Knowing and Doing

I sometimes half-jokingly tell my students that, whenever they write a new piece of code, they should have at least two alternatives in mind; that way, at least they know they aren't doing the worst possible thing. (They always laugh.) That's an old Kent Beck line, which I memorialized in a blog post many years ago.

It's part joke because it's cold comfort even to experienced programmers, and because students often don't trust themselves to generate alternatives, let alone evaluate their quality. But it's also quite serious, because it can be the first step novices take on the path to becoming a reflective practitioner.

That old story came to mind obliquely yesterday when I saw this Mastodon post by Kent, which ends with:

Next time you hear, "But we have to make this decision *now*!" ask yourself, "What skills would we need in order to *not* have to make this decision until later? How can we learn those skills?"

This seems to be an instance of a question useful to ask oneself more generally. What data, knowledge, tool, or skill would I need to be able to make this decision later?

We shouldn't fetishize postponing decisions, of course. Looking for a reason to wait to make every decision could become a recipe for not making any decisions. Further, this fetish can paralyze novices, who doubt their own abilities to evaluate choices. They can find themselves in a spiral of infinite postponement.

Fortunately, as long as we don't turn this mindset into a pathology, waiting to make a decision is rarely going to be a speed bump to writing programs. There are always plenty of decisions to make, so being able to delay some is a favorable option to have in hand.

In such a world, there is great value to be found in viewing a seemingly forced decision as an opportunity to learn.

It is almost never good to be in a position of having to make a decision right now, to have no alternatives from which to choose. We shouldn't settle for that condition without doing a little work first.

~~~~

Kent has a knack for making me think more deeply with an aphorism or a simple story. I've always admired that. This post is yet another example.

We can sharpen our tools for other than practical reasons:

I also think that there is a place for sharpening one's tools just for its own sake. Especially as we get older, and our responsibilities increase, anything related to our work can start to feel like a burden. Sometimes even a small amount of time invested in sharpening our tools can bring a bit of joy and restore motivation.
-- Laurence Tratt

I wear my department head hat so many hours a week that sometimes an opportunity to fiddle with my tools is a welcome break. It's not always the most obviously productive use of my time -- with time so precious, shouldn't I use these moments to work on my research project or write Some Serious Code? -- but that bit of joy can sustain me through a lot of dreary time later. That might even make me more productive then. If not? That's okay, too.

~~~~~

Explanations, including documentation for software, really consist of three parts:

Content, then, conveys more than itself. The prefix is reflected in what our explanation takes for granted. The suffix is reflected in what our explanation seems to value; whatever we have today, we'll probably want more tomorrow.
-- Explaining Software Design

When people talk about critical thinking and critical reading, this is what I imagine: As a reader, even of documentation for software, it's worth thinking about what the doc takes for granted and what it says about the values of the writer.

It's also worth thinking about as a writer. This is especially on point as I prepare for the fall semester that looms around the corner. What do my explanations for students take for granted? How will they recognize and deal with what is not written down? What do my explanations say about the things I value, and that I hope they come to value through the course?

~~~~~

The beginning of a new academic year is exciting, and scary, and a lot of work. It's the work we faculty choose to do.

I read one of Tim Bray's recent blog posts this morning and really liked this passage, quoted from a post of his written four years ago:

The observation that computer programmers can build executable abstractions that work but they then have trouble understanding is not new and not surprising. Lots of our code is smarter than we are.

I know this happens to me. I wonder how often something similar happens to my students as they learn techniques and abstractions?

Imagine: They assemble several small pieces of code, each of which they understand individually at least a little, into a bigger program that mostly does what they want — but they have trouble understanding the program as a whole. Further, the size and complexity of the program as a whole makes them begin to doubt their understanding of the individual pieces.

That seems a little far-fetched on its face, but it would explain behavior I see in class all the time. It's a shame when a student who seems to be doing fine begins to lose confidence as the size and complexity of their programs grow. I try to address these growing pains as best I can, but so much of their learning happens away from me, back in their rooms writing code. A few ask for help and stay on track. The ones who don't, struggle and sometimes stop having fun.

If only I can help them see that this is, many ways, the natural order for even the best programmers: We build abstractions that work but which we have trouble understanding.

People like Tim Bray struggle with this, too. You'll be all right.

~~~~~

Wow. I let the entire month of July, and the last ten days of June, pass without posting. That's the first calendar month with a (0) next to it in the blog's archives. My long absence included Knowing and Doing's 20th birthday, July 9, 2004. We should have had a party!

That means July 2024 was the first month of my twenty-first year blogging. Putting up a bagel is not an auspicious start...

I have a few short posts in mind for the coming weeks. Let's see if I can follow through. I like to write here.

One of the downsides of being department head is that much of the daily work I have to do is less interesting to me than studying computer science or writing programs. It's important work, sure, at least most of it, but it's not why I became a computer scientist.

Today, I ended up not doing most of the administrative work I had planned for the day. On the exercise bike this morning, I read the recent Quanta article about a new way to estimate the number of distinct items in a list. My mind craved computing, so I spent some time implementing the algorithm. I still have a bug somewhere, but I'm close.

Any day I get to write code for fun I call a good day. This is important work, too, because it keeps me fresh. I can justify the time practically, because the exercise also gives me raw material for my courses and for research with my undergrads. But the real value is in keeping me alive as a computer scientist.

The good feeling from writing code today is heightened knowing that tomorrow's planned administrative work can't be postponed and is not fun, for tomorrow I must finish up writing annual salary letters. I am fortunate that writing these letters provokes as little stress as possible, because the faculty in my department are all very good and are doing good work. Even so... Salary letters? Ugh.

Thus I take extra pleasure in an absorbing programming process today.

I realized something about myself as a programmer while on a bike ride with my wife this afternoon.

Even though I prefer to write code in small steps and to write tests before (or in parallel with) the code, I have a weakness: If you give me the algorithm for a task in full upfront, and I grok it, I will occasionally implement the entire algorithm upfront, too. Then I end up debugging the program one error at a time, like a caveman.

Today, I succumbed to this tendency without even thinking about it. I am human.

Avdi Grimm sent out an email to one of his lists this week. After describing his daily domestic tasks, which are many, he segues to professional life. I am not a software consultant, but this sounded familiar:

I telepresence into my client team, who I will sit with all day. My title might as well be "mom" here as well; 20% of my contributions leverage my software development career, and the rest of the time I am a source of gentle direction, executive function, organization, and little nudges to stay on target.

There are days when the biggest contribution I make to my students' progress consist of gentle direction and little nudges that have little to do with Racket, programming languages concepts, or compilers. Often what they need most is help staying focused on a given task. Error messages can distract them to the point that they start working on a different problem, when all they really need to do is to figure out what the message means in their specific context. Or encountering an error makes them doubt that they are on the right path, and they start looking for alternative paths, which will only take them farther from a solution.

I don't sit virtually with any students all day, but I do have a few who like to camp out in my office during office hours. They find comfort in having someone there to help them make sense of the feedback they get as they work on code. My function is one part second brain for executive function and one part emotional support. My goal as educator in these encounters is to help them build up their confidence and their thinking habits to the point that they are comfortable working on their own.

I have had colleagues in the past who thought that this kind of work is outside of the role that profs should play. I think, though, that playing this role is one way that we can reach a group of students who might not otherwise succeed in CS at the university level. Almost all of them can learn the material, and eventually they can develop the confidence and thinking habits they need to succeed independently.

So, if being dad or mom for a while helps, I am up for the attempt. I'm glad to know that industry pros like Avdi also find themselves playing this role and are willing to help their clients grow in this way.

In her Conversation with Tyler, scholar Katherine Rundell said something important about the books we give our children:

Children's novels tend to teach the large, uncompromising truths that we hope exist. Things like love will matter, kindness will matter, equality is possible. I think that we express them as truths to children when what they really are are hopes.

This passage immediately brought to mind Marick's Law: In software, anything of the form "X's Law" is better understood by replacing the word "Law" with "Fervent Desire". (More on this law below.)

While comments on different worlds, these two ideas are very much in sync. In software and so many other domains, we coin laws that are really much more expressions of our aspiration. This no less true in how we interact with young people.

We usually think that our job is to teach children the universal truths we have discovered about the world, but what we really teach them is our view of how the world can or should be. We can do that by our example. We can also do that with good books.

But aren't the universal truths in our children's literature true? Sometimes, perhaps, but not all of them are true all of the time, or for all people. When we tell stories, we are describing the world we want for our children, and giving them the hope, and perhaps the gumption, to make our truths truer than we ourselves have been able to.

I found myself reading lots of children's books and YA fiction when my daughters were young: to them, and with them, and on their recommendation. Some of them affected me enough that I quoted them in blog posts. There is so many good books for our youth in the library: honest, relevant to their experiences, aspirational, exemplary. I concur in Rundell's suggestion that adults should read children's fiction occasionally, both for pleasure and "for the unabashed politics of idealism that they have".

More on Marick's Law and Me

I remember posting Marick's Law on this blog in October 2015, when I wanted to share a link to it with Mike Feathers. Brian had tweeted the law in 2009, but a link to a tweet didn't feel right, not at a time when the idealism of the open web was still alive. In my post, I said "This law is too important to be left vulnerable to the vagaries of an internet service, so let's give it a permanent home".

In 2015, the idea that Twitter would take a weird turn, change its name to X, and become a place many of my colleagues don't want to visit anymore seemed far-fetched. Fortunately, Brian's tweet is still there and, at least for now, publicly viewable via redirect. Even so, given the events of the last couple of years, I'm glad I trusted my instincts and gave the law a more home on Knowing and Doing. (Will this blog outlive Twitter?)

The funny thing, though, is that that wasn't its first appearance here. I found the 2015 URL for use in this post by searching for the word "fervent" in my Software category. That search also brought up a Posts of the Day post from April 2009 — the day after Brian tweeted the law. I don't remember that post now, and I guess I didn't remember it in 2015 either.

Sometimes, "Great minds think alike" doesn't require two different people. With a little forgetfulness, they can be Past Me and Current Me.

At some point last week, I found myself pointed to this short YouTube video of Jerry Seinfeld talking with Howard Stern about work habits. Seinfeld told Stern that he was essentially always thinking about making comedy. Whatever situation he found himself in, even with family and friends, he was thinking about how he could mine it for new material. Stern told him that sounded like torture. Jerry said, yes, it was, but...

Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you're comfortable with.

This is something I talk about with students a lot.

Sometimes it's a current student who is worried that CS isn't for them because too often the work seems hard, or boring. Shouldn't it be easy, or at least fun?

Sometimes it's a prospective student, maybe a HS student on a university visit or a college student thinking about changing their major. They worry that they haven't found an area of study that makes them happy all the time. Other people tell them, "If you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life." Why can't I find that?

I tell them all that I love what I do -- studying, teaching, and writing about computer science -- and even so, some days feel like work.

I don't use torture as analogy the way Seinfeld does, but I certainly know what he means. Instead, I usually think of this phenomenon in terms of drudgery: all the grunt work that comes with setting up tools, and fiddling with test cases, and formatting documentation, and ... the list goes on. Sometimes we can automate one bit of drudgery, but around the corner awaits another.

And yet we persist. We have found the drudgery we are comfortable with, the grunt work we are willing to do so that we can be part of the thing it serves: creating something new, or understanding one little corner of the world better.

I experienced the disconnect between the torture I was comfortable with and the torture that drove me away during my first year in college. As I've mentioned here a few times, most recently in my post on Niklaus Wirth, from an early age I had wanted to become an architect (the kind who design houses and other buildings, not software). I spent years reading about architecture and learning about the profession. I even took two drafting courses in high school, including one in which we designed a house and did a full set of plans, with cross-sections of walls and eaves.

Then I got to college and found two things. One, I still liked architecture in the same way as I always had. Two, I most assuredly did not enjoy the kind of grunt work that architecture students had to do, nor did I relish the torture that came with not seeing a path to a solution for a thorny design problem.

That was so different from the feeling I had writing BASIC programs. I would gladly bang my head on the wall for hours to get the tiniest detail just the way I wanted it, either in the code or in the output. When the torture ended, the resulting program made all the pain worth it. Then I'd tackle a new problem, and it started again.

Many of the students I talk with don't yet know this feeling. Even so, it comforts some of them to know that they don't have to find The One Perfect Major that makes all their boredom go away.

However, a few others understand immediately. They are often the ones who learned to play a musical instrument or who ran cross country. The pianists remember all the boring finger exercises they had to do; the runners remember all the wind sprints and all the long, boring miles they ran to build their base. These students stuck with the boredom and worked through the pain because they wanted to get to the other side, where satisfaction and joy are.

Like Seinfeld, I am lucky that I found the torture I am comfortable with. It has made this life a good one. I hope everyone finds theirs.

Alan Kay is fond of saying that object-oriented programming is not about the objects; it's about the messages. He also looks to the biological world for models of how to think about and write computer programs.

This morning I read two things on the exercise bike that brought these ideas to mind, one from the animal kingdom and one from the human sphere.

First was a surprising little article on how an invasive ant species is making it harder for Kenyan lions to hunt zebras, with elephants playing a pivotal role in the story, too. One of the scientists behind the study said:

"We often talk about conservation in the context of species. But it's the interactions which are the glue that holds the entire system together."

It's not just the animals. It's the interactions.

Then came @jessitron reflecting on what it means to be "the best":

And then I remembered: people are people through other people. Meaning comes from between us, not within us.

It's not just the people. It's the interactions.

Both articles highlighted that we are usually better served by thinking about interactions within systems, and not simply the components of system. That way lies a more reliable approach to build robust software. Alan Kay is probably somewhere nodding his head.

The ideas in Jessitron's piece fit nicely into the software analogy, but they mean even more in the world of people that she is reflecting on. It's easy for each of us to fall into the habit of walking around the world as an I and never quite feeling whole. Wholeness comes from connection to others. I occasionally have to remind myself to step back and see my day in terms of the students and faculty I've interacted with, whom I have helped and who have helped me.

It's not (just) the people. It's the interactions.

It's been a long time again between posts. That seems to be the new normal. On top of that, though, teaching web development this fall for the first time has been soaking up all of my free hours in the evenings and over the weekends, which has left me little time to be sad about not blogging. I've certainly been writing plenty of text and a bit of code.

The course started off with a lot of positive energy. The students were excited to learn HTML and CSS. I made a few mistakes in how I organized and presented topics, but things went pretty well. By all accounts, students seemed to enjoy what they were learning and doing.

And then came JavaScript.

Well, along came real computer programming. It could have been Python or some other language, I think, but the transition to writing programs, even short bits of code, took the wind out of the students' excitement.

I was prepared for the possibility that the mood of the course would change when we shifted from CSS to JavaScript. A previous offering of the course had encountered a similar obstacle. Learning to program is a challenge. I'm still not convinced that learning to program is that much harder than a lot of things people learn to do, but it does take time.

