it for themselves, and send them the email addresses of my code's happy users. That way they know just what sort of programmer they will get for their money, and I get the job I want.
As for "ruining it for the rest of you", tough shit. I bet you complained about the people in your college classes who set the curve on exams, too.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Cheers,
Ian
Fallacy 1: Computing is Easy
/etc/conf hacker, not someone working in an office relying on Word to get the memo done.
.NET. These are true advances in computing complexity and it is a continuing process.
well, actually it IS easy to learn syntax. This fallacy is just sniping at inexperience. No one teaches you how to write great code, even the greatest C hackers learned their loops one at a time. And, most of the rationale behind spaghetti code nowadays is due to extreme commercial pressure, not any lack of aesthetic sense.
- Teach Yourself C++ in 14 Easy Lessons
- Brain Surgery in 14 Easy Lessons
its completely arrogant to equate Brain surgery to C++. For one thing, lives are not at stake. This analogy is delusional with extreme grandeur.
Fallacy 2: Computers Allow People to Do things They Could Not Do Otherwise
As a matter of fact, they DO empower us. With Word I can do mass mailings in an hour, instead of all day. A great word processor will do a lot of the annoying things like spellcheck and thesaurus and automatic formatting of headings and footnotes and equations - which used to be a severe drain of time. A great spreadsheet lets you analyse numbers with impressive ease - ask any accountant how much the spreadsheet has transformed their parctice. This power of analysis has allowed professionals to actually expand their business instead of being mired down in drudgery.
Fallacy 3: Computers Increase Productivity
yes, they do, if used with discipline. See above. The idiots who waste all day adding sound effects are the same ones who in eth 40's used to while the day way lobbing sharp pencils into the ceiling. Procrastination has evolved with technology but is essentially the same.
the point about typos in letters written in 1945 illustrates the opposite point.
quote: "Nowadays, we rewrite the letter many, many times, changing fonts, format etc.
We are no better off in terms of letters produced."
really? you call a letter produced with no typos, "no better off" ? and all of the ways we can edit documents today, can be done effortlessly. The default templates that come with Word do all of this already. Its only the "power users" who seem to obsess like that, when people who actually use computers daily for their profession simply get the work done.
Fallacy 4: Programs Help Their Users
true, software companies try to ensnare their users. Also true that DVD makers try to snsnare their consumers, that groceries and airlines and car salesmen all use deceptive marketing, schemes, and even planned obsolescence to suck your wallet drier. You shoudl blame capitalism, not computers.
Fallacy 5: If It's Graphical, It's Easy
the vast majority of GUIs make simple tasks much easier. If you think that arcane text codes and comands are easier than just clicking the Underline button, then you're a
with a gui, you dont NEED to be a "sysadmin, programmer, typesetter, etc." to get work DONE. You just get work done. In a CLI you have to be all these things and more.
also, the paperclip has NEVER interrupted me to tell me a joke. Document the allegation!
Fallacy 6: Computers are Getting Faster
yes, they are. NO software I can buy today can really tax my 2 GHZ Pc, not even the most bloated WINXP install. My Pentium DOES boot faster than my old 386, Word loads in a few seconds, my web page is limited by my dial in connection (which i am forced to use because of monopolies and lack of regulation in telecom, not because of any computer issue). Its obvious that a Pentium 4 compiles faster than a 486, and the programs of today have more functionality anyway. EVERYTHING took FAR LONGER 5, 10 years ago.
Hardware is SO FAR AHEAD of software that only Id Siftware can really claim to have tested the metal. And can YOU tell the difference between 100 and 200 fps ? NO! stick your head out of the benchmark app!
Fallacy 7: Programs are Getting Better
Yes they are. True many obscure functionalities are barely used but they are there - and they barely slow things down in todays 2 GHz age.
I dont buy the anecdote about a single hyperlink inflating a 800K document to 2.2 MB. I just tried it myself, but taking 800 K of raw text and pasting it into Word. Then i added a link. The file size difference is negligible, but dont take my word for it, TRY IT YOURSELF! And then stop propagating foolish incendiary lies.
