TODAY:
Let's Get This Straight Sliced off by the cutting edge: Second of two excerpts from Ellen
Ullman's "Close to the Machine"
Elegance and entropy
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Disappearing into the code
Clicking for Godot Working for Bill Apple's Apostates: ____________________ |
[ -- SLICED OFF BY THE CUTTING EDGE | CONTINUED -- ] I learned to program a computer in 1971; my first programming job came in 1978. Since then, I have taught myself six higher-level programming languages, three assemblers, two data-retrieval languages, eight job-processing languages, seventeen scripting languages, ten types of macros, two object-definition languages, sixty-eight programming-library interfaces, five varieties of networks, and eight operating environments -- fifteen, if you cross-multiply the distinct combinations of operating systems and networks. I don't think this makes me particularly unusual. Given the rate of change in computing, anyone who's been around for a while could probably make a list like this. This process of remembering technologies is a little like trying to remember all your lovers: you have to root around in the past and wonder, Let's see. Have I missed anybody? In some ways, my personal life has made me uniquely suited to the technical life. I'm a dedicated serial monogamist -- long periods of intense engagement punctuated by times of great restlessness and searching. As hard as this may be on the emotions, it is a good profile for technology. I've managed to stay in a perpetual state of learning only by maintaining what I think of as a posture of ignorant humility. This humility is as mandatory as arrogance. Knowing an IBM mainframe -- knowing it as you would a person, with all its good qualities and deficiencies, knowledge gained in years of slow anxious probing -- is no use at all when you sit down for the first time in front of a UNIX machine. It is sobering to be a senior programmer and not know how to log on. There is only one way to deal with this humiliation: bow your head, let go of the idea that you know anything, and ask politely of this new machine, "How do you wish to be operated?" If you accept your ignorance, if you really admit to yourself that everything you know is now useless, the new machine will be good to you and tell you: here is how to operate me. Once it tells you, your single days are over. You are involved again. Now you can be arrogant again. Now you must be arrogant: you must believe you can come to know this new place as well as the old -- no, better. You must now dedicate yourself to that deep slow probing, that patience and frustration, the anxious intimacy of a new technical relationship. You must give yourself over wholly to this: you must believe this is your last lover. I have known programmers who managed to stay with one or two operating systems their entire careers -- solid married folks, if you will. But, sorry to say, our world has very little use for them. Learn it, do it, learn another: that's the best way. UNIX programmers used to scoff at COBOL drones, stuck year by year in the wasteland of corporate mainframes. Then, just last year, UNIX became old-fashioned, Windows NT is now the new environment, and it's time to move on again. Don't get comfortable, don't get too attached, don't get married. Fidelity in technology is not even desirable. Loyalty to one system is career-death. Is it any wonder that programmers make such good social libertarians?
Every Monday morning, three trade weeklies come sliding through my mail slot. I've come to dread Mondays, not for the return to work but for these fat loads of newness piled on the floor waiting for me. I cannot possibly read all those pages. But then again, I absolutely must know what's in them. Somewhere in that pile is what I must know and what I must forget. Somewhere, if I can only see it, is the outline of the future. Once a year, I renew my subscription to the Microsoft Professional Developer Network. And so an inundation of CD-ROMs continues. Quarterly, seasonally, monthly, whenever -- with an odd and relentless periodicity -- UPS shows up at my door with a new stack of disks. New versions of operating systems, libraries, tools -- everything you need to know to keep pace with Microsoft. The disks are barely loaded before I turn around and UPS is back again: a new stack of disks, another load of newness. Every month come the hardware and software catalogs: the Black Box networking book, five hundred pages of black-housed components turned around to show the back panel; PCs Compleat, with its luscious just-out laptops; and my favorite, the Programmer's Paradise, on the cover a cartoon guy in wild bathing trunks sitting under a palm tree. He is all alone on a tiny desert island but he is happy: he is surrounded by boxes of the latest programming tools. Then there is the Microsoft Systems Journal, a monthly that evangelizes the Microsoft way while handing out free code samples. The Economist, to remind myself how my libertarian colleagues see the world. Upside, Wired, The Red Herring: the People magazines of technology. The daily Times and Wall Street Journal. And then, as if all this periodical literature were not enough, as if I weren't already drowning in information -- here comes the Web. Suddenly, monthly updates are unthinkable, weekly stories laughable, daily postings almost passé. "If you aren't updating three times a day, you're not realizing the potential of the medium," said one pundit, complaining about an on-line journal that was refreshing its content -- shocking! -- only once a day. There was a time when all this newness was exhilarating. I would pore over the trade weeklies, tearing out pages, saving the clips in great messy piles. I ate my meals reading catalogs. I pestered nice young men taking orders on the other end of 800 phone lines; I learned their names and they mine. A manual for a new programming tool would call out to me like a fussy, rustling baby from inside its wrapping. What has happened to me that I just feel tired? The weeklies come, and I barely flip the pages before throwing them on the recycle pile. The new catalogs come and I just put them on the shelf. The invoice for the Professional Developer Subscription just came from Microsoft: I'm thinking of doing the unthinkable and not renewing. I'm watching the great, spinning, cutting edge slice away from me -- and I'm just watching. I'm almost fascinated by my own self-destructiveness. I know the longer I do nothing, the harder it will be to get back. Technologic time is accelerated, like the lives of very large dogs: six months of inattention might as well be years. Yet I'm doing nothing anyway. For the first time in nineteen years, the new has no hold on me. This terrifies me. It also makes me feel buoyant and light. Ellen Ullman is a software engineer who lives in San Francisco and writes about her profession. DISAPPEARING INTO THE CODE:
AND ELEGANCE AND ENTROPY: ELLEN ULLMAN Come to Table Talk's Digital Culture discussion area and tell your tale of the programming life -- or post your reactions to Ellen Ullman's book. |
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