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A L S O__T O D A Y
- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Should companies be allowed to track their employees' Web surfing? Weigh in on employee privacy vs. corporate rights in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y The dumbing-down of programming Maximum confusion
Let's Get This Straight Wired nests with Condé Nast Let's Get
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THE DUMBING-DOWN OF PROGRAMMING | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Linux won't recognize my CD-ROM drive. I'm using what should be the right boot kernel, it's supposed to handle CD-ROMs like mine, but no: The operating system doesn't see anything at all on /dev/hdc. I try various arcane commands to the boot loader: still nothing. Finally I'm driven back to the HOW-TO FAQs and realize I should have started there. In just a few minutes, I find a FAQ that describes my problem in thorough and knowledgeable detail. Don't let anyone ever say that Linux is an unsupported operating system. Out there is a global militia of fearless engineers posting helpful information on the Internet: Linux is the best supported operating system in the world. The problem is the way the CD-ROM is wired, and as I reach for the screwdriver and take the cover off the machine, I realize that this is exactly what I came for: to take off the covers. And this, I think, is what is driving so many engineers to Linux: to get their hands on the system again. Now that I know that the CD-ROM drive should be attached as a master device on the secondary IDE connector of my orphaned motherboard -- now that I know this machine to the metal -- it occurs to me that Linux is a reaction to Microsoft's consumerization of the computer, to its cutesying and dumbing-down and bulletproofing behind dialog boxes. That Linux represents a desire to get back to UNIX before it was Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX or Sun's Solaris or IBM's AIX -- knowledge now owned by a corporation, released in unreadable binary form, so easy to install, so hard to uninstall. That this sudden movement to freeware and open source is our desire to revisit the idea that a professional engineer can and should be able to do the one thing that is most basic to our work: examine the source code, the actual program, the real and unvarnished representation of the system. I exaggerate only a little if I say that it is a reassertion of our dignity as humans working with mere machine; a return, quite literally, to the source. In an ideal world, I would not have to choose between the extreme polarities of dialog box and source code. My dream system interface would allow me to start hesitantly, unschooled. Then, as I used the facility that distinguishes me from the machine -- the still-mysterious capacity to learn, the ability to do something the second time in a way quite different from the first -- I could descend a level to a smarter, quicker kind of "talk." I would want the interface to scale with me, to follow me as my interest deepened or waned. Down, I would say, and it would let me get my way, however stupid or incomprehensible this seemed to it, a mere program. Up, I could say, so I could try something new or forgotten or lost just now in a moment of my being human, nonlinear, unpredictable.
Once my installation of Linux was working, I felt myself qualified, as a bona fide Linux user, to attend a meeting of the Silicon Valley Linux User's Group. Linus Torvalds, author of the Linux kernel and local godhead, was scheduled to speak. The meeting was to be in a building in the sprawling campus of Cisco Systems. I was early; I took a seat in a nearly empty room that held exactly 200 chairs. By the time Torvalds arrived half an hour later, more than twice that many people had crowded in. Torvalds is a witty and engaging speaker, but it was not his clever jokes that held the audience; he did not cheerlead or sell or sloganize. What he did was a sort of engineering design review. Immediately he made it clear that he wanted to talk about the problem he was just then working on: a symmetrical multiprocessing kernel for Linux. For an hour and a half, the audience was rapt as he outlined the trade-offs that go into writing an operating system that runs on multiple processors: better isolation between processes vs. performance; how many locks would be a good number, not too many to degrade response, not so few to risk one program stepping on the memory area of another; what speed of processor should you test on, since faster processors would tend to minimize lock contention; and so on through the many countervailing and contradictory demands on the operating system, all valid, no one solution addressing all. An immense calm settled over the room. We were reminded that software engineering was not about right and wrong but only better and worse, solutions that solved some problems while ignoring or exacerbating others. That the machine that all the world seems to want to see as possessing some supreme power and intelligence was indeed intelligent, but only as we humans are: full of hedge and error, brilliance and backtrack and compromise. That we, each of us, could participate in this collaborative endeavor of creating the machine, to the extent we could, and to the extent we wished. The next month, the speaker at the Silicon Valley Linux User's Group is Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape. The day before, the source code for Netscape's browser had been released on the Internet, and Andreessen is here as part of the general celebration. The mood tonight is not cerebral. Andreessen is expansive, talks about the release of the source code as "a return to our roots on a personal level." Tom Paquin, manager of Mozilla, the organization created to manage the Netscape source code, is unabashed in his belief that free and open source can compete with the juggernaut Microsoft, with the giants Oracle and Sun. He almost seems to believe that Netscape's release of the source isn't an act of desperation against the onslaught of the Microsoft browser. "Technologists drive this industry," he says, whistling in the dark. "The conventional wisdom is it's all marketing, but it's not." Outside, a bus is waiting to take the attendees up to San Francisco, where a big party is being held in a South of Market disco joint called the Sound Factory. There is a long line outside, backed up almost to the roadway of the Bay Bridge. Andreessen enters, and he is followed around by lights and cameras like a rock star. In all this celebration, for just this one night, it's almost possible to believe that technologists do indeed matter to technology, that marketing is not all, and all we have to do is get the code to the people who might understand it and we can reclaim our technical souls. Meanwhile, Andreessen disappears into a crush of people, lights flash, a band plays loudly and engineers, mostly men, stand around holding beer bottles. Above us, projected onto a screen that is mostly ignored, is what looks like the Netscape browser source code. The red-blue-green guns on the color projector are not well focused. The code is too blurry, scrolling by too quickly, to be read. Ellen Ullman is a software engineer. She is the author of "Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents."
Is programming being "dumbed-down"? Are "easy" programming tools and wizards changing the nature of programming? Is knowledge disappearing into code? Come to Table Talk's Digital Culture area and talk about Ellen Ullman's "The Dumbing-Down of Programming."
Disappearing into the code: A deadline brings programmers to the place of no shame. Excerpt from "Close to the Machine."
Sliced off by the cutting edge: It's impossible for programmers to keep up with every trend even when they're eager and willing. What happens when they despair? Excerpt from "Close to the Machine."
Elegance and entropy: An interview with Ellen Ullman.
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