Fallacy 8: Programmers are Getting Better
well, if they all bitch and moan like this, maybe this really is a fallacy. But, I doubt it. Most of teh programmers I know are able to switch between languages and adapt to different environments. Most old time programmers are surgically attached to the Language of Choice for them and will never change. Look at the quality of coding being done on the Linux Kernel, in Oracle's 8i, in Windows'
BTW, ANY student who majors in CS will know what a core dump is, dont be alarmist. Any student who isnt CS, has no reason to know. So what?
the jab about knowing how to write excel memos being a mark of qualification is just arrogant snobbery. And the average retention time is from the dotcom boom, it surely isnt true anymore. YOu have a problem with people cashing in on their skills while they could?
Fallacy 9: Programming is About Date Structures and Algorithms
this is an extremely provincial accusation - probably better to just nod and agree with you rather than set off a religious war.
Agreed that programmers are not taught to design. Well, who taught you? If experience sufficed for you to become a self-declared expert, then it will suffice for others also.
Fallacy 10: Open Source is the Answer
The Answer? The Answer to what? with apologies to DOuglas Adams, first off you better figure out just what the Question is!
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
He claims:
99% of all documents are written to be printed on paper.
Hell, no! 99% of documents (besides programs) I write are emails.
I'm not nitpicking, this is a major flaw in the argument.
I hate Linux and Open Source in general with a passion
/. posts all the more impressive. I mean, you despise Linux, perl, MySQL, and even SlashCode itself. You are surrounded by people who deeply and abidingly disagree with you. And yet you put up with all of this to bring us comments with titles like "erf" and "zerg".
Which makes your 680
I salute you.
--
E_NOSIG
You got it backwards, moron. He's stating the Fallicies, and he states that Open Source is one of them. Good job making an ass of yourself though.
I have to agree somewhat with Fallacy 10
Fallacy 10: Open Source is the Answer
- Economic model is doubtful
- Source code is useless
- Motivation for Open Source is inappropriate for most software
- Nerd culture is counter-productive
It seems like he's trying to make the point that many open source developer's motivation is in the wrong place (making technically interesting, but not useful software), but he does a pretty horrible job conveying that with these bullets.
While there are *some* (I'm not going to make up statistics) who do a pretty horrible job at making useful softwarebecause of poor motivation, there are also plenty of Open Source developers who's contributions to core technologies are VERY underappreciated because they were able to make the technology transparent.
Unfortunately, he begins to make some good points about these issues.
1. He right insofar as source code isn't everything and won't solve everything, but that hardly makes it useless.
2. Yes the economic model is pretty doubtful at this point. Some have made it worked, others haven't. Some do it for profit, others as philanthropists, and others do it to set standards that will benefit a consortium.
Personally, I think he's just beginning to hit the iceberg by pointing out these fallicies that many of us need to address, but he doesn't follow through with supporting arguments. Instead, it's as if he expects us to just "get it" because he "gets it".
Maybe we can expand on his work and fill in some of the holes.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
"Computers Allow People to Do things They Could Not Do Otherwise"
How is this a fallacy??...He cites perhaps the handful of examples in which it may NOT be true, but leaves out the seemingly unending numbers of examples in which it is in fact very true.
- Telephone switching
- All the sophisticated computers running those F16s we see in Afganistan
- Power grid / sewage / water / gas control (in most areas)
- The entire Internet
- The level of visual effects in movies
- Computer and video games
- Thousands of different manufacturing processes that need to be computer controlled to get the level of accuracy needed
- Protein folding research
- and so on...
If you have anything to do with designing any sort of interface to any sort of product (be it a piece of hardware, a piece of software, a widget, whatever), you should read this book. It will open your eyes.
"The only point that didn't made sense in this summary was the one about "source code being useless"
It would have been better, perhaps, to say "for most users, source code is useless."
I remember when I was first getting started, and I head about Open Source. "Hey, cool, I can teach myself to write a word processor!" The truth, though, was that I couldn't. The code to any non-trivial program is going to be very hard to follow if you don't have someone walking you through it, or loads of time to work it through. And that's if you're a programmer. If you aren't, all the source code is good for is taking up space on your hard drive.
Thomas Galvin
While I think many of his fallacies have some truth to them (and I find them amusing), I think that his arguments only apply to business, or more specifically, they DON'T apply to a lot of areas where computers have revolutionized the way people do things, for example, in music composition, graphic design, scientific research, etc. - not to mention communication.