As I prepared for the course last summer, I saw so many different approaches to teaching JavaScript for web development. Many assumed a lot of HTML/CSS/DOM background, certainly more than my students had picked up in six weeks. Others assumed programming experience most of my students didn't have, even when the approach said 'no experience necessary!'. So I had to find a middle path.

My main source of inspiration in the first half of the course was David Humphrey's WEB 222 course, which was explicitly aimed at an audience of CS students with programming experience. So I knew that I had to do something different with my students, even as I used his wonderful course materials whenever I could.

My department had offered this course once many years ago, aimed at much the same kind of audience as mine, and the instructor — a good friend — shared all of his materials. I used that offering as a primary source of ideas for getting started with JavaScript, and I occasionally adapted examples for use in my class.

The results were not ideal. Students don't seem to have enjoyed this part of the course much at all. Some acknowledged that to me directly. Even the most engaged students seemed to lose a bit of their energy for the course. Performance also sagged. Based on homework solutions and a short exam, I would say that only one student has achieved the outcomes I had originally outlined for this unit.

I either expected too much or did not do a good enough job helping students get to where I wanted them to be.

I have to do better next time.

But how?

Programming isn't as hard as some people tell us, but most of us can't learn to do it in five or six weeks, at least not enough to become very productive. We don't expect students to master all of CSS or even HTML in such a short time, so we can't expect them to master JavaScript either. The difference is that there seems to be a smooth on-ramp for learning HTML and CSS on the way to mastery, while JavaScript (or any other programming language) presents a steep climb, with occasional plateaus.

For now, I am thinking that the key to doing better is to focus on an even narrower set of concepts and skills.

If people starting from scratch can't learn all of JavaScript in five or six weeks, or even enough to be super-productive, what useful skills can they learn in that time? For this course I trimmed down the set of topics that we might cover in an intro CS considerably, but I think I need to trim even more and — more importantly — choose topics and examples that are even more embedded in the act of web development.

Earlier this week, a sudden burst of thought outlined something like this:

• document.querySelector() to select an element in a page
• simple assignment statements to modify innerText, innerHTML, and various style attributes
• parameterizing changes to an element to create a function
• document.querySelectorAll() to select collections of elements in a page
• forEach to process every element in a collection
• guarded actions to select items in the collection using if statements, without else clauses

That is a lot to learn in five weeks! Even so, it cuts way back on several topics I tried cover this time, such as a more general discussion of objects, arrays, and boolean values, and a deeper look at the DOM. And it eliminates even mentioning several topics altogether:

• if-else statements
• while statements
• counted for loops and, more generally, map-like behavior
• any fiddling with numbers and arithmetic, which are often used to learn assignment statements, if statements, and function

There are so many things a programmer can't do without these concepts, such as writing an indefinite data validation loop or really understanding what's going on in the DOM tree. But trying to cover all of those topics too did not result in students being able to do them either! I think it left them confused, with so many new ideas jumbled in their minds, and a general dissatisfaction at being unable to use JavaScript effectively.

Of course I would want to build hooks into the course for students who want to go deeper and are ready to do so. There is so much good material on the web for people who are ready for more. Providing more enriched opportunities for advanced students is easier than designing learning opportunities for beginners.

Can something like this work?

I won't know for a while. It will be at least a year before I teach this course again. I wish I could teach it again sooner, so that I could try some of my new ideas and get feedback on them sooner. Such is the curse of a university calendar and once-yearly offerings.

It's too late to make any big changes in trajectory this semester. We have only two weeks after the current one-week Thanksgiving break. Next week, we will focus on input forms (HTML), styling (CSS), and a little data validation (HTML+JavaScript). I hope that this return to HTML+CSS helps us end the course on a positive note. I'd like for students to finish with a good feeling about all they have learned and now can do.

Last month, Gus Mueller announced v7.4.3 of his image-editing tool Acorn. This release has a fun little extra built in:

One more super geeky thing I've added is a JavaScript Console:

...

This tool is really meant for folks developing plugins in Acorn, and it is only accessible from the Command Bar, but a part of me absolutely loves pointing out little things like this. I was just chatting with Brent Simmons the other day at Xcoders how you can't really spelunk in apps any more because of all the restrictions that are (justifiably) put on recent MacOS releases. While a console isn't exactly a spelunking tool, I still think it's kind of cool and fun and maybe someone will discover it accidentally and that will inspire them to do stupid and entertaining things like we used to do back in the 10.x days.

I have had JavaScript consoles on my mind a lot in the last few weeks. My students and I have used the developer tools in our browsers as part of my web development course for non-majors. To be honest, I had never used a JavaScript console until this summer, when I began preparing for the course in earnest. REPLs are, of course, a big part of the programming background, from Lisp to Racket to Ruby to Python, so I took to the console with ease and joy. (My past experience with JavaScript was mostly in Node.js, which has its own REPL.) We just started our fourth week studying JavaScript in class, so my students have started getting used to the console. At the outset, it was new to most of them, who have never programmed before. Our attention has now turned to interacting with the DOM and manipulating the content of web page. It's been a lot of fun for me. I'm not sure how it feels for all of my students, though. Many came to the course for web design and really enjoy HTML and CSS. JavaScript, on the other hand, is... programming: more syntax, more semantics, and a lot of new details just to select, say, the third h3 on the page.

Sometimes, you just gotta work over the initial hump to sense the power and fun. Some of them are getting there.

Today I had great fun showing them how to add some simple search functionality to a web page. It was our first big exercise using document.querySelectorAll() and processing a collection of HTML elements. Soon we'll learn about text fields and buttons and events, at which point my The Books of Bokonon will become much more useful to the many readers who still find pleasure in it. Just last night that page got its first modern web styling in the form of a CSS style sheet. For its first twenty-four years of existence, it was all 1990s-era HTML and pseudo-layout using <center>, <hr>, and <br> tags.

Anyway, I appreciate Gus's excitement at adding a console to Acorn, making his tool a place to play as well as work. Spread the joy.

Earlier this week, I posted an item on Mastodon:

After a few months studying and using CSS, every once in a while I am able to change a style sheet and cause something I want to happen. It feels wonderful. Pretty soon, though, I'll make a typo somewhere, or misunderstand a property, and not be able to make anything useful happen. That makes me feel like I'm drowning in complexity.

Thankfully, the occasional wonderful feelings — and my strange willingness to struggle with programming errors — pull me forward.

I've been learning a lot while preparing to teach to our web development course [ 1 | 2 ]. Occasionally, I feel incompetent, or not very bright. It's good for me.

I haven't been blogging lately, but I've been writing lots of words. I've also been re-purposing and adapting many other words that are licensed to be reusable (thanks, David Humphrey and John Davis). Prepping a new course is usually prime blogging time for me, with my mind in a constant state of churn, but this course has me drowning in work to do. There is so much to learn, and so much new material — readings, session plans and notes, examples, homework assignments — to create.

I have made a few notes along the way, hoping to expand them into posts. Today they become part of this post.

VS Code

This is my first time in a long time using an editor configured to auto-complete and do all the modern things that developers expect these days. I figured, new tool, why not try a new workflow...

After a short period of breaking in, I'm quite enjoying the experience. One feature I didn't expect to use so much is the ability to collapse an HTML element. In a large HTML file, this has been a game changer for me. Yes, I know, this is old news to most of you. But as my brother loves to say when he gets something used or watches a movie everyone else has already seen, "But, hey, it's new to me!" VS Code's auto-complete across HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with built-in documentation and links to MDN's more complete documentation, lets me type code much faster than ever before. It made me think of one of my favorite Kent Beck lines:

As the speed of development approaches infinity, reuse becomes irrelevant.

When programming, I often copy, paste, and adapt previous code. In VS Code, I have found myself moving fast enough that copy, paste, and adapt would slow me down. That sort of reuse has become irrelevant.

Examples > Prose

The class sessions for which I have written the longest and most complete notes for my students (and me) tend to be the ones for which I have the fewest, or least well-developed, code examples. The reverse is also true: lots of good examples and code tends to mean smaller class notes. Sometimes that is because I run out of time to write much prose to accompany the session. Just as often, though, it's because the examples give us plenty to do live in class, where the learning happens in the flow of writing and examining code.

This confirms something I've observed over many years of teaching: Examples First tends to work better for most students, even people like me who fancy themselves as top-down thinkers. Good examples and code exercises can create the conditions in which abstract knowledge can be learned. This is a sturdy pedagogical pattern.

Concepts and Patterns

There is so, so much to CSS! HTML itself has a lot of details for new coders to master before they reach fluency. Many of the websites aimed at teaching and presenting these topics quickly begin to feel like a downpour of information, even when the authors try to organize it all. It's too easy to fall into, "And then there's this other property...".

After a few weeks, I've settled into trying to help students learn two kinds of things for each topic:

• a couple of basic concepts or principles
• a few helpful patterns

My challenge is that I am still new enough to modern web design that identifying either in advance is a challenge. My understanding is constantly evolving, so my examples and notes are evolving, too. I will be better next time, or so I hope.

~~~~~

We are only five weeks into a fifteen week semester, so take any conclusions I draw with a grain of salt. We also haven't gotten to JavaScript yet, the teaching and learning of which will present a different sort of challenge than HTML and CSS with students who have little or no experience programming. Maybe I will make time to write up our experiences with JavaScript in a few weeks.

I ran across this blog post earlier this summer when browsing articles on CSS, as one does while learning CSS for a fall course. Near the end, the writer says:

This is thoroughly exciting to me, and I don't wanna whine about improvements in CSS, but it's a bit concerning since I feel like what the web is now capable of is slipping through my fingers. And I guess that's what I'm worried about; I no longer have a good idea of how these things interact with each other, or where the frontier is now.

The map of CSS in my mind is real messy, confused, and teetering with details that I can't keep straight in my head.

Imagine how someone feels as they learn CSS basically from the beginning and tries to get a handle both on how to use it effectively and how to teach it effectively. There is so much there... The good news, of course, is that our course is for folks with no experience, learning the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from the beginning, so there is only so far we can hope to go in fifteen weeks anyway.

My impressions of HTML and CSS at this point are quite similar: very little syntax, at least for big chunks of the use cases, and lots and lots of vocabulary. Having convenient access to documentation such as that available at developer.mozilla.org via the web and inside VS Code makes exploring all of the options more manageable in context.

I've been watching Dave Humphrey's videos for his WEB 222 course at Seneca College and learning tons. Special thanks to Dave for showing me a neat technique to use when learning -- and teaching -- web development: take a page you use all the time and try to recreate it using HTML and CSS, without looking at the page's own styles. He has done that a couple times now in his videos, and I was able to integrate the ideas we covered about the two languages in previous videos as Dave made the magic work. I have tried it once on my own. It's good fun and a challenging exercise.

Learning layout by viewing page source used to be easier in the old days, when pages were simpler and didn't include dozens of CSS imports or thousands of scripts. Accepting the extra challenge of not looking at a page's styles in 2023 is usually the simpler path.

Two re-creations I have on tap for myself in the coming days are a simple Wikipedia-like page for myself (I'm not notable enough to have an actual Wikipedia page, of course) and a page that acts like my Mastodon home page, with anchored sidebars and a scrolling feed in between. Wish me luck.

Last time I posted this passage from Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matthew Crawford:

Countless times since that day, a more experienced mechanic has pointed out to me something that was right in front of my face, but which I lacked the knowledge to see. It is an uncanny experience; the raw sensual data reaching my eye before and after are the same, but without the pertinent framework of meaning, the features in question are invisible. Once they have been pointed out, it seems impossible that I should not have seen them before.

We perceive in part based on what we know. A lack of knowledge can prevent us from seeing what is right in front of us. Our brains and eyes work together, and without a perceptual frame, they don't make sense of the pattern. Once we learn something, our eyes -- and brains -- can.

This reminds me of a line from the movie The Santa Clause, which my family watched several times when my daughters were younger. The new Santa Claus is at the North Pole, watching magical things outside his window, and comments to the elf whose been helping him, "I see it, but I don't believe it." She replies that adults don't understand: "Seeing isn't believing; believing is seeing." As a mechanic, Crawford came to understand that knowing is seeing.

Later in the book, Crawford describes another way that knowing and perceiving interact with one another, this time with negative results. He had been struggling to figure out why there was no spark at the spark plugs in his VW Bug, and his father -- an academic, not a mechanic -- told him about Ohm's Law:

Ohm's law is something explicit and rulelike, and is true in the way that propositions are true. Its utter simplicity makes it beautiful; a mind in possession of this equation is charmed with a sense of its own competence. We feel we have access to something universal, and this affords a pleasure that is quasi-religious, perhaps. But this charm of competence can get in the way of noticing things; it can displace, or perhaps hamper the development of, a different kind of knowledge that may be difficult to bring to explicit awareness, but is superior as a practical matter. It superiority lies in the fact that it begins with the typical rather than the universal, so it goes more rapidly and directly to particular causes, the kind that actually tend to cause ignition problems.

Rule-based, universal knowledge imposes a frame on the scene. Unfortunately, its universal nature can impede perception by blinding us to the particular details of the situation we are actually in. Instead of seeing what is there, we see the scene as our knowledge would have it.

This reminds me of a story and a technique from the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which I first wrote about in the earliest days of this blog. When asked to draw a chair, most people barely even look at the chair in front of them. Instead, they start drawing their idea of a chair, supplemented by a few details of the actual chair they see. That works about as well as diagnosing an engine by diagnosing your mind's eye of an engine, rather than the mess of parts in front of you.

In that blog post, I reported my experience with one of Edwards's techniques for seeing the chair, drawing the negative space:

One of her exercises asked the student to draw a chair. But, rather than trying to draw the chair itself, the student is to draw the space around the chair. You know, that little area hemmed in between the legs of the chair and the floor; the space between the bottom of the chair's back and its seat; and the space that is the rest of the room around the chair. In focusing on these spaces, I had to actually look at the space, because I don't have an image in my brain of an idealized space between the bottom of the chair's back and its seat. I had to look at the angles, and the shading, and that flaw in the seat fabric that makes the space seem a little ragged.

Sometimes, we have to trick our eyes into seeing, because otherwise our brains tell us what we see before we actually look at the scene. Abstract universal knowledge helps us reason about what we see, but it can also impede us from seeing in the first place.

What we know both enables and hampers what we perceive. This idea has me thinking about how my students this fall, non-CS majors who want to learn how to develop web sites, will encounter the course. Most will be novice programmers who don't know what they see when they are looking at code, or perhaps even at a page rendered in the browser. Debugging code will be a big part of their experience this semester. Are there exercises I can give them to help them see accurately?

As I said in my previous post, there's lots of good stuff happening in my brain as I read this book. Perhaps more posts will follow.

With the exception of teaching our database course during the COVID year, I have been teaching a stable pair of courses for the last many semesters: Programming Languages in the spring and our compilers course, Translation of Programming Languages, in the fall. That will change this fall due to some issues with enrollments and course demands. I'll be teaching a course in client-side web development.

The official number and title of the course are "CS 1100 Web Development: Client-Side Coding". The catalog description for the course was written years ago by committee:

Client-side web development adhering to current Web standards. Includes by-hand web page development involving basic HTML, CSS, data acquisition using forms, and JavaScript for data validation and simple web-based tools.

As you might guess from the 1000-level number, this is an introductory course suitable for even first-year students. Learning to use HTML, CSS, and Javascript effectively is the focal point. It was designed as a service course for non-majors, with the primary audience these days being students in our Interactive Digital Studies program. Students in that program learn some HTML and CSS in another course, but that course is not a prerequisite to ours. A few students will come in with a little HTML5+CSS3 experience, but not all.

So that's where I am. As I mentioned, this is one of my first courses to design from scratch in a long time. Other than Database Systems, we have to go back to Software Engineering in 2009. Starting from scratch is fun but can be daunting, especially in a course outside my core competency of hard-core computer science.

The really big change, though, was mentioned two paragraphs ago: non-majors. I don't think I've taught non-majors since teaching my university's capstone 21 years ago -- so long ago that this blog did not yet exist. I haven't taught a non-majors' programming course in even longer, 25 years or more, when I last taught BASIC. That is so long ago that their was no "Visual" in the language name!

So: new area, new content, new target audience. I have a lot of work to do this summer.

I could use some advice from those of you who do web development for a living, who know someone who does, or who are more up to date on the field than I.

Generally, what should a course with this title and catalog description be teaching to beginners in 2023?

Specifically, can you point me toward...

• similar courses with material online that I could learn from?
• resources for students to use as they learn: websites, videos, even books?

For example, a former student and now friend mentioned that the w3schools website includes a JavaScript tutorial which allows students to type and test code within the web browser. That might simplify practice greatly for non-CS students while they are learning other development tools.

I have so many questions to answer about tools in particular right now: Should we use an IDE or a simple text editor? Which one? Should we learn raw JavaScript or a simple framework? If a framework, which one?

This isn't a job-training course, but to the extent that's reasonable I would like for students to see a reasonable facsimile of what they might encounter out in industry.

Thinking back, I guess I'm glad now that I decided to play some around with JavaScript in 2022... At least I now have more context for evaluatins the options available for this course.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please do send them along. Sending email or replying on Mastodon or Twitter all work. I'll keep you posted on what I learn.

The last day of a conference is often a wildcard. If it ends early enough, I can often drive or fly home afterward, which means that I can attend all of the conference activities. If not, I have to decide between departing the next day or cutting out early. When possible, I stay all day. Sometimes, as with StrangeLoop, I can stay all day, skip only the closing keynote, and drive home into the night.

With virtual PyCon, I decided fairly early on that I would not be able to attend most of the last day. This is Sunday, I have family visiting, and work looms on the horizon for Monday. An afternoon talk or two is all I will be able to manage.

Talk 1: A Pythonic Full-Text Search

The idea of this talk was to use common Python tools to implement full-text search of a corpus. It turns out that the talk focused on websites, and thus on tools common to Python web developers: PostgreSQL and Django. It also turns out that django.contrib.postgres provides lots of features for doing search out of the box. This talk showed how to use them.

This was an interesting talk, but not immediately useful to me. I don't work with Django, and I use SQLite more often then PostgreSQL for my personal work. There may be some support for search in django.contrib.sqlite, if it exists, but the speaker said that I'd likely have to implement most of the search functionality myself. Even so, I enjoyed seeing what was possible with modules already available.

Talk 2: Using Python to Help the Unhoused

I thought I was done for the conference, but I decided I could listen in one one more talk while making dinner. This non-technical session sounded interesting:

How a group of volunteers from around the globe use Python to help an NGO in Victoria, BC, Canada to help the unhoused. By building a tool to find social media activity on unhoused in the Capitol Region, the NGO can use a dashboard of results to know where to move their limited resources.

With my attention focused on the Sri Lankan dal with coconut-lime kale in my care, I didn't take detailed notes this time, but I did learn about the existence of Statistics Without Borders, which sounds like a cool public service group that needs to exist in 2023. Otherwise, the project involved scraping Twitter as a source of data about the needs of the homeless in Victoria, and using sentiment analysis to organize the data. Filtering the data to zero in on relevant data was their biggest challenge, as keyword filters passed through many false positives.

At this point, the developers have given their app to the NGO and are looking forward to receiving feedback, so that they can make any improvements that might be needed.

This is a nice project by folks giving back to their community, and a nice way to end the conference.