Let's consider Fallacy 2: Computers Allow People to Do things They Could Not Do Otherwise. This is not a fallacy, it's true. As an amateur composer, I can compose and print a piece of music in a tenth of the time it would take me to do by hand. I am not taking advantage of any automatic composition or any silly A.I. technology. I'm just taking about using Finale 2000 to enter in the notes using my MIDI keyboard, edit them quickly with the mouse, and listen to the result through my speakers to make sure I didn't make any musical "typos".
How about scientific research? Scientists now have amazingly powerful tools at their disposal. I know plenty of people who do need to perform a Fourier analysis on a daily basis (see Fallacy 7) and for people like this who are leading experts in Physics but know little about computers, a book like "Learn Matlab in 21 days" is all they need. I agree that you can't become a good DB programmer or QA person by reading a quick book or studing at DeVry, but most people who use computers aren't programmers and don't need to be.
While we were taking about scientific researchers, clearly "Computers are Getting Faster" is NOT a fallacy for them!
Finally, what about the Internet? Yes, the dot-com bubble bursted, but note that all major companies still have websites. It's silly to even consider a company not having one. E-mail definitely allows you to do things that weren't possible (or at least weren't realistic) before, like collaborate on a book or article with someone who lives halfway around the world.
Also, statements like "Programmers are Getting Better" are hard to really analyze. One problem is that there are hundreds of times more programmers now than there were twenty years ago. As a natural consequence, the average level of expertise has gone down a lot. But the best programmers today are a lot better than the best programmers twenty years ago - because they're building off of the best ideas of the last twenty years. And there's no question that even below-average programmers are far more productive today than below-average programmers twenty years ago, simply because there are more high level tools available to them. People who write Visual Basic scripts for internal company programs may be very poor programmers, but if they can get the job done, who cares?
< / RANT >
Sorry. Computers have definitely made my life better, and have enabled me to do many things I never could have done without them, so I get upset when people try to argue that computers suck and that things are basically the same as they were before computers.
It's not counterproductive to have people pushing the envelope, it's counterproductive to have people outside of the mainstream dictating to those in it what their needs are.
Despite advances in UIs, computers are still designed as general-purpose hobby devices, rather than for the specific functions for which the majority of their sales are used. When users complain that it doesn't make sense to have to log in to a system or to "start" a word processor, or to "double-click" to "open" a file through a graphical icon, they're simply told that they don't understand the technology. Same when they have to figure out [to avoid being scammed] what kind of RAM they need with their new P4 processors.
The point is that for products to be useful and effective, they need to be designed with more consideration for the needs of the user; and much of the time, that which is "neat" to enthusiasts has held sway over design at the expense of what would be useful [see featurebloat].
BTW: impractical thinking is not necessarily visionary. It might just be impractical.
Larsal
Michi Henning has given his Computing Fallacies talk several times in various venues in the last few years.
Slides and video from one of these (given on April 18th, 2000) are available here.
He will probably continue to give his talk for many years to come, as it is unlikely things will change much in the short to medium term.
There are good points but I've got a problem with what looks like the unwritten assumptions that programs are all the same and are targetted at the same people. Let's see who uses:
-Word
-Matlab
-Apache
-Linux/Embedded
-AutoCAD
...
While you (should) want to make Word as simple as possible, you want to let Apache users configure everything, you want to let people modify the source to Linux(Embedded) to exactly fit their needs. AutoCAD needs lots of features, but not necessarly source code ('cuz there are less programmers in mec. eng. than ee)
So I'd add fallacy #11: Programs are all the same
-Software management should be done the same way, regardless of the software being produced
-All programs should focus on simplicity, not features
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Money is not the only motivator for people to do work -- even skilled labor. Doctors who work in well-paid jobs in cooshy suburban hospitals routinely donate their efforts to free clinics and programs like Doctors Without Borders. Lawyers take on pro-bono cases for causes they believe in. Programmers write Free software. They all do this not for money, but for personal satisfaction, out of a sense of duty, or to gain experience they wouldn't get in their day jobs. Why do you feel it's appropriate to praise the doctors and lawyers who donate their hard-won professional knowledge to the world, but to deride and ridicule the programmers who do so.
Consider this - a volunteer doctor or lawyer can only help one person at a time, whereas an infinite number of people can benefit from the efforts of a volunteer programmer.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I wonder just how far we've come in automotive technology since the 1950s?
/help documentation.
I mean, the cars don't actually go any faster. The speed limits aren't much higher, and if anything, the increased traffic makes us drive slower. Environmental improvements from catalytic converters and the like are nullified by the increased number of cars producing pollution. We add rear-window wipers and CD players, and instead of buying (or building) a more efficient vehicle we demand (and get) SUVs from every last manufacturer on the planet.
So, are cars actually any better, when any technological improvements are effectively nullified by the people driving them?
Well, yes, they are. Cars are more popular every decade because they're easier to use, cheaper to own, and more comfortable for everyone inside. They may not be "better" from a numerical perspective, but anyone driving a 2002 model right after driving a 1962 model will immediately notice the difference.
Computers are the same way. The faster they get, the more we expect them to do. The more people that use them, the fewer things they are used for. Developers get sloppier about optimization and APIs get changed with every iteration of the OS. It takes longer to start up this year's computer as it did 1979's, and people still do the same basic things with them.
But look at how much they've changed: graphical UIs make it easier for anyone to use a computer, instead of having to know what to type in at a text prompt. WYSIWYG doesn't happen 100% of the time, but 98% is a fair sight better than 0%. I may not get anything more interesting using a cable modem than I could using a 14.4 and a BBS, but at least all the commands are on screen instead of hidden behind a hundred scrolling screens of
So people are using all this computing power for nothing more than playing video poker and typing papers. So what? 90% of the population never needed it to do anything more; at least in 2002, they can do it for a lot less money and with a lot less reading. Companies and users may throw away countless man-hours developing skins and pretty interfaces, but at least they're successful in making computers familiar, comfortable, and desirable to the common man.
And besides, look at all the things we can do with a PC today that we couldn't ten years ago: access millions of pages of esoteric information online. Take photos digitally and organize them on CD-R discs, taking up 1/100th of the space for about the same cost. Listen to a thousand songs from a single digital jukebox, no vinyl or tape required. IM your mom across the continent without spending a penny on long-distance. Order anything from the Sears catalog without having to own the catalog. Find a new job. Locate a special interest group. Print a map. Comparison shop.
Or, just write and print out your resume. But at least nowadays, as with Henry Ford's first cars, you're not stuck with "any color you want, as long as it's black."
Or if you ask me. This guy has a few interesting points and a bunch of useless or fundimentally flawed points.
The one "decent" point is that people spend too much time dicking around with fonts and colors. But that's a problem that doesn't sit on a hard drive - it sits in the chair in front of the computer.
Fallacy 1: Computing is Easy, he shows by pointing out that there are "Teach Yourself" and "for Dummies" books. These are merely titles. He then points out things like "Air Traffic Control for Morons" is silly. Yes, it is, if you're going to be a professional ATC. But then, if you're seeing if you're interested in the field, or possibly getting caught up on a new system, it makes sense. These are industry specific publications - grabbing a copy of New Riders "Essiental Python" won't teach you Python if you've never programmed, but it will get you going quickly if you've done C++, Perl, etc before.
Fallacy 2: Computers Allow People to Do things They Could Not Do Otherwise This is not a fallacy. I don't have a typewriter, lightboard, razors, specialized photography equipment and a printing press. But I've used a multitude of layout programs and a printer, which is far cheaper and quicker to use. The fallacy he *is* showing is the concept of "Software automatically makes me an expert", which is not a common credo at all. In fact, most office workers will activly try to avoid learning new software because they don't understand that that field.
Fallacy 3: Computers Increase Productivity
Walk into an engineering firm or archetect firm and ask them if they want to go back to sketching blueprints. See if most small businesses have a CPA on hire anymore. He says: "It only took five hours to format this memo". If that's the case, the problem sits in the chair, not in the software. Your HR department should take care of that, not IT.
Fallacy 4: Programs Help Their Users Which he then says is a false because they are only focused on upgrades, money and crushing the competition. And yet, later he'll say why open source is useless. Um.
Fallacy 5: If It's Graphical, It's Easy CLI might be more "powerful" in the hands of a skilled user (I won't give mine up), but well done GUIs can be self explanatory (assuming you know the conventions of that UI). Again, he's phrasing this so it is self-fufilling. Of *course* there are lousy graphical interfaces out there. There are also quite a few easy ones. And I think the metaphor of windows is a very very good one in a computing environment when you are moving from task to task constantly (Letter, Email, Check the intranet for some numbers, back to the Email, task list, look up an phone number, make a call, pull up client records and make note, check email, write a letter). For very deticated tasks, it's less useful, but many real world users need to jump around in tasks. Even if it's a spreadsheet and solitare, as a receptionist listed as her "necessary applications".