~~~~~

I was a PyCon first-timer, attending virtually. The conference talks were quite good. Thanks to everyone who organized the conference and created such a complete online experience. I didn't use all of the features available, but what I did use worked well, and the people were great. I ended up with links to several Python projects to try out, a few example scripts for PyScript and Mermaid that I cobbled together after the talks, and lots of syntactic abstractions to explore. Three days well spent.

Another way that attending a virtual conference is like the in-person experience: you can oversleep, or lose track of time. After a long morning of activity before the time-shifted start of Day 2, I took a nap before the 11:45 talk, and...

Talk 1: Python's Syntactic Sugar

Grrr. I missed the first two-thirds of this talk, which I greatly anticipated, but I slept longer than I planned. My body must have needed more than I was giving it.

I saw enough of the talk, though, to know I want to watch the video on YouTube when it shows up. This topic is one of my favorite topics in programming languages: What is the smallest set of features we need to implement the rest of the language? The speaker spent a couple of years implementing various Python features in terms of others, and arrived at a list of only ten that he could not translate away. The rest are sugar. I missed the list at the beginning of the talk, but I gathered a few of its members in the ten minutes I watched: while, raise, and try/except.

I love this kind of exercise: "How can you translate the statement if X: Y into one that uses only core features?" Here's one attempt the speaker gave:

    try:
        while X:
	    Y
	    raise _DONE
    except _DONE:
        None
 

I was today days old when I learned that Python's bool subclasses int, that True == 1, and that False == 0. That bit of knowledge was worth interrupting my nap to catch the end of the talk. Even better, this talk was based on a series of blog posts. Video is okay, but I love to read and play with ideas in written form. This series vaults to the top of my reading list for the coming days.

Talk 2: Subclassing, Composition, Python, and You

Okay, so this guy doesn't like subclasses much. Fair enough, but... some of his concerns seem to be more about the way Python classes work (open borders with their super- and subclasses) than with the idea itself. He showed a lot of ways one can go wrong with arcane uses of Python subclassing, things I've never thought to do with a subclass in my many years doing OO programming. There are plenty of simpler uses of inheritance that are useful and understandable.

Still, I liked this talk, and the speaker. He was honest about his biases, and he clearly cares about programs and programmers. His excitement gave the talk energy. The second half of the talk included a few good design examples, using subclassing and composition together to achieve various ends. It also recommended the book Architecture Patterns with Python. I haven't read a new software patterns book in a while, so I'll give this one a look.

Toward the end, the speaker referenced the line "Software engineering is programming integrated over time." Apparently, this is a Google thing, but it was new to me. Clever. I'll think on it.

Talk 3: How We Are Making CPython Faster -- Past, Present and Future

I did not realize that, until Python 3.11, efforts to make the interpreter had been rather limited. The speaker mentioned one improvement made in 3.7 to optimize the typical method invocation, obj.meth(arg), and one in 3.8 that sped up global variable access by using a cache. There are others, but nothing systematic.

At this point, the talk became mutually recursive with the Friday talk "Inside CPython 3.11's New Specializing, Adaptive Interpreter". The speaker asked us to go watch that talk and return. If I were more ambitious, I'd add a link to that talk now, but I'll let you any of you are interested to visit yesterday's post and scroll down two paragraphs.

He then continued with improvements currently in the works, including:

• efforts to optimize over larger regions, such as the different elements of a function call
• use of partial evaluation when possible
• specialization of code
• efforts to speed up memory management and garbage collection

He also mentions possible improvements related to C extension code, but I didn't catch the substance of this one. The speaker offered the audience a pithy takeaway from his talk: Python is always getting faster. Do the planet a favor and upgrade to the latest version as soon as you can. That's a nice hook.

There was lots of good stuff here. Whenever I hear compiler talks like this, I almost immediately start thinking about how I might work some of the ideas into my compiler course. To do more with optimization, we would have to move faster through construction of a baseline compiler, skipping some or all of the classic material. That's a trade-off I've been reluctant to make, given the course's role in our curriculum as a compilers-for-everyone experience. I remain tempted, though, and open to a different treatment.

Talk 4: The Lost Art of Diagrams: Making Complex Ideas Easy to See with Python

Early on, this talk contained a line that programmers sometimes need to remember: Good documentation shows respect for users. Good diagrams, said the speaker, can improve users' lives. The talk was a nice general introduction to some of the design choices available to us as we create diagrams, including the use of color, shading, and shapes (Venn diagrams, concentric circles, etc.). It then discussed a few tools one can use to generate better diagrams. The one that appealed most to me was Mermaid.js, which uses a Markdown-like syntax that reminded me of GraphViz's Dot language. My students and use GraphViz, so picking up Mermaid might be a comfortable task.

~~~~~

My second day at virtual PyCon confirmed that attending was a good choice. I've seen enough language-specific material to get me thinking new thoughts about my courses, plus a few other topics to broaden the experience. A nice break from the semester's grind.

One of great benefits of a virtual conference is accessibility. I can hop from Iowa to Salt Lake City with the press of a button. The competing cost to virtual conference is that I am accessible ... from elsewhere.

On the first day of PyCon, we had a transfer orientation session that required my presence in virtual Iowa from 10:00 AM-12:00 noon local time. That's 9:00-11:00 Mountain time, so I missed Ned Batchelder's keynote and the opening set of talks. The rest of the day, though, I was at the conference. Virtual giveth, and virtual taketh away.

Talk 1: Inside CPython 3.11's New Specializing, Adaptive Interpreter

As I said yesterday, I don't know Python -- tools, community, or implementation -- intimately. That means I have a lot to learn in any talk. In this one, Brandt Bucher discussed the adaptive interpreter that is part of Python 3.11, in particular how the compiler uses specialization to improve its performance based on run-time usage of the code.

Midway through the talk, he referred us to a talk on tomorrow's schedule. "You'll find that the two talks are not only complementary, they're also mutually recursive." I love the idea of mutually recursive talks! Maybe I should try this with two sessions in one of my courses. To make it fly, I will need to make some videos... I wonder how students would respond?

This online Python disassembler by @pamelafox@fosstodon.org popped up in the chat room. It looks like a neat tool I can use in my compiler course. (Full disclosure: I have been following Pamela on Twitter and Mastodon for a long time. Her posts are always interesting!)

Talk 2: Build Yourself a PyScript

PyScript is a Javascript module that enables you to embed Python in a web page, via WebAssembly. This talk described how PyScript works and showed some of the technical issues in writing web apps.

Some of this talk was over my head. I also do not have deep experience programming in the web. It looks like I will end up teaching a beginning web development course this fall (more later), so I'll definitely be learning more about HTML, CSS, and Javascript soon. That will prepare me to be more productive using tools like PyScript.

Talk 3: Kill All Mutants! (Intro to Mutation Testing)

Our test suites are often not strong enough to recognize changes in our code. The talk introduced mutation testing, which modifies code to test the suite. I didn't take a lot of notes on this one, but I did make a note to try mutation testing out, maybe in Racket.

Talk 4: Working with Time Zones: Everything You Wish You Didn't Need to Know

Dealing with time zones is one of those things that every software engineer seems to complain about. It's a thorny problem with both technical and social dimensions, which makes it really interesting for someone who loves software design to think about.

This talk opened with example after example of how time zones don't behave as straightforwardly as you might think, and then discussed Python's newest time zone library, pytz.

My main takeaways from this talk: pytz looks useful, and I'm glad I don't have to deal with time zones on a regular basis.

Talk 5: Pythonic Functional (iter)tools for your Data Challenges

This is, of course, a topic after my heart. Functional programming is a big part of my programming languages course, and I like being able to show students Python analogues to the Racket ideas they are learning. There was not much new FP content for me here, but I did learn some new Python functions from itertools that I can use in class -- and in my own code. I enjoyed the Advent of Code segment of the talk, in which the speaker applied Python to some of the 2021 challenges. I use an Advent of Code challenge or two each year in class, too. The early days of the month usually feature fun little problems that my students can understand quickly. They know how to solve them imperatively in Python, but we tackle them functionally in Racket.

Most of the FP ideas needed to solve them in Python are similar, so it was fun to see the speaker solve them using itertools. Toward the end, the solutions got heavy quickly, which must be how some of my students feel when we are solving these problems in class.

~~~~~

Between work in the morning and the conference afternoon and evening, this was a long day. I have a lot of new tools to explore.

Last night, I posted on Mastodon:

Heading off to #PyConUS in the morning, virtually. I just took my first tour of Hubilo, the online platform. There's an awful lot going on, but you need a lot of moving parts to produce the varied experiences available in person. I'm glad that people have taken up the challenge.

Why PyCon? I'm not an expert in the language, or as into the language as I once was with Ruby. Long-time readers may recall that I blogged about attending JRubyConf back in 2012. Here is a link to my first post from that conference. You can scroll up from there to see several more posts from the conference.

However, I do write and read a lot of Python code, because our students learn it early and use it quite a bit. Besides, it's a fun language and has a large, welcoming community. Like many language-specific conferences, PyCon includes a decent number of talks about interpreters, compilers, and tools, which are a big part of my teaching portfolio these days. The conference offers a solid virtual experience, too, which makes it attractive to attend while the semester is still going on.

My goals for attending PyCon this year include:

• learning some things that will help me improve my programming languages and compiler courses,
• learning some things that make me a better Python programmer, and
• simply enjoying computer science and programming for a few days, after a long and occasionally tedious year. The work doesn't go away while I am at a conference, but my mind gets to focus on something else -- something I enjoy!

More about today's talks tomorrow.

There are several revised approaches to "what's the deal with the ring?" presented in "The History of The Lord of the Rings", and, as you read through the drafts, the material just ... slowly gets better! Bit by bit, the familiar angles emerge. There seems not to have been any magic moment: no electric thought in the bathtub, circa 1931, that sent Tolkien rushing to find a pen.

It was just revision.

Then:

... if Tolkien can find his way to the One Ring in the middle of the fifth draft, so can I, and so can you.

-- Robin Sloan, How The Ring Got Good

In a recent blog post, Why Grace Matters (for Software Development), Avdi Grimm tells the story of how he came to name his training site "Graceful.Dev". Check it out. This passage resolves into the answer:

You know, the word "grace" is interesting, because it has two different meanings. On the one hand, it means beauty in lines or in motion. But if you were raised with a religious background anything like mine, you know that grace is also something that saves you.

And in that moment on the dance floor, I realized that these two meanings of grace are really one and the same thing. Because grace is something that makes space for you to screw up, and then turns it into something beautiful.

I don't think I was raised in the same religious tradition as Avdi, but I was raised in a tradition that valued deeply the notion of grace. Grace manifest in sacrament was a powerful notion to me, one of the religious ideas I found most compelling as I was growing up.

That's probably why Avdi's realization strikes close to home for me. I carry the idea of grace present in other parts of my life as part of my cultural DNA. His connection of grace to software feels right. "Grace makes space for you to screw up, and then turns it into something beautiful." -- I imagine that many programmers know this feeling, in an non-religious way, if only vaguely.

This line line from Chuck Wendig's post on AI tools and writing:

Hell, it's the thing every writer has heard from some jabroni who tells you, "I got this great idea, you write it, we'll split the money 50/50, boom."

... brought to mind one of my most-read blog posts ever, "I Just Need a Programmer":

As head of the Department of Computer Science at my university, I often receive e-mail and phone calls from people with The Next Great Idea. The phone calls can be quite entertaining! The caller is an eager entrepreneur, drunk on their idea to revolutionize the web, to replace Google, to top Facebook, or to change the face of business as we know it. ...

They just need a programmer. ...

The opening of that piece sounds a little harsh more than a decade later, but the basic premise holds. And, as Wendig notes, it holds beyond the software world. I even once wrote a short follow-up when accomplished TV writer Ken Levine commented on his blog about the same phenomenon in screenwriting.

Some misconceptions are evergreen.

Adding AI to the mix adds a new twist. I do think human execution in telling stories will still matter, though. I'm not yet convinced that the AI tools have the depth of network to replace human creativity.

However, maybe tools such as ChatGPT can be the programmer people need. A lot of folks are putting these tools to good use creating prototypes, and people who know how to program are using them effectively as accelerators. Execution will still matter, but these programs may be useful contributors on the path to a product.

Robin Sloan speculates that language-learning models like ChatGPT have gone through a phase change in what they can accomplish.

AI at this moment feels like a mash-up of programming and biology. The programming part is obvious; the biology part becomes apparent when you see AI engineers probing their own creations the way scientists might probe a mouse in a lab.

Like so many people, I find my social media and blog feeds filled with ChatGPT and LLMs and DALL-E and ... speculation about what these tools mean for (1) the production of text and code, and (2) learning to write and program. A lot of that speculation is tinged with fear.

I admire Sloan's effort to be constructive in his approach to the uncertainty:

I've found it helpful, these past few years, to frame my anxieties and dissatisfactions as questions. For example, fed up with the state of social media, I asked: what do I want from the internet, anyway?

It turns out I had an answer to that question.

Where the GPT-alikes are concerned, a question that's emerging for me is:

What could I do with a universal function — a tool for turning just about any X into just about any Y with plain language instructions?

I admit that I am reacting to these developments slowly compared to many people. That's my style in most things: I am more likely to under-react to a change than to over-react, especially at the onset of the change. In this case, there is no chance of immediate peril, so waiting to see what happens as people use these tools seems like a reasonable reasonable. I haven't made any effort to use these tools actively (or even been moved to), so any speculating I do would be uninformed by personal experience.

Instead, I read as people whose work I respect experiment with these tools and try to make sense of them. Occasionally, I draw a small, tentative conclusion, such as that prompting these generators is a lot like prompting students. After a few months of reading and a little reflection, I still think the biggest risk we face is probably that we tend to change the world around us to accommodate our technologies. If we put these tools to work for us in ways that enhance what we do, then the accommodation will pay off. If not, then we may, as Daniel Steinberg wrote in one of his newsletters, stop asking the questions we want to ask and start asking only the questions these tools can answer.

Professionally, I think most about the effect that ChatGPT and its ilk will have on programming and CS education. In these regards, I've been paying special attention to reports from David Humphrey, such as this blog post on his university's attempt to grapple the widespread availability of these tools. David has approached OpenAI with an open mind and written thoughtfully about the promise and the risk. For example, he has written a lot of code with an LLM assistant and found it improving his ability both to write code and to think about problems. Advanced CS students can benefit from this kind of assistance, too, but David wonders how such tools might interfere with students first learning to program.

What do we educators want from generative programming tools anyway? What do I as a programmer and educator want from them?

So, at this point, my personal interaction with the phase change that Sloan describes has been mostly passive: I read about what others are doing and think about the results of their exploration. Perhaps this post is a guilty conscience asserting that I should be doing more. Really, though, I think of it more as an active form of inaction: an effort to collect some of my thinking as I slowly respond to the changes that are coming. Perhaps some day soon I will feel moved to use of these tools as I write code of my own. For now, though, I am content to watch from the sidelines. You can learn a lot just by watching.

In this episode of Conversations With Tyler, Cowen asks economist Jeffrey Sachs if he agrees with several other economists' bearish views on a particular issue. Sachs says they "have been wrong ... for 20 years", laughs, and goes on to say:

They just got it wrong time and again. They had failed to understand, and the same with [another economist]. It's the same story. It doesn't fit our model exactly, so it can't happen. It's got to collapse. That's not right. It's happening. That's the story of our time. It's happening.

"It doesn't fit our model, so it can't happen." But it is happening.

When your model keeps saying that something can't happen, but it keeps happening anyway, you may want to reconsider your model. Otherwise, you may miss the dominant story of the era -- not to mention being continually wrong.

Sachs spends much of his time with Cowen emphasizing the importance of context in determining which model to use and which actions to take. This is essential in economics because the world it studies is simply too complex for the models we have now, even the complex models.

I think Sachs's insight applies to any discipline that works with people, including education and software development.

The topic of education even comes up toward the end of the conversation, when Cowen asks Sachs how to "fix graduate education in economics". Sachs says that one of its problems is that they teach econ as if there were "four underlying, natural forces of the social universe" rather than studying the specific context of particular problems.

He goes on to highlight an approach that is affecting every discipline now touched by data analytics:

We have so much statistical machinery to ask the question, "What can you learn from this dataset?" That's the wrong question because the dataset is always a tiny, tiny fraction of what you can know about the problem that you're studying.

Every interesting problem is bigger than any dataset we build from it. The details of the problem matter. Again: context. Sachs suggests that we shouldn't teach econ like physics, with Maxwell's overarching equations, but like biology, with the seemingly arbitrary details of DNA.

In my mind, I immediately began thinking about my discipline. We shouldn't teach software development (or econ!) like pure math. We should teach it as a mix of principles and context, generalities and specific details.

There's almost always a tension in CS programs between timeless knowledge and the details of specific languages, libraries, and tools. Most of students don't go on to become theoretical computer scientists; they go out to work in the world of messy details, details that keep evolving and morphing into something new.

That makes our job harder than teaching math or some sciences because, like economics:

... we're not studying a stable environment. We're studying a changing environment. Whatever we study in depth will be out of date. We're looking at a moving target.

That dynamic environment creates a challenge for those of us teaching software development or any computing as practiced in the world. CS professors have to constantly be moving, so as not to fall our of date. But they also have to try to identify the enduring principles that their students can count on as they go on to work in the world for several decades.

To be honest, that's part of the fun for many of us CS profs. But it's also why so many CS profs can burn out after 15 or 20 years. A never-ending marathon can wear anyone out.

Anyway, I found Cowens' conversation with Jeffrey Sachs to be surprisingly stimulating, both for thinking about economics and for thinking about software.

I finally read Rudolf Winestock's 2011 essay The Lisp Curse, which is summarized in one line:

Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp.

It seems to me that Racket and Clojure have overcome the curse. Racket was built by a small team that grew up in academia. Clojure was designed and created by an individual. Yet they are both 100% solutions, not the sort of one-off 80% personal solutions that tend to plague the Lisp world.

But the creators went further: They also attracted and built communities.

The Racket and Clojure communities consist of programmers who care about the entire ecosystem. The Racket community welcomes and helps newcomers. I don't move in Clojure circles, but I see and hear good things from people who do.

Clojure has made a bigger impact commercially, of course. Offering a high level of performance and running on the JVM have their advantages. I doubt either will ever displace Java or the other commercial behemoths, but they appear to have staying power. They earned that status by solving both technical issues and social issues.

Today I received an email message similar to this:

I didn't do very well in my first semester, so I'm looking for ways to do better this time around. Do you have any ideas about study resources or tips for succeeding in CS courses?

As an advisor, I'm occasionally asked by students for advice of this sort. As department head, I receive even more queries, because early on I am the faculty member students know best, from campus visits and orientation advising.

When such students have already attempted a CS course or two, my first step is always to learn more about their situation. That way, I can offer suggestions suited to their specific needs.

Sometimes, though, the request comes from a high school student, or a high school student's parent: What is the best way to succeed as a CS student?

To be honest, most of the advice I give is not specific to a computer science major. At a first approximation, what it takes to succeed as a CS student is the same as what it takes to succeed as a student in any major: show up and do the work. But there are a few things a CS student does that are discipline-specific, most of which involve the tools we use.

I've decided to put together a list of suggestions that I can point our students to, and to which I can refer occasionally in order to refresh my mind. My advice usually includes one or all of these suggestions, with a focus on students at the beginning of our program:

• Go to every class and every lab session. This is #0 because it should go without saying, but sometimes saying it helps. Students don't always have to go to their other courses every day in order to succeed.


• Work steadily on a course. Do a little work on your course, both programming and reading or study, frequently -- every day, if possible. This gives your brain a chance to see patterns more often and learn more effectively. Cramming may help you pass a test, but it doesn't usually help you learn how to program or make software.


• Ask your professor questions sooner rather than later. Send email. Visit office hours. This way, you get answers sooner and don't end up spinning your wheels while doing homework. Even worse, feeling confused can lead you to shying away from doing the work, which gets in the way of #1.


• Get to know your programming environment. When programming in Python, simply feeling comfortable with IDLE, and with the file system where you store your programs and data, can make everything else seem easier. Your mind doesn't have to look up basic actions or worry about details, which enables you to make the most of your programming time: working on the assigned task.


• Spend some of your study time with IDLE open. Even when you aren't writing a program, the REPL can help you! It lets you try out snippets of code from your reading, to see them work. You can run small experiments of your own, to see whether you understand syntax and operators correctly. You can make up your own examples to fill in the gaps in your understanding of the problem.
  
  Getting used to trying things out in the interactions window can be a huge asset. This is one of the touchstones of being a successful CS student.

That's what came to mind at the end of a Friday, at the end of a long week, when I sat down to give advice to one student. I'd love to hear your suggestions for improving the suggestions in my list, or other bits of advice that would help our students. Email me your ideas, and I'll make my list better for anyone who cares to read it.

Someone on Mastodon posted a link to a 2021 survey of how the parsers for major languages are implemented. Are they written by hand, or automated by a parser generator? The answer was mixed: a few are generated by yacc-like tools (some of which were custom built), but many are written by hand, often for speed.

My two favorite notes:

Julia's parser is handwritten but not in Julia. It's in Scheme!

Good for the Julia team. Scheme is a fine language in which to write -- and maintain -- a parser.

Not only [is Clang's parser] handwritten but the same file handles parsing C, Objective-C and C++.

I haven't clicked through to the source code for Clang yet but, wow, that must be some file.

Finally, this closing comment in the paper hit close to the heart:

Although parser generators are still used in major language implementations, maybe it's time for universities to start teaching handwritten parsing?

I have persisted in having my compiler students write table-driven parsers by hand for over fifteen years. As I noted in this post at the beginning of the 2021 semester, my course is compilers for everyone in our major, or potentially so. Most of our students will not write another compiler in their careers, and traditional skills like implementing recursive descent and building a table-driven program are valuable to them more generally than knowing yacc or bison. Any of my compiler students who do eventually want to use a parser generator are well prepared to learn how, and they'll understand what's going on when they do, to boot.

My course is so old school that it's back to the forefront. I just had to be patient.

(I posted the seeds of this entry on Mastodon. Feel free to comment there!)

I'm trying to get back into the habit of writing here more regularly. In the early days of my blog, I posted quick snippets every so often. Here's a set to start 2023.

• Falsework

From A Bridge Over a River Never Crossed:

Funnily enough, traditional arch bridges were built by first having a wood framing on which to lay all the stones in a solid arch (YouTube). That wood framing is called falsework, and is necessary until the arch is complete and can stand on its own. Only then is the falsework taken away. Without it, no such bridge would be left standing. That temporary structure, even if no trace is left of it at the end, is nevertheless critical to getting a functional bridge.

Programmers sometimes write a function or an object that helps them build something else that they couldn't easily have built otherwise, then delete the bridge code after they have written the code they really wanted. A big step in the development of a student programmer is when they do this for the first time, and feel in their bones why it was necessary and good.

• Repair as part of the history of an object

From The Art of Imperfection and its link back to a post on making repair visible, I learned about Kintsugi, a practice in Japanese art...

that treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

I have this pattern around my home, at least on occasion. I often repair my backpack, satchel, or clothing and leave evidence of the repair visible. My family thinks it's odd, but figure it's just me.

Do I do this in code? I don't think so. I tend to like clean code, with no distractions for future readers. The closest thing to Kintsugi I can think of now are comments that mention where some bit of code came from, especially if the current code is not intuitive to me at the time. Perhaps my memory is failing me, though. I'll be on the watch for this practice as I program.

• "It is good to watch the master."

I've been reading a rundown of the top 128 tennis players of the last hundred years, including this one about Pancho Gonzalez, one of the great players of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. He was forty years old when the Open Era of tennis began in 1968, well past his prime. Even so, he could still compete with the best players in the game.

Even his opponents could appreciate the legend in their midst. Denmark's Torben Ulrich lost to him in five sets at the 1969 US Open. "Pancho gives great happiness," he said. "It is good to watch the master."

The old masters give me great happiness, too. With any luck, I can give a little happiness to my students now and then.

My social media feeds are full of ChatGPT screenshots and speculation these days, as they have been with LLMs and DALL-E and other machine learning-based tools for many months. People wonder what these tools will mean for writers, students, teachers, artists, and anyone who produces ordinary text, programs, and art.

These are natural concerns, given their effect on real people right now. But if you consider the history of human technology, they miss a bigger picture. Technologies often eliminate the need for a certain form of human labor, but they just as often create a new form of human labor. And sometimes, they increase the demand for the old kind of labor! If we come to rely on LLMs to generate text for us, where will we get the text with which to train them? Maybe we'll need people to write even more replacement-level prose and code!

As Robin Sloan reminds us in the latest edition of his newsletter, A Year of New Avenues, we redesign the world to fit the technologies we create and adopt.

Likewise, here's a lesson from my work making olive oil. In most places, the olive harvest is mechanized, but that's only possible because olive groves have been replanted to fit the shape of the harvesting machines. A grove planted for machine harvesting looks nothing like a grove planted for human harvesting.

Which means that our attention should be on how programs like GPT-2 might lead us to redesign the world we live and work in better to accommodate these new tools:

For me, the interesting questions sound more like

• What new or expanded kinds of human labor might AI systems demand?
• What entirely new activities do they suggest?
• How will the world now be reshaped to fit their needs?