Fallacy 6: Computers are Getting Faster Computers are getting faster, the experience is not. On my Apple ][, I could turn it on and in a matter of several seconds, be typing in a word processor. But then, it didn't have spell checking, fonts, and I couldn't make a spreadsheet larger than something like 32x64. Humans can only work so quickly, so as long as the computer can keep up, the coders will add new features. There is the issue of "snappiness", but that's a feel issue less than a task speed issue.
"We have come along and destroyed all the gains we have made in hardware" - no, we have leveraged them into more flexability.
Fallacy 7: Programs are Getting Better
He asks how often I make pie charts. Me? Very seldom. But for the guy down the hall who does financial pitches to clients, he really really needs that ability. How often do I embedd live info into a document? Not often - but the guy who manages the intranet does it all the time. How often do I perform a Fourier analysis? Pretty damn often - when I was in college. Had I gone into a different field, I would be stone dead if I couldn't.
His wife was trying to save a 2.2MB for a 2 page Word document on a floppy disk. Plain text, default font, left aligned. There was one email address, underlined. After 17 minutes of searching, he found a way to turn off this email address highlight off. The document was then saved at 800KB.
My comment: Then it wasn't plain text! We all *know* that Word's doc format sucks... so use something else (and yet open source has no advantages in creating sane standards).
Fallacy 9: Programming is About Date Structures and Algorithms
No... Program = Data Structure + Algorithms. Knowing how they work makes you a better programmer. Period. And Michi? I wrote a program using linked lists last week. Some of us do low level code for specific reasons.
Fallacy 10: Open Source is the Answer I agree with this one - again, because he phrased it carefully. Open Source is an answer, not "the" answer.
Fallacy 11: Standards all the Solution Right then, what is Corba?
Fallacy 12: We are Making Progress If you bought the shite at the beginning, I assume this makes sense.
Fallacy 13: The Industry Knows Where it is Goling Name an industry that does know what is in the future. Hell, name a *person* who is certain of the future and is not delusional.
This guy is a twonk, and almost dangerous: The best UI people on the planet are those working in the car industry. And yet people die all the time because the controls for AC and radio are off to the side and different in each car. I get into a new car, and I have to play for a minute to figure out the lights, shifting, etc... and I just forget about things like cruise control unless I'm on a road trip - and then I ask.
And finally, the biggest thing that shows what an idiot this guys is: We have to stop doing things just because they are fun. If you don't enjoy your activities and you aren't pursuing alternate activites, that's a pathalogical condition. You are mentally ill.
Me? I enjoy my profession, *and* do the best damn job I can do to make powerful, easy to use and useful solutions for my users.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
If people who sell software for money want to continue to do so they have exactly one choice: pay the people who are willing to write software for free.
The Harvard model(turning away qualified applicants because you have more applicants than slots to fill) ain't gonna cut it in the world of software. If the software industry expects to sell its wares, it damn well better hire all the qualified applicants.
Elitism will not work. Because if people have the ability and the time, but no job, they will sit around making high quality software and giving it away for free. And that poses quite a little problem if you have a similar product and want to charge for it, now doesn't it?
The current downturn in the computer industry is by far the worst I have ever seen. Ever since I can remember(back to the early 80's when PC's first arrived) the computer industry had always expanded and provided more jobs. Now its experiencing its first real downturn and you have a lot of skilled people without jobs. If those skilled people continue to produce software, but they give it away for free, that spells disaster for software companies who expect to sell their product for money.
Open source software will indeed "catch up" to its commercial equivalents. I give KDE less than five years before it is equivalent or superior in every way to Windows. Same thing with the Open Offices, the databases, the programming languages, etc. The software industry has one choice - start paying open-source programmers or die.
I'm not sure if our current economic model can deal with the situation of high quality products being given away en masse for free. I certainly don't see how the software industry can grow like it did in years past. Since the computer industry has led the economy for the last 20 years prior to the current recession, we may never see a recovery. Unless we revamp our current economic system to deal with the fact that what had previously been leading the economy into prosperity(software) is now being given away for free. Also, on a global scale we have to compete with entire economies of scale(China) that don't pay for software.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Lets run down them quick:
I have no idea what the 'Progress' is at the end. Apparently it's quite different from Progress? I guess I had to be there.