That last question will, on the timescale of decades, turn out to be the most consequential, by far. Think of cars ... and of how dutifully humans have engineered a world just for them, at our own great expense. What will be the equivalent, for AI, of the gas station, the six-lane highway, the parking lot?

Many professors worry that ChatGPT makes their homework assignments and grading rubrics obsolete, which is a natural concern in the short run. I'm old enough that I may not live to work in a world with the AI equivalent of the gas station, so maybe that world seems too far in the future to be my main concern. But the really interesting questions for us to ask now revolve around how tools such as these will lead us to redesign our worlds to accommodate and even serve them.

Perhaps, with a little thought and a little collaboration, we can avoid engineering a world for them at our own great expense. How might we benefit from the good things that our new AI technologies can provide us while sidestepping some of the highest costs of, say, the auto-centric world we built? Trying to answer that question is a better long-term use of our time and energy that fretting about our "Hello, world!" assignments and advertising copy.

In the essay "On Societies as Organisms", Lewis Thomas says that we "violate science" when we try to read human meaning into the structures and behaviors of insects. But it's hard not to:

Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves. The families of weaver ants engage in child labor, holding their larvae like shuttles to spin out the thread that sews the leaves together for their fungus gardens. They exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.

I'm not sure if humans should be embarrassed for still imitating some of the less savory behaviors of insects, or if ants should be embarrassed for reflecting some of the less savory behaviors of humans.

Biology has never been my forte, so I've read and learned less about it than many other sciences. Enjoying chemistry a bit at least helped keep me within range of the life sciences. I was fortunate to grow up in the Digital Age.

But with many people thinking the 21st century will the Age of Biology, I feel like I should get more in tune with the times. I picked up Thomas's now classic The Lives of a Cell, in which the quoted essay appears, as a brief foray into biological thinking about the world. I'm only a few pages in, but it is striking a chord. I can imagine so many parallels with computing and software. Perhaps I can be as at home in the 21st century as I was in the 20th.

Like so many people, I have been checking out new social media options in the face of Twitter's upheaval. None are ideal, but for now I have focused most of my attention on Mastodon, a federation of servers implemented using the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon has an open API, which makes it attractive to programmers. I've had an account there for a few years (I like to grab username wallingf whenever a new service comes out) but, like so many people, hadn't really used it. Now feels more like the time.

On Friday, I spent a few minutes writing a small script that posts to my Mastodon account from the command line. I occasionally find that sort of thing useful, so the script has practical value. Really, though, I just wanted to play a bit in code and take a look at Mastodon's API.

Several people in my feed posted, boosted, and retweeted a link to this DEV Community article, which walks readers through the process of posting a status update using curl or Python. Everything worked exactly as advertised, with one small change: the Developers link that used to be in the bottom left corner of one's Mastodon home page is now a Development link on the Preferences page.

I've read a lot in the last few weeks about how the culture of Mastodon is different from the culture of Twitter. I'm trying to take seriously the different culture. One concrete example is the use of content warnings or spoiler alerts to hide content behind a brief phrase or tag. This seems like a really valuable practice, useful in a number of different contexts. At the very least, it feels like the Subject: line on an email message or a Usenet News post. So I looked up how to post content warnings with my command-line script. It was dead simple, all done in a few minutes.

There may be efficiency problems under the hood with how Mastodon requests work, or so I've read. The public interface seems well done, though.

I went with Python for my script, rather than curl. That fits better with most my coding these days. It also makes it easier to grow the script later, if I want. bash is great for a few lines, but I don't like to live inside bash for very long. On any code longer than a few lines, I want to use a programming language. At a couple of dozen lines, my script was already long enough to merit a real language. I went mostly YAGNI this time around. There are no classes, just a sequence of statements to build the http request from some constants (server name, authorization token) and command-line args (the post, the content warning). I did factor the server name and authorization token out of the longer strings and include an option to write the post via stdin. I want the flexibility of writing longer toots now, and I don't like magic constants. If I ever need to change servers or tokens, I never have to look past the few first few lines of the file.

As I briefly imagined morphing the small but growing script into a Toot class, I recalled a project I gave my Intermediate Computing students back in 2009 or so: implement the barebones framework of a Twitter-like application. That felt cutting edge back then, and most of the students really liked putting their new OO design and programming skills to use in a program that seemed to matter. It was good fun, and a great playground for so many of the ideas they had learned that semester.

All in all, this was a great way to spend a few minutes on a free afternoon. The API was simple to use, and the result is a usable new command. I probably should've been grading or doing some admin work, but profs need a break, too. I'm thankful to enjoy little programming projects so much.

This weekend, I learned that Kathleen Booth, a British mathematician and computer scientist, invented assembly language. An October 29 obituary reported that Booth died on September 29 at the age of 100. By 1950, when she received her PhD in applied mathematics from the University of London, she had already collaborated on building at least two early digital computers. But her contributions weren't limited to hardware:

As well as building the hardware for the first machines, she wrote all the software for the ARC2 and SEC machines, in the process inventing what she called "Contracted Notation" and would later be known as assembly language.

Her 1958 book, Programming for an Automatic Digital Calculator, may have been the first one on programming written by a woman.

I love the phrase "Contracted Notation".

Thanks to several people in my Twitter feed for sharing this link. Here's hoping that Twitter doesn't become uninhabitable, or that a viable alternative arises; otherwise, I'm going to miss out on a whole lotta learning.

I've been meaning to write a post about my fall compilers course since the beginning of the semester but never managed to set aside time to do anything more than jot down a few notes. Now we are at the end of Week 9 and I just must write. Long-time readers know what motivates me most: a fun program to write in my student's source language!

TFW you run across a puzzle and all you want to do now is write a program to solve it. And teach your students about the process.
-- https://twitter.com/wallingf/status/1583841233536884737

Yesterday, it wasn't a puzzle so much as discovering a new kind of number, Carmichael numbers. Of course, I didn't discover them (neither did Carmichael, though); I learned of them from a Quanta article about a recent proof about these numbers that masquerade as primes. One way of defining this set comes from Korselt:

A positive composite integer n is a Carmichael number if and only if it has multiple prime divisors, no prime divisor repeats, and for each prime divisor p, p-1 divides n-1.

This definition is relatively straightforward, and I quickly imagined am imperative solution with a loop and a list. The challenge of writing a program to verify a number is a Carmichael number in my compiler course's source language is that it has neither of these things. It has no data structures or even local variables; only basic integer and boolean arithmetic, if expressions, and function calls.

Challenge accepted. I've written many times over the years about the languages I ask my students to write compilers for and about my adventures programming in them, from Twine last year through Flair a few years ago to a recurring favorite, Klein, which features prominently in popular posts about Farey sequences and excellent numbers.

This year, I created a new language, Graphene, for my students. It is essentially a small functional subset of Google's new language Carbon. But like it's predecessors, it is something of an integer assembly language, fully capable of working with statements about integers and primes. Korselt's description of Carmichael numbers is right in Graphene's sweet spot.

As I wrote in the post about Klein and excellent numbers, my standard procedure in cases like this is to first write a reference program in Python using only features available in Graphene. I must do this if I hope to debug and test my algorithm, because we do not have a working Graphene compiler yet! (I'm writing my compiler in parallel with my students, which is one of the key subjects in my phantom unwritten post.) I was proud this time to write my reference program in a Graphene-like subset of Python from scratch. Usually I write a Pythonic solution, using loops and variables, as a way to think through the problem, and then massage that code down to a program using a limited set of concepts. This time, I started with short procedural outline:

    # walk up the primes to n
    #   - find a prime divisor p:
    #     - test if a repeat         (yes: fail)
    #     - test if p-1 divides n-1  (no : fail)
    # return # prime divisors > 1

and then implemented it in a single recursive function. The first few tests were promising. My algorithm rejected many small numbers not in the set, and it correctly found 561, the smallest Carmichael number. But when I tested all the numbers up to 561, I saw many false positives. A little print-driven debugging found the main bug: I was stopping too soon in my search for prime divisors, at sqrt(n), due to some careless thinking about factors. Once I fixed that, boom, the program correctly handled all n up to 3000. I don't have a proof of correctness, but I'm confident the code is correct. (Famous last words, I know.)

As I tested the code, it occurred to me that my students have a chance to one-up standard Python. Its rather short standard stack depth prevented my program from reaching even n=1000. When I set sys.setrecursionlimit(5000), my program found the first five Carmichael numbers: 561, 1105, 1729, 2465, and 2821. Next come 6601 and 8911; I'll need a lot more stack frames to get there.

All those stack frames are unnecessary, though. My main "looping" function is beautifully tail recursive: two failure cases, the final answer case checking the number of prime divisors, and two tail-recursive calls that move either to the next prime as potential factor or to the next quotient when we find one. If my students implement proper tail calls -- an optimization that is optional in the course but encouraged by their instructor with gusto -- then their compiler will enable us to solve for values up to the maximum integer in the language, 2³¹-1. We'll be limited only by the speed of the target language's VM, and the speed of the target code the compiler generates. I'm pretty excited.

Now I have to resist the urge to regale my students with this entire story, and with more details about how I approach programming in a language like Graphene. I love to talk shop with students about design and programming, but our time is limited... My students are already plenty busy writing the compiler that I need to run my program!

This lark resulted in an hour or so writing code in Python, a few more minutes porting to Graphene, and an enjoyable hour writing this blog post. As the song says, it was a good day.

From the closing pages from The Orchid Thief, which I mentioned in my previous post:

"The thing about computers," Laroche said, "the thing that I like is that I'm immersed in it but it's not a living thing that's going to leave or die or something. I like having the minimum number of living things to worry about in my life."

Actually, I have two comments.

If Laroche had gotten into open source software, he might have found himself with the opposite problem: software that won't die. Programmers sometimes think, "I know, I'll design and implement my own programming language!" Veterans of the programming languages community always seem to advise: think twice. If you put something out there, other people will use it, and now you are stuck maintaining a package forever. The same can be said for open source software more generally. Oh, and did I mention it would be really great if you added this feature?

I like having plants in my home and office. They give me joy every day. They also tend to live a lot longer than some of my code. The hardy orchid featured above bloomed like clockwork twice a year for me for five and a half years. Eventually it needed more space than the pot in my office could give, so it's gone now. But I'm glad to have enjoyed it for all those years.

Morgan Housel's recent piece on experts trying too hard includes a sentence that made me think of what I teach:

A doctor once told me the biggest thing they don't teach in medical school is the difference between medicine and being a doctor — medicine is a biological science, while being a doctor is often a social skill of managing expectations, understanding the insurance system, communicating effectively, and so on.

Most of the grads from our CS program go on to be software developers or to work in software-adjacent jobs like database administrator or web developer. Most of the rest work in system administration or networks. Few go on to be academic computer scientists. As Housel's doctor knows about medicine, there is a difference between academic computer science and being a software developer.

The good news is, I think the CS profs at many schools are aware of this, and the schools have developed computer science programs that at least nod at the difference in their coursework. The CS program at my school has a course on software engineering that is more practical than theoretical, and another short course that teaches practical tools such as version control, automated testing, and build tools, and skills such as writing documentation. All of our CS majors complete a large project course in which students work in teams to create a piece of software or a secure system, and the practical task of working as a team to deliver a piece of working software is a focus of the course. On top of those courses, I think most of our profs try to keep their courses real for students they know will want to apply what they learn in Algorithms, say, or Artificial Intelligence in their jobs as developers.

Even so, there is always a tension in classes between building foundational knowledge and building practical skills. I encounter this tension in both Programming Languages and Translation of Programming Languages. There are a lot of cool things we could learn about type theory, some of which might turn out to be quite useful in a forty-year career as a developer. But any time we devote to going deeper on type theory is time we can't devote to the concrete languages skills of a software developer, such as learning and creating APIs or the usability of programming languages.

So, we CS profs have to make design trade-offs in our courses as we try to balance the forces of students learning computer science and students becoming software developers. Fortunately, we learn a little bit about recognizing, assessing, and making trade-offs in our work both as computer scientists and as programmers. That doesn't make it easy, but at least we have some experience for thinking about the challenge.

The sentence quoted above reminds me that other disciplines face a similar challenge. Knowing computer science is different from being a software developer, or sysadmin. Knowing medicine is different from being a doctor. And, as Housel explains so well in his own work, knowing finance is different from being an investor, which is usually more about psychology and self-awareness than it is about net present value or alpha ratios. (The current stock market is a rather harsh reminder of that.)

Thanks to Housel for the prompt. The main theme of his piece — that experts makes mistakes that novices can't make, which leads to occasional unexpected outcomes — is the topic for another post.

This past weekend, it was supposed to rain Saturday evening into Sunday, so I woke up with uncertainty about my usual Sunday morning bike ride. My exercise bike broke down a few weeks back, so riding outdoors was my only option. I decided before I went to bed on Saturday night that, if it was dry when I woke up, I would ride a couple of miles to a small lake in town and ride laps in whatever time I could squeeze in between rain showers.

The rain in the forecast turned out to be a false alarm, so I had more time to ride than I had planned. I ended up riding the 2.3 miles to the fifteen 1.2-mile laps, and 2.30 miles back home. Fifteen mile-plus laps may seem crazy to you, but it was the quickest and most predictable adjustment I could make in the face of the suddenly available time. It was like a speed workout on the track from my running days. Though shorter than my usual Sunday ride, it was an unexpected gift of exercise on what turned out to be a beautiful morning.

A couple of laps into the ride, the hill on the far end of the loop began to look look foreboding. Thirteen laps to go... Thirteen more times up an extended incline (well, at least what passes for one in east central Iowa).

After a few more laps, my mindset had changed. Six down. This feels good. Let's do nine more!

I had found the rhythm of doing repeats.

I used to do track repeats when training for marathons and always liked them. (One of my earliest blog entries sang the praises of short iterations and frequent feedback on the track.) I felt again the hit of endorphins every time I completed one loop around the lake. My body got into the rhythm. Another one, another one. My mind doesn't switch off under these conditions, but it does shift into a different mode. I'm thinking, but only in the moment of the current lap. Then there's one more to do.

I wonder if this is one of the reasons some programmers like programming with stories of a limited size, or under the constraints of test-driven design. Both provide opportunities for frequent feedback and frequent learning. They also provide a hit of endorphins every time you make a new test pass, or see the light go green after a small refactoring.

My willingness to do laps, at least in service of a higher goal, may border on the unfathomable. One Sunday many years ago, when I was still running, we had huge thunderstorms all morning and all afternoon. I was in the middle of marathon training and needed a 20-miler that day to stay on my program. So I went to the university gym -- the one mentioned in the blog post linked above, with 9.2 laps to a mile -- and ran 184 laps. "Are you nuts?" I loved it! The short iterations and frequent feedback dropped me in to a fugue-like rhythm. It was easy to track my pace, never running too fast or too slow. It was easy to make adjustments when I noticed something off-plan. In between moments checking my time, I watched people, I breathed, I cleared my mind. I ran. All things considered, it was a good day.