I think the designers should focus on design and let everybody else do their job.
Very very true that we need realistic growth expectations. Especially for startups. I remember an anecdote were AOL had figured a certain growth rate not factoring any sort of slowdown as they reach critical mass. They intened to account for something like 15% of the nations GNP by 2010.
I read the internet for the articles.
Company I work for purchased a system in early 80's. Company was new. Who knew if it would last? This was pretty damned important software. So, the source went into an escrowed safety deposit box. They disappear or file bankruptcy, we get to open the box.
Never had to use it, never wanted to use it. But it was there, and allowed us to pick something other than IBM (way too expensive at the time. Not sure if they even offer a similar product anymore.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
The public benefit of open source and free software has nothing to do with economics. It has everything to do with learning and progress, and free access to source code is the key to advancing past the current stagnant backwater that computer science has become.
Let me explain.
Imagine that you're a young student who wants to become a writer. You ask your teacher, "What do I need to do in order to become a great writer."
Your teacher, if she has a bit of sense about her, will tell you to read all the works that you can, by the best writers, and learn from them. By recreationally reading and studying the works of great writers, as a young person, you will learn to recognize and understand, from experience, what differentiates good writing from bad writing. This is the educational process that, if you are both diligent and lucky, will turn you into a talented writer.
Contrast this advice with the world of computer programming. In the world of software, programs are distributed as object code -- meaning that you can't learn from them by reading them. Plus, they contain "licenses" that proport to deny you the right to study them to learn from them. Any programmer who obtains surreptitious access to some major program's source code is running a serious risk of being unemployable -- as a legal liability.
It is as if our original hypothetical budding author were told:
"If you want to be come a author, you must be sure to never, ever read anyone else's books, especially popular books by great authors. The way to become an author is to wait until you are of college age, then enroll in a two year "writing school", where you will learn grammar and spelling, sentence structure, and then write a series of short essays. For your final project, you will write a single chapter of a book co-authored by the entire class. Once you are completed with this two year course, you will have your degree, and, having only studied textbooks, will be fully qualified and ready to join the workforce as a writer, uncontaminated by exposure to real-world writing experience.
If this were the way we taught writing, then our novels would show the same lack of quality -- and lack of progress as our software does right now!
So how do we fix this problem?
I believe that the answer is to reform copyright law. The current system of closed source, proprietary programming technology -- and the lack of any noticable progress in the craft of programming -- reflects the complete failure of copyright law brought on by the extension of copyright protection to proprietary software.
Patent and Copyright law are supposed to promote progress by placing the best examples of science and technology into the public domain, where they can be studied and learned from. If I want to learn about any physical science or engineering discipline -- if I want to catch up to the current state of the art, all I need do is go to the patent databases and -- right there, are thousands of examples of the latest, real-world scientific technology, written by actual scientists working in actual companies on actual products -- all there for me to study and learn from, and, 17-20 years after disclosure, to freely draw upon and use.
This is the public benefit of the patent system -- the dissemenation of practical engineering and scientific knowledge. This is supposed to be the public benefit of the copyright system. Copyright is supposed to be a tradeoff. Copyright is supposed to provide monopoly benefits in exchange for publication -- public disclosure. This works just fine in the case of natural language writings, because the source code is the product, but not for object code, where the product can only, for all practical purposes, be used -- not studied and learned from.
Copyright law could and should be used to leverage a similar public benefit, however, in the case of software, our legislators have completely missed the point of having copyright in the first place. The purpose of copyright is not to protect authors. The purpose of copyright is to create the next generation of authors -- to "promote progress" -- by encouraging the publication of works.
Imagine an alternate universe in which copyright protection were only afforded to software that was distributed in conjunction with full, buildable source code. Companies would have to choose between copyright protection, and DRM protection, instead of the current dysfunctional system, where they are able to effectively obtain copyrights on works that are at the same time, in effect, trade secrets.
In such an alternate universe, young programmers would start out as computer users. However, if they became curious about how their software worked, they would find the source code to their programs waiting for them.
Like the young, would-be writer with a library full of books, they would have the entire world of software to read, study, analyze, and learn from.