Sunday morning's fifteen laps were workaday in comparison. At the end, I wished I had more time to ride. I felt strong enough. Another five laps would have been fun. That hill wasn't going to get me. And I liked the rhythm.

Last month, I picked up a copy of The Writing Life by Annie Dillard at the library. It's one of those books that everyone seems to quote, and I had never read it. I was pleased to find it is a slim volume.

It didn't take long to see one of the often-quoted passages, on the page before the first chapter:

No one expects the days to be gods. -- Emerson

Then, about a third of the way in, came the sentences for which everyone knows Dillard:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.

Dillard's portrayal of the writing life describes some of the mystery that we non-writers imagine, but mostly it depicts the ordinariness of daily grind and the extended focus that looks like obsession to those of us on the outside.

Occasionally, her stories touched on my experience as a writer of programs. Consider this paragraph:

Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment. Every year the old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two piles, bad and good. Every year that man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack. At length he turned to the young man: "You submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack. Why do you like it so much?" The young photographer said, "Because I had to climb a mountain to get it."

I have written that code. I bang my head against some problem for days or weeks. Eventually, I find a solution. Sometimes it's homely code that gets the job; usually it seems more elegant than it is, in relief against the work that went into discovering it. Over time, I realize that I need to change it, or delete it altogether, in order to make progress on the system in which it resides. But... the mountain.

It's a freeing moment when I get over the fixation and make the change the code needs. I'll always have the mountain, but my program needs to move in a different direction.

I recently ran across an old post by @joepolitz, Beginner REPL Stumbles, that records some of the ways he has observed students struggle as they learn to use IDEs with REPLs and files. As I mentioned on Twitter, it struck a chord with me even though I don't teach beginning programmers much these days. My tweets led to a short conversation that I'd like to record, and slightly expoand on, here.

I've noticed the first of the struggles in my junior-level Programming Languages class: students not knowing, or not taking seriously enough, the value of ctrl-up to replay and edit a previous interaction. If students cannot work effectively in the REPL, they will resort to typing all of their code in the definitions pane and repeatedly re-running it. This programming style misses out on the immense value of the REPL as a place to evolve code rapidly, with continual feedback, on the way to becoming a program.

As recommended in the post, I now demonstrate ctrl-up early in the course and note whenever I use it in a demo. If a student finds that their keyboard maps ctrl-up to another behavior, I show them how to define a shortcut in Preferences. This simple affordance can have an inordinate effect on the student's programming experience.

The other observations that Politz describes may be true for my students, too, and I just don't see them. My students are juniors and seniors who already have a year of experience in Python and perhaps a semester using Java. We aren't in the lab together regularly. I usually hear about their struggles with content when they ask questions, and when they do, they don't usually ask about process or tools. Sometimes, they will demo some interaction for me and I'll get to see an unexpected behavior in usage and help them, but that's rare.

(I do recall a student coming into my office once a few years ago and opening up a source file -- in Word. They said they had never gotten comfortable with Dr. Racket and that Word helped them make progress typing and editing code faster. We talked about ways to learn and practice Dr. Racket, but I don't think they ever switched.)

Having read about some of the usage patterns that Politz reports, I think I need to find ways to detect misunderstandings and difficulties with tools sooner. The REPL, and the ability to evolve code from interactions in the REPL into programs in the definitions pane, are powerful tools -- if one groks them and learns to use them effectively. As Politz notes, direct instruction is a necessary antidote to address these struggles. Direct instruction up front may also help my students get off to a better start with the tools.

There is so much room for improvement hidden inside assumptions that are baked into our current tools and languages. Observing learners can expose things we never think about, if we pay attention. I wonder what else I have been missing...

Fortunately, both Joe Politz and Shriram Krishnamurthi encountered my tweets. Krishnamurthi provided helpful context, noting that the PLT Scheme team noticed many of these issues in the early days of Dr. Scheme. They noticed others while running teacher training sessions for @Bootstrapworld. In both cases, instructors were in the lab with learners while they used the tools. In the crush to fix more pressing problems, the interaction issues went unaddressed. In my experience, they are also subtle and hard to appreciate fully without repeated exposure.

Politz provided a link to a workshop paper on Repartee, a tool that explicitly integrates interactive programming and whole-program editing. Very cool. As Krishnamurthi noted to close the conversation, Repartee demonstrates that we may be able to do better than simply teach students to use a REPL more effectively. Perhaps we can make better tools.

I've been learning a lot about CS education research the last few years. It is so much more than the sort of surface-level observations and uncontrolled experiments I saw, and made, at the beginning of my career. This kind of research demands a more serious commitment to science but offers the potential of real improvement in return for the effort. I'm glad to know CS ed researchers are making that commitment. I hope to help where I can.

We are at the point in my programming languages course where my students have learned a little Racket, a little functional programming, and a little recursive programming over inductive datatypes. Even though I've been able to connect many of the ideas we've studied to programming tasks out in the world that they care about themselves, a couple of students have asked, "Why are we doing this again?"

This is a natural question, and one I'm asked every time I teach this course. My students think that they will be heading out into the world to build software in Java or Python or C, and the ideas we've seen thus far seem pretty far removed from the world they think they will live in.

These paragraphs from near the end of Chelsea Troy's 3-part essay on API design do a nice job of capturing one part of the answer I give my students:

This is just one example to make a broader point: it is worthwhile for us as technologists to cultivate knowledge of the context surrounding our tools so we can make informed decisions about when and how to use them. In this case, we've managed to break down some web request protocols and build their pieces back up into a hybrid version that suits our needs.

When we understand where technology comes from, we can more effectively engage with its strengths, limitations, and use cases. We can also pick and choose the elements from that technology that we would like to carry into the solutions we build today.

The languages we use were designed and developed in a particular context. Knowing that context gives us multiple powers. One power is the ability to make informed decisions about the languages -- and language features -- we choose in any given situation. Another is the ability to make new languages, new features, and new combinations of features that solve the problem we face today in the way that works best in our current context.

Not knowing context limits us to our own experience. Troy does a wonderful job of demonstrating this using the history of web API practice. I hope my course can help students choose tools and write code more effectively when they encounter new languages and programming styles.

Computing changes. My students don't really know what world they will be working in in five years, or ten, or thirty. Context is a meta-tool that will serve them well.

It's been a while since I read a non-technical article and made as many notes as I did this morning on this Paris Review interview with Billy Collins. Collins was poet laureate of the U.S. in the early 2000s. I recall reading his collection, Sailing Alone Around the Room, at PLoP in 2002 or 2003. Walking the grounds at Allerton with a poem in your mind changes one's eyes and hears. Had I been blogging by then, I probably would have commented on the experience, and maybe one or two of the poems, in a post.

As I read this interview, I encountered a dozen or so passages that made me think about things I do, things I've thought, and even things I've never thought. Here are a few.

I'd like to get something straightened out at the beginning: I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.

Uni-Ball Micropoint pens are my preferred writing implement as well, though I don't write enough on paper any more to make buying a particular pen much worth the effort. Unfortunately, just yesterday my last Uni-Ball Micro wrote its last line. Will I order more? It's a race between preference and sloth.

I type up most of the things I write these days on a 2015-era MacBook Pro, often connected to a Magic Keyboard. With the advent of the M1 MacBook Pros, I'm tempted to buy a new laptop, but this one serves me so well... I am nothing if not loyal.

The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with. You're trying to discover something that you don't know exists, maybe something of value.

Programming may be like writing in many ways, but the search for something to say isn't usually one of them. Most of us sit down to write a program to do something, not to discover some unexpected outcome. However, while I may know what my program will do when I get done, I don't always know what that program will look like, or how it will accomplish its task. This state of uncertainty probably accounts for my preference in programming languages over the years. Smalltalk, Ruby, and Racket have always felt more like flashlights or Geiger counters than tape recorders. They help me find the program I need more readily than Java or C or Python.

I love William Matthews's idea--he says that revision is not cleaning up after the party; revision is the party!

Refactoring is not cleaning up after the party; refactoring is the party! Yes.

... nothing precedes a poem but silence, and nothing follows a poem but silence. A poem is an interruption of silence, whereas prose is a continuation of noise.

I don't know why this passage grabbed me. Perhaps it's just the imagery of the phrases "interruption of silence" and "continuation of noise". I won't be surprised if my subconscious connects this to programming somehow, but I ought to be suspicious of the imposition. Our brains love to make connections.

She's this girl in high school who broke my heart, and I'm hoping that she'll read my poems one day and feel bad about what she did.

This is the sort of sentence I'm a sucker for, but it has no real connection to my life. Though high school was a weird and wonderful time for me, as it was for so many, I don't think anything I've ever done since has been motivated in this way. Collins actually goes on to say the same thing about his own work. Readers are people with no vested interest. We have to engage them.

Another example of that is my interest in bridge columns. I don't play bridge. I have no idea how to play bridge, but I always read Alan Truscott's bridge column in the Times. I advise students to do the same unless, of course, they play bridge. You find language like, South won with dummy's ace, cashed the club ace and ruffed a diamond. There's always drama to it: Her thirteen imps failed by a trick. There's obviously lots at stake, but I have no idea what he's talking about. It's pure language. It's a jargon I'm exterior to, and I love reading it because I don't know what the context is, and I'm just enjoying the language and the drama, almost like when you hear two people arguing through a wall, and the wall is thick enough so you can't make out what they're saying, though you can follow the tone.

I feel seen. Back when we took the local daily paper, I always read the bridge column by Charles Goren, which ran on the page with the crossword, crypto cipher, and other puzzles. I've never played bridge; most of what I know about the game comes from reading Matthew Ginsberg's papers about building AI programs to bid and play. Like Collins, I think I was merely enjoying sound of the language, a jargon that sounds serious and silly at the same time.

Yeats summarizes this whole thing in "Adam's Curse" when he writes: "A line will take us hours maybe, / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught."

I'm not a poet, and my unit of writing is rarely the line, but I know a feeling something like this in writing lecture notes for my students. Most of the worst writing consists of paragraphs and sections I have not spent enough time on. Most of the best sounds natural, a clean distillation of deep understanding. But those paragraphs and sections are the result of years of evolution. That's the time scale on which some of my courses grow, because no course ever gets my full attention in any semester.

When I finish a set of notes, I usually feel like the stitching and unstitching have not yet reached their desired end. Some of the text "seems a moment's thought", but much is still uneven or awkward. Whatever the state of the notes, though, I have move on to the next task: grading a homework assignment, preparing the next class session, or -- worst of all -- performing the administrivia that props up the modern university. More evolution awaits.

~~~~

This was a good read for a Sunday morning on the exercise bike, well recommended. The line on revision alone was worth the time; I expect it will be a stock tool in my arsenal for years to come.

My recent post on what language or tool I should dive into next got some engagement on Twitter, with many helpful suggestions. Thank you all! So I figure I should post a quick update to report what I'm thinking at this point.

In that post, I mentioned JavaScript and Pharo by name, though I was open to other ideas. Many folks pointed out the practical value of JavaScript, especially in a context where many of my students know and use it. Others offered lots of good ideas in the Smalltalk vein, both Pharo and several lighter-weight Squeaks. A couple of folks recommended Glamorous Toolkit (GToolkit), from @feenkcom, which I had not heard of before.

I took to mind several of the suggestions that commenters made about the how to think about making the decision. For example, there is more overhead to studying Pharo and GToolkit than JavaScript or one of the lighter-weight Squeaks. Choosing one of the latter would make it easier to tinker. I think some of these comments had students in mind, but they are true even for my own study during the academic semester. Once I get into a term (my course begins one week from today), my attention gets pulled in many directions for fifteen or sixteen weeks. Being able to quickly switch contexts when jumping into a coding session means that I can jump more often and more productively.

Also, as Glenn Vanderburg pointed out, JavaScript and Pharo aren't likely to teach me much new. I have a lot of background with Smalltalk and, in many ways, JavaScript is just another language. The main benefit of working with either would be practical, not educational.

GToolkit might teach me something, though. As I looked into GToolkit, it became more tempting. The code is Smalltalk, because it is implemented in Pharo. But the project has a more ambitious vision of software that is "moldable": easier to understand, easier to figure out. GToolkit builds on Smalltalk's image in the direction of a computational notebook, which is an idea I've long wanted to explore. (I feel a little guilty that I haven't look more into the work that David Schmüdde has done developing a notebook in Clojure.) GToolkit sounds like a great way for me to open several doors at once and learn something new. To do it justice, though, I need more time and focus to get started.

So I have decided on a two-pronged approach. I will explore JavaScript during the spring semester. This will teach me more about a language and ecosystem that are central to many of my students' lives. There is little overhead to picking it up and playing with it, even during the busiest weeks of the term. I can have a little fun and maybe make some connections to my programming languages course along the way. Then for summer, I will turn my attention to GToolkit, and perhaps a bigger research agenda.

I started playing with JavaScript on Tuesday. Having just read a blog post on scripting to compute letter frequencies in Perl, I implemented some of the same ideas in JavaScript. For the most part, I worked just as my students do: relying on vague memories of syntax and semantics and, when that failed, searching about for examples online.

A couple of hours working like this refreshed my memory on the syntax I knew from before and introduced me to some features that were new to me. It took a few minutes to re-internalize the need for those pesky semicolons at the end of every line... The resulting code is not much more verbose than Perl. I drifted pretty naturally to using functional programming style, as you might imagine, and it felt reasonably comfortable. Pretty soon I was thinking more about the tradeoff between clarity and efficiency in my code than about syntax, which is a good sign. I did run into one of JavaScript's gotchas: I used for...in twice instead of for...of and was surprised by the resulting behavior. Like any programmer, I banged my head on wall for a few minutes and then recovered. But I have to admit that I had fun. I like to program.

I'm not sure what I will write next, or when I will move into the browser and play with interface elements. Suggestions are welcome!

I am pretty sure, though, that I'll start writing unit tests soon. I used SUnit briefly and have a lot of experience with JUnit. Is JSUnit a thing?

I've never been one to write year-end retrospectives on my blog, or prospective posts about my plans for the new year. That won't change this year, this post notwithstanding.

I will say that 2021 was a weird year for me, as it was for many people. One positive was purchasing a 29" ultra-wide monitor for work at home, seen in this post from my Strange Loop series. Programming at home has been more fun since the purchase, as have been lecture prep, data-focused online meetings, and just about everything. The only downside is that it's in my basement office, which hides me away. When I want to work upstairs to be with family, it's back to the 15" laptop screen. First-world problems.

Looking forward, I'm feeling a little itchy. I'll be teaching programming languages again this spring and plan to inject some new ideas, but the real itch is: I am looking for a new project to work on, and a new language to study. This doesn't have to be a new language, just one that one I haven't gone deep on before. I have considered a few, including Swift, but right now I am thinking of Pharo and JavaScript.

Thinking about mastering JavaScript in 2022 feels like going backward. It's old, as programming languages go, and has been a dominant force in the computing world for well over a decade. But it's also the most common language many of my students know that I have never gone deep on. There is great value in studying languages for their novel ideas and academic interest, but there is also value in having expertise with a language and toolchain that my students already care about. Besides, I've really enjoyed reading about work on JIT compilation of JavaScript over the years, and it's been a long time since I wrote code in a prototype-based OO language. Maybe it's time to build something useful in JavaScript.

Studying Pharo would be going backward for me in a different way. Smalltalk always beckons. Long-time followers of this blog have read many posts about my formative experiences with Smalltalk. But it has been twenty years since I lived in an image every day. Pharo is a modern Smalltalk with a big class library and a goal of being suitable for mission-critical systems. I don't need much of a tug; Smalltalk always beckons.

My current quandary brings to mind a dinner at a Dagstuhl seminar in the summer of 2019 (*). It's been a while now, so I hope my memory doesn't fail me too badly. Mark Guzdial was talking about a Pharo MOOC he had recently completed and how he was thinking of using the language to implement a piece of software for his new research group at Michigan, or perhaps a class he was teaching in the fall. If I recall correctly, he was torn between using Pharo and... JavaScript. He laid out some of the pros and cons of each, with JavaScript winning out on several pragmatic criteria, but his heart was clearly with Pharo. Shriram Krishnamurthi gently encouraged Mark to follow his heart: programming should be joyful, and programming languages allow us to build in languages that give us enjoyment. I seconded the (e)motion.

And here I sit mulling a similar choice.

Maybe I can make this a two-language year.

~~~~~

(*) Argh! I never properly blogged about about this seminar, on the interplay between notional machines and programming language semantics, or the experience of visiting Europe for the first time. I did write one post that mentioned Dagstuhl, Paris, and Montenegro, with an expressed hope to write more. Anything I write now will be filtered through two and a half years of fuzzy memory, but it may be worth the time to get it down in writing before it's too late to remember anything useful. In the meantime: both the seminar and the vacation were wonderful! If you are ever invited to participate in a Dagstuhl seminar, consider accepting.

Over the last four or five offerings of my compiler course, I have been making progress in how I teach code generation, with teams becoming increasingly successful at producing a working code generator. In the 2019 offering, students asked a few new questions about some low-level mechanical issues in the run-time system. So I whipped up a simple one the night before class, both to refamiliarize myself with the issues and to serve as a potential example. It was not a great piece of software, but it was good enough for a quick in-class demo and as a seed for discussion.

Jump ahead to 2021. As I mentioned in my previous post, this fall's group had a lot more questions about assembly language, the run-time stack, activation records, and the like. When I pulled out my demo run-time system from last time, I found that it didn't help them as much as it had the previous group. The messiness of the code got in the way. Students couldn't see the bigger picture from the explanatory comments, and the code itself seemed opaque to them.

Working with a couple of students in particular, I began to refine the code. First, I commented the higher-level structure of generator more clearly. I then used those comments to reorganize the code bit, with the goal of improving the instructional presentation rather than the code's efficiency or compactness. I chose to leave some comments in rather than to factor out functions, because the students found the linear presentation easier to follow.

Finally, I refined some sections of the code and rewrote others entirely, to make them clearer. At this point, I did extract a helper function or two in an attempty not to obscure the story the program was telling with low-level details.

I worked through two iterations of this process: comment, reorganize, rewrite. At the end, I had a piece of code that is pretty good, and one that is on the student's path to a full code generator.

Of course, I could have designed my software up front and proceeded more carefully as I wrote this code. I mean, professionals and academics understand compiler construction pretty well. The result might well have been a better example of what the run-time generator should look like when students are done.

But I don't think that would have been as helpful to most members of my class. This process was much more like how my students program, and how many of us program, frankly, when we are first learning a new domain. Following this process, and working in direct response to questions students had as we discussed the code, gave me insights into some of the challenges they encounter in my course, including tracking register usage and seeing how the calling and return sequences interact. I teach these ideas in class, but my students were seeing that material as too abstract. They couldn't make the leap to code quite as easily as I had hoped; they were working concretely from the start.

In the end, I ended up with both a piece of code I like and a better handle on how my students approach the compiler project. In terms of outcomes assessment, this experience gives me some concrete ideas for improving the prerequisite courses students take before my course, such as computer organization. More immediately, it helps me improve the instruction in my own course. I have some ideas about how I can reorganize my code generator units and how I might simplify some of my pedagogical material. This may lead to a bigger redesign of the course in a coming semester.

I must admit: I had a lot of fun writing this code -- and revising and improving it! One bit of good news from the experience is that the advice I give in class is pretty good. If they follow my practical suggestions for writing their code, they can be successful. What needs improvement now is finding ways for students to have the relevant bits of advice at hand when they need them. Concrete advice that gets separated from concrete practice tends to get lost in the wind.

Finally, this experience reminded me first hand that the compiler project is indeed a challenge. It's fun, but it's a challenge, especially for undergrads attempting to write their first large piece of software as part of a team. There may be ways I can better help them to succeed.

Well, fall semester really got away from me quickly. It seems not long ago that I wrote of launching the course with a renewed mindset of "compilers for the masses, not compilers for compiler people". I'm not sure how well that went this time, as many students came into the course with less understanding of the underlying machine model and assembly language than ever before. As a result, many of them ended up stressing over low-level implementation details while shoring up that knowledge than thinking about some of the higher-level software engineering ideas. I spent more time this semester working with more teams to help them understand parsing rules, semantic actions, and activation records than in anytime I can remember.

I suspect that the students' programming maturity and state of knowledge at the start of the course are in large part a result of experiencing the previous two and a half semesters under the damper of the pandemic. Some classes were online, others were hybrid, and all were affected by mitigation efforts, doubt, and stress. Students and professors alike faced these effects, me included, and while everyone has been doing the best they could under the circumstances, sometimes the best we can do comes up a little short.

At the beginning of the course, I wrote about a particular uncertainty raised by the preceding pandemic semesters: how isolation and the interruption of regular life had reduced the chances for students to make friends in the major and to build up personal and professional connections with their classmates. I underestimated, I think, the effect that the previous year and a half would have on learning outcomes in our courses.

The effect on project teams themselves turned out to be a mixed bag. Three of the five teams worked pretty well together, even if one of the teammates was unable to contribute equally to the project. That's pretty typical. Two other teams encountered more serious difficulties working together effectively. Difficulties derailed one project that got off to an outstanding start, and the second ended up being a one-person show (a very impressive one-person show, in fact). In retrospect, many of these challenges can be traced back to problems some students had with content: they found themselves falling farther behind their teammates and responded by withdrawing from group work. The result is a bad experience for those still plugging along.

That's perhaps too many words about the difficulties. Several teams seemed to have pretty typical experiences working one another, even though they didn't really know each other before working together.

The combination of some students struggling with course content and some struggling with collaboration led to mixed bag of results. Two teams produced working compilers that handled essentially all language features correctly, or nearly so. That's pretty typical for a five-team semester. One team produced an incomplete system, but one they could be proud of after working pretty hard the entire semester. That's typical, too.

Two teams produced systems without code generators beyond a rudimentary run-time system. That's a bit unusual. These teams were disappointed because they had set much higher goals for themselves. Many of these students were taking heavy course and research loads and, unfortunately, all that work eventually overwhelmed them. I think I felt as bad for them as they did, knowing what they might have accomplished with a more forgiving schedule. I do hope they found some value in the course and will be able to look back on the experience as worthwhile. They learned a lot about working on a big project, and perhaps about themselves.

What about me? A few weeks into the course, I declared that I was programming like a student again, trying to implement the full compiler project I set before my students. Like many of my students, I accomplished some of my goals and fell short when outside obstacles got in the way. One the front end, my scanner is in great shape, while my parser is correct but in need of some refactoring. At that point in the semester, I got busy both with department duties and with working one on one with the teams, and my productivity dropped off.

I did implement a solid run-time system, one I am rather happy with. My work on it came directly out of answering students' questions about code generation and working with them to investigate and debug their programs. I'll have more to say about my run-time system in the next post.

So, my latest compiler course is in the books. All in all, my students and I did about as well as we could under the circumstances. There is still great magic in watching a team's compiler generate an executable, then running that executable on an input that produces tens of thousands of activation records and executes several million lines of assembly. The best we can do is often quite good enough.

Yesterday someone retweeted this message from Hillel Wayne into my timeline:

A surprising and undervalued aspect of mastery comes from narrow-scope "microskills". In software, these would be things like

- Python list comprehensions
- Grep flags
- Debugging specific error messages
- Using a window manager

We can, and should, do targeted training.

Later in the short thread, Hillel says something that brought my students to mind:

In other words, the high level thinking is the difference between a task being possible and impossible, but the microskills are the difference between a task being 20 minutes and six hours. That's why it can take us days to find the right one-liner.

Some students love to program and look for every opportunity to write code. These students develop a satchelful of microskills, usually far behind what we could every teach them or expose them to in class. They tend to do fine on the programming assignments we give in class.

Other students complain that a programming assignment I gave them, intended as a one-hour practice session, took them eight or ten hours. My first reaction is usually to encourage them never to spin their wheels that long without asking me a question. I want them to develop grit, but usually that kind of wheel spinning is a sign that they may be missing a key idea or piece of information. I'd like to help them get moving sooner.

There is another reason, though, that many of these students spin their wheels. For a variety of reasons, they program only when they are required by a class. They are ambivalent about programming, either because they don't find it as interesting as their peers or because they don't enjoy the grind of working in the trenches yet. I say "yet" because one of the ways we all come to enjoy the grind is... to grind away! That's how we develop the microskills Hillel is talking about, which turn a six-hour task into a 20-minute task, or a disappointing one-hour experience with a homework problem into a five-minute joy.

Students who have yet to experience the power of microskills are prone to underestimate their value. That makes it less enjoyable to practice programming, which makes it hard to develop new skills. It's a self-reinforcing loop, and not the kind we want to encourage in our students.

Even after all these years in the classroom, I still struggle to find ways to help my students practice programming skills in a steady, reliable way. Designing engaging problems to work on helps. So does letting students choose the problems they work on, which works better in some courses than others. Ultimately, though, I think what works best is to develop as much of a personal relationship with each student as possible. This creates a condition in which they are more inclined to ask for help when they need it and to trust suggestions from that sound a little crazy to the beginner's mind.

I am teaching my compiler development course this semester, which means that I am working with students near the end of their time with us, whose habits are deeply ingrained from previous courses. The ones who don't already possess a few of the microskills they need are struggling as the task of writing a parser or semantic checker or code generator stretches out like an endless desert before them.

Next semester, I teach my programming languages course and have the joy of introducing my students to Racket and functional programming. This essay me already thinking of how I can help my students develop some of the microskills they will want and need in the course and beyond. Perhaps a more explicit focus early on the use Dr. Racket to create, run, test, and debug code can set them up for a more enjoyable experience later in the course -- and help put them on a virtuous self-reinforcing loop developing skills and using them to enjoy the next bit of learning they do.

A couple of weeks back, I saw an article in which Malcom Gladwell noted that he did not know The Triggering Town, a slim book of essays by poet Richard Hugo. I was fortunate to hear about Hugo many years ago from software guru Richard Gabriel, who is also a working poet. It had been fifteen years or more since I'd read The Triggering Town, so I stopped into the library on my way home one day and picked it up. I enjoyed it the second time around as much as the first.

I frequently make notes of passages to save. Here are five from this reading.

Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.

That advice works for budding software developers, too.

Emotional honesty is a rare thing in the academic world or anywhere else for that matter, and nothing is more prized by good students.

Emotion plays a much smaller role in programming than in writing poetry. Teaching, though, is deeply personal, even in a technical discipline. All students value emotional honesty, and profs who struggle to be open usually struggle making connections to their students.

Side note: Teachers, like policemen, firemen, and service personnel, should be able to retire after twenty years with full pension. Our risks may be different, but they are real. In twenty years most teachers have given their best.

This is a teacher speaking, so take the recommendation with caution. But more than twenty years into this game, I know exactly what Hugo means.

Whatever, by now, I was old enough to know explanations are usually wrong. We never quite understand and we can't quite explain.

Yet we keep trying. Humans are an optimistic animal, which is one of the reasons we find them so endearing.

... at least for me, what does turn me on lies in a region of myself that could not be changed by the nature of my employment. But it seems important (to me even gratifying) that the same region lies untouched and unchanged in a lot of people, and in my innocent way I wonder if it is reason for hope. Hope for what? I don't know. Maybe hope that humanity will always survive civilization.

This paragraph comes on the last page of the book and expresses one of the core tenets of Hugo's view of poetry and poets. He fought in World War 2 as a young man, then worked in a Boeing factory for 15-20 years, and then became an English professor at a university. No matter the day job, he was always a poet. I have never been a poet, but I know quite well the region of which he speaks.

Also: I love the sentence, "Maybe hope that humanity will always survive civilization."

I am usually tired on the second day of a conference, and today was no exception. But the day started and ended with talks that kept my brain alive.

• "Poems in an Accidental Language" by Kate Compton -- Okay, so that was a Strange Loop keynote. When the video goes live on YouTube, watch it. I may blog more about the talk later, but for now know only that it included:

• "Evenings of Recreational Ontology" (I also learned about Google Sheet parties)
• "fitting an octopus into an ontology"
• "Contemplate the universe, and write an API for it."

Like I said, go watch this talk!

• Quantum computing is one of those technical areas I know very little about, maybe the equivalent of a 30-minute pitch talk. I've never been super-interested, but some of my students are. So I attended "Practical Quantum Computing Today" to see what's up these days. I'm still not interested in putting much of my time into quantum computing, but now I'm better informed.

• Before my lunch walk, I attended a non-technical talk on "tech-enabled crisis response". Emma Ferguson and Colin Schimmelfing reported on their experience doing something I'd like to be able to do: spin up a short-lived project to meet a critical need, using mostly free or open-source tools. For three months early in the COVID pandemic, their project helped deliver ~950,000 protective masks from 7,000 donors to 6,000 healthcare workers. They didn't invent new tech; they used existing tools and occasionally wrote some code to connect such tools.

My favorite quote from the talk came when Ferguson related the team's realization that they had grown too big for the default limits on Google Sheets and Gmail. "We thought, 'Let's just pay Google.' We tried. We tried. But we couldn't figure it out." So they built their own tool. It is good to be a programmer.

• After lunch, Will Crichton live-coded a simple API in Rust, using traits (Rust's version of interfaces) and aggressive types. He delivered almost his entire talk within emacs, including an ASCII art opening slide. It almost felt like I was back in grad school!

• In "Remote Workstations for Discerning Artists", Michelle Brenner from Netflix described the company's cloud-based infrastructure for the workstations used by the company's artists and project managers. This is one of those areas that is simply outside my experience, so I learned a bit. At the top level, though, the story is familiar: the scale of Netflix's goals requires enabling artists to work wherever they are, whenever they are; the pandemic accelerated a process that was already underway.