One objection to the source code requirement for copyright protection that I have heard is that it would encourage code theft. If companies distributed the source code to their products, I have heard it said, other companies will steal their work and incorporate it into their own code.
The answer to this objection is that, under such a system, they would not be able to do that because it would be trivially easy to detect such theft. If I were to steal a portion of the Windows source code and add it to my program, then went to market my program, in order to obtain copyright protection, I would be forced to distribute my source code -- with the stolen Windows source code imbedded. Microsoft would discover it and shut me down.
In this way, mandatory disclosure of source code would severely limit, or effectively end the practice of code theft. Who's to say who is stealing code today? It's nearly impossible to tell, when only object code is published.
Fortunately, free software, and to a lesser extent open source software is bridging this gap. Yesterday's young budding software writers had little to work from. The new generation of young software writers -- and I am talking about high-school age students -- have the entire GNU/Linux/Gnome/KDE system to study and learn from. Free software is the only software that earns its copyright. It's the only software that "promotes progress", because it's the only software that can be freely studied by the general public. It's a functional replacement for the public domain that has been lost/destroyed by misguided, failed copyright law.
In other words, just as having access to a library of great books is everything to a young, budding writer, having access to quality, real-world source code is everything to a young, budding programmer.
In a certain sense, it's probably the only thing that really matters.
But, the people that design and position the steering wheels, pedals, shifters, turn signals, gauges and door handles in such a way that *anyone* can go from one car to another without *any* difficulty or re-education
The example I give is this: I once drove a friends car in the dark. I drove it on city streets for close to an hour before I realised the turn signal lever wasn't a lever, but a little switch on the dashborad. However that switch was right where my fingers expeced it to be, and worked just the like the turn signal lever of any other car I ever drove so I didn't know that it was a completely different implimentation!
Unfortunatly not all things are like that. When I drive my dad's truck I often trun the headlights off on a rainy day, his headlights switch is where the whindshield whipers on most cars are.
> Organized religion
:)
He said advance, not regress
When is the last time you thought it necessary to analyze (algorithmically) code that you are writing?
Its far more important to be very good in the programming language you have chosen and its libraries. Knowing how to write quicksort in your latest language is a dead skill - its already been done better by someone else, and added into the SDK.
Heh. I can imagine what that book looks like.
"Teach Yourself C++ in 10 Minutes"
Chapter 1: Minute 1:
First, realize that if you really thought you could learn a programming language in 10 minutes, you're too stupid to be a programmer.
Spend the remaining 9 minutes 40 seconds letting that sink in.
Sucker.
The enemies of Democracy are
So, basically what Michi is saying is that Computer Science isn't having the day-to-day impact that it once did. Advances in data structures and algorithms aren't impacting the development of products like it once did.
Computer Science now gets to join Chemistry, Physics, and Biology as science disciplines that can no longer handle their own engineering. Physicists don't design boilers any more, Chemists don't design refineries, and biologists don't build waste treatment plants. And computer scientists don't build operating systems well.
Enter Software Engineers and Computer Engineers, who get to learn their stuff from the CS boys, but who focus on production, on tradeoff, on integration, on management. Its the engineers that push for legislation, that make sure that you have the education and experience to practice, and build systems that we are willing to call 'infrastructure'.
What people need to clue into is that we have an industry that has hit the point where it needs to split and to recognize those that advance the theory and those that pave the roads.
Fallacy 10: Open Source is the Answer
- Economic model is doubtful
Getting tired of hearing this. a bunch of people start companies using "open sourse" products, have no real business plan, then surprise surprise, they fail and some how open source is the fault. There are companies making money in the open sourse arena. Most companies fail, in any arena.
- Source code is useless
I'd like to see him say that after a vendor goes out of business and he has software that must be fixed, or he goes out of business.
Or the vendor changeed its focus, and since you are tied to them, your company must change the way it does business.
Say a lot of companies get surprised when MS finally discovered the internet, and they change there focus.
- Motivation for Open Source is inappropriate for most software
not sure what he means here. My motivation is 2 fold, improve my programming knowledge, make better code. I fail to see how that inappropriate.
- Nerd culture is counter-productive
yes, we nerds never ever produce anything, or start big companies *coughapplecough*.
Pretty much every large computer company was started because by a nerd.
As a matter of fact a can't think of any.
Xerox was founded by a nerd, Apple, Microsft, IBM, Sun, etc. etc.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on