• Eric Gade gave another talk in the long tradition of Alan Kay and a bigger vision for computing. "Authorship Environments: In Search of the 'Personal' in Personal Computing" started by deconstructing Steve Jobs's "bicycle for the mind" metaphor (he's not a fan of what most people take as the meaning) and then moved onto the idea of personal computing as literacy: a new level at which to interrogate ideas, including one's own.

This talk included several inspirational quotes. My favorite was was from Adele Goldberg:

There's all these layers in everything we do... We have to learn how to peel.

(I have long admired Goldberg and her work. See this post from Ada Lovelace Day 2009 for a few of my thoughts.)

As with most talks in this genre, I left feeling like there is so much more to be done, but frustrated at not knowing how to do it. We still haven't found a way to reach a wide audience with the empowering idea that there is more to computing than typing into a Google doc or clicking in a web browser.

• The closing keynote was delivered by Will Byrd. "Strange Dreams of Stranger Loops" took Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach as its inspiration, fitting both for the conference and for Byrd's longstanding explorations of relational programming. His focus today: generating quines in mini-Kanren, and discussing how quines enable us to think about programs, interpreters, and the strange loops at the heart of GEB.

As with the opening keynote I may blog more about this talk later. For now I give you two fun items:

• Byrd expressed his thanks to D((a(d|n))oug), a regular expression that matches on Byrd (his father), Friedman (his academic mentor), and Hofstadter (his intellectual inspiration).
• While preparing his keynote, Byrd clains to have suffered from UDIS: Unintended Doug Intimidation Syndrome. Hofstader is so cultured, so well-read, and so deep a thinker, how can the rest of us hope to contribute?

Rest assured: Byrd delivered. A great talk, as always.

Strange Loop 2021 has ended. I "hit the road" by walking upstairs to make dinner with my wife.

For the first time in many years, I got the urge this fall to implement the compiler project I set before my students.

I've written here about this course many times over the years. It serves students interested in programming languages and compilers as well as students looking for a big project course and students looking for a major elective. Students implement a compiler for a small language by hand in teams of 2-5, depending on the source language and the particular group of people in the course.

Having written small compilers like this many times, I don't always implement the entire project each offering. That would not be a wise use of my time most semesters. Instead, when something comes up in class, I will whip up a quick scanner or type checker or whatever so that we can explore an idea. In recent years, the bits I've written have tended to be on the backend, where I have more room to learn.

But this fall, I felt the tug to go all in.

I created a new source language for the class this summer, which I call Twine. Much of its concrete syntax was inspired by SISAL, a general-purpose, single-assignment functional language with implicit parallelism and efficient array handling. SISAL was designed in the mid-1980s to be a high-level language for large numerical programs, to be run on a variety of multiprocessors. With advances in multiprocessors and parallel processors, SISAL is well suited for modern computation. Of course, it contains many features beyond what we can implement in a one-semester compiler course where students implement all of their own machinery. Twine is essentially a subset of SISAL, with a few additions and modifications aimed at making the language more suitable for our undergraduate course.

(Whence the name "Twine"? The name of SISAL comes from the standard Unix word list. It was chosen because it contains the phrase "sal", which is an acronym for "single assignment language". The word "sisal" itself is the name of a flowering plant native to southern Mexico but widely cultivated around the world. Its leaves are crushed to extract a fiber that is used to create rope and twine. So, just as the sisal plant is used to create twine, the SISAL programming language was used to create the Twine programming language.)

With new surface elements, the idea of implementing a new front end appealed to me. Besides, the experience of implementing a complete system feels different than implementing a one-off component... That's one of the things we want our students to experience in our project courses! After eighteen months of weirdness and upheaval at school and in the world, I craved that sort of connection to some code. So here I am.

Knocking out a scanner in my free time over the last week and getting started on my parser has been fun. It has also reminded me how the choice of programming language affects how I think about the code I am writing.

I decided to implement in Python, the language most of my student teams are using this fall, so that I might have recent experience with specific issues they encounter. I'd forgotten just how list-y Python is. Whenever I look at Python code on the web, it seems that everything is a list or a dictionary. The path of least resistance flows that way... If I walk that path, I soon find myself with a list of lists of lists, and my brain is swimming in indices. Using dictionaries replaces integer indices with keys of other types, but the conceptual jumble remains.

It did not take me long to appreciate anew why I like to work with objects. They give me the linguistic layers I need to think about my code independent of languages primitives. I know, I know, I can achieve the same thing with algebraic types and layers of function definitions. However, my mind seems to work on a wavelength where data encapsulation and abstract messages go together. Blame Smalltalk for ruining me, or enlightening me, whichever your stance.

Python provides a little extra friction to classes and objects that seems to interrupt my flow occasionally. For a few minutes this week, I felt myself missing Java and wondering if I ought to have chosen it for the project instead of Python. I used to program in Java every day, and this was the first time in a long while that I felt the pull back. After programming so much in Racket the last decade, though, the wordiness of Java keeps me away. Alas, Python is not the answer. Maybe I'm ready to go deep on a new language, but which one? OOP doesn't seem to be in vogue these days. Maybe I need to return to Ruby or Smalltalk.

For now I will live with OOP in Python and see whether its other charms can compensate. Living with Python's constraints shows up as a feature of another choice I made for this project: to let pycodestyle tell me how to format my code. This is an obstacle for any programmer who is as idiosyncratic as I am. After a few rounds of reformatting my code, though, I am finding surrender easier to accept. This has freed me to pay attention to more important matters, which is one of the keys ideas behind coding and style standards in the first place. But I am a slow learner.

It's been fun so far. I look forward to running Twine programs translated by my compiler in a few weeks! As long as I've been programming, I have never gotten over the thrill of watching my compiler I've written -- or any big program I've written -- do its thing. Great joy.

In the middle of an old post about computing an "impossible" integral, John Cook says:

In the artificial world of the calculus classroom, everything works out nicely. And this is a shame.

When I was a student, I probably took comfort in the fact that everything was supposed to work out nicely on the homework we did. There *was* a solution; I just had to find the pattern, or the key that turned the lock. I suspect that I was a good student largely because I was good at finding the patterns, the keys.

It wasn't until I got to grad school that things really changed, and even then course work was typically organized pretty neatly. Research in the lab was very different, of course, and that's where my old skills no longer served me so well.

In university programs in computer science, where many people first learn how to develop software, things tend to work out nicely. That is a shame, too. But it's a tough problem to solve.

In most courses, in particular introductory courses, we create assignments with that have "closed form" solutions, because we want students to practice a specific skill or learn a particular concept. Having a fixed target can be useful in achieving the desired outcomes, especially if we want to help students build confidence in their abilities.

It's important, though, that we eventually take off the training wheels and expose students to messier problems. That's where they have an opportunity to build other important skills they need for solving problems outside the classroom, which aren't designed by a benevolent instructor to have follow a pattern. As Cook says, neat problems can create a false impression that every problem has a simple solution.

Students who go on to use calculus for anything more than artificial homework problems may incorrectly assume they've done something wrong when they encounter an integral in the wild.

CS students need experience writing programs that solve messy problems. In more advanced courses, my colleagues and I all try to extend students' ability to solve less neatly-designed problems, with mixed results.

It's possible to design a coherent curriculum that exposes students to an increasingly messy set of problems, but I don't think many universities do this. One big problem is that doing so requires coordination across many courses, each of which has its own specific content outcomes. There's never enough time, it seems, to teach everything about, say, AI or databases, in the fifteen weeks available. It's easier to be sure that we cover another concept than it is to be sure students take a reliable step along the path from being able to solve elementary problems to being able to solve to the problems they'll find in the wild.

I face this set of competing forces every semester and do my best to strike a balance. It's never easy.

Courses that involve large systems projects are one place where students in my program have a chance to work on a real problem: writing a compiler, an embedded real-time system, or an AI-based system. These courses have closed form solutions of sorts, but the scale and complexity of the problems require students to do more than just apply formulas or find simple patterns.

Many students thrive in these settings. "Finally," they say, "this is a problem worth working on." These students will be fine when they graduate. Other students struggle when they have to do battle for the first time with an unruly language grammar or a set of fussy physical sensors. One of my challenges in my project course is to help this group of students move further along the path from "student doing homework" to "professional solving problems".

That would be a lot easier to do if we more reliably helped students take small steps along that path in their preceding courses. But that, as I've said, is difficult.

This post describes a problem in curriculum design without offering any solutions. I will think more about how I try to balance the forces between neat and messy in my courses, and then share some concrete ideas. If you have any approaches that have worked for you, or suggestions based on your experiences as a student, please email me or send me a message on Twitter. I'd love to learn how to do this better.

I've written a number of posts over the years that circle around this problem in curriculum and instruction. Here are three:

• Problems Are The Thing
• Problem-Based Universities and Other Radical Changes
• The Tension Among Motivation, Real Problems, and Hard Work

I'm re-reading these to see if past me has any ideas for present-day me. Perhaps you will find them interesting, too.

From Sixty-Four Reasons to Celebrate Paul McCartney, this bit of wisdom that will sound familiar to programmers:

On one of the tapes of studio chatter at Abbey Road you can hear McCartney saying, of something they're working on, "It's complicated now. If we can get it simpler, and then complicate it where it needs to be complicated..."

People talk a lot about making software as simple as possible. The truth is, software sometimes has to be complicated. Some programs perform complex tasks. More importantly, programs these days often interact in complex environments with a lot of dissimilar, distributed components. We cannot avoid complexity.

As McCartney knows about music, the key is to make things as simple as can be and introduce complexity only where it is essential. Programmers face three challenges in this regard:

• learning how to simplify code,
• learning how to add complexity in a minimal, contained fashion, and
• learning how to recognize the subtle boundary between essential simplicity and essential complexity.

I almost said that new programmers face those challenges, but after many years of programming, I feel like I'm still learning how to do all three of these things. I suspect other experienced programmers are still learning, too.

On an unrelated note, another passage in this article spoke to me personally as a programmer. While discussing McCartney's propensity to try new things and to release everything, good and bad, it refers to some of the songs on his most recent album (at that time) as enthusiastically executed misjudgments. I empathize with McCartney. My hard drive is littered with enthusiastically executed misjudgments. And I've never written the software equivalent of "Hey Jude".

McCartney just released a new album this month at the age of 78. The third album in a trilogy conceived and begun in 1970, it has already gone to #1 in three countries. He continues to write, record, and release, and collaborates frequently with today's artists. I can only hope to be enthusiastically producing software, and in tune with the modern tech world, when I am his age.

This.

Was the time I spent writing my RSS scripts more than the time I would now spend thinking about the "best" RSS aggregator and reader? Doesn't matter. I enjoyed writing the scripts. I learned new things and got satisfaction out of seeing them run correctly. I get nothing like that out of comparing apps and services.

I concur so strongly not only because he writes about RSS, which I'm on record as supporting and using. I enjoy rolling my own simple software in almost any domain. Simple has a lot of advantages. Under my control has a lot of advantages. But the biggest advantage echoes what Dr. Drang says: Programming is often more fun than the alternative uses of my time.

I program because I like to, and because I can.

I read two passages in the last few days that echo one another. First, I read this from Wallace Shawn, in a Paris Review interview:

But my God, without writers, humanity might be trapped in a swamp of idiotic, unchanging provincial clichés. Yes, there are writers who merely reinforce people's complacency, but a writer like Rachel Carson inspired the activism of millions, and writers like Lady Murasaki, Milton, and Joyce have reordered people's brains! And for any writers to exist at all, there must surely be a tradition of writing. Maybe in order for one valuable writer to exist, there must be a hundred others who aren't valuable at all, but it isn't possible at any given moment for anyone to be sure who the valuable one is.

Then, in his response to Marc Andreessen's "It's Time to Build", Tanner Greer writes:

To consistently create brilliant poets, you need a society awash in mediocre, even tawdry poetry. Brilliant minds will find their way towards poem writing when poem writing and poem reading is the thing that people do.

I once blogged briefly about The Art of Fear tells the story of an artist sketching hundreds of roosters, which laid the foundation for creating a single sketch for his client. For us as individuals, this means that "talent is rarely distinguishable, over the long run, from perseverance and lots of hard work." As Richard Gabriel often says, "Talent determines only how fast you get good, not how good you get". Volume creates the conditions under which quality can appear.

Shawn and Greer remind us that the same dynamic applies at the scale of a culture. A community that produces many writers has a better chance to produce great writers. When the community values writers, it increases the chances that someone will do the work necessary to becoming a writer. The best way to produce a lot of writers is to have a tradition that welcomes, even encourages, all members of the community to write, even if they aren't great.

The same applies to other forms of achievement, too. In particular, I think it applies to programming.

Sandi Metz's latest newsletter is about the heuristic not to name a class after the design pattern it implements. Actually, it's about a case in which Metz wanted to name a class after the pattern it implements in her code and then realized what she had done. She decided that she either needed to have a better reason for doing it than "because it just felt right" or she needed practice what she preaches to the rest of us. What followed was some deep thinking about what makes the rule a good one to follow and her efforts to put her conclusions in writing for the benefit of her readers.

I recognize with Metz's sense of discomfort at breaking a rule when it feels right and her need to step back and understand the rule at a deeper level. Between her set up and her explanation, she writes:

I've built a newsletter around this rule not only because I believe that it's useful, but also because my initial attempts to explain it exposed deep holes in my understanding. This was a revelation. Had I not been writing a book, I might have hand-waved around these gaps in my knowledge forever.

People sometimes say, "If you you really want to understand something, teach it to others." Metz's story is a great example of why this is really true. I mean, sure, you can learn any new area and then benefit from explaining it to someone else. Processing knowledge and putting it in your own words helps to consolidate knowledge at the surface. But the real learning comes when you find yourself in a situation where you realize there's something you've taken for granted for months or for years, something you thought you knew, but suddenly you sense a deep hole lying under the surface of that supposed understanding. "I just know breaking the rule is the right thing to do here, but... but..."

I've been teaching long enough to have had this experience many times in many courses, covering many areas of knowledge. It can be terrifying, at least momentarily. The temptation to wave my hands and hurry past a student's question is enormous. To learn from teaching in these moments requires humility, self-awareness, and a willingness to think and work until you break through to that deeper understanding. Learning from these moments is what sets the best teachers and writers apart from the rest of us.

As you might guess from Metz's reaction to her conundrum, she's a pretty good teacher and writer. The story in the newsletter is from the new edition of her book "99 Bottles of OOP", which is now available. I enjoyed the first edition of "99 Bottles" and found it useful in my own teaching. It sounds like the second edition will be more than a cleanup; it will have a few twists that make it a better book.

I'm teaching our database systems course for the first time ever this fall. This is a brand new prep for me: I've never taught a database course before, anywhere. There are so many holes in my understanding, places where I've internalized good practices but don't grok them in the way an expert does. I hope I have enough humility and self-awareness this semester to do my students right.

I recently read a Five Books interview about the best books on philosophical wonder. One of the books recommended by philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel was Diaspora, a science fiction novel by Greg Egan I've never read. The story unfolds in a world where people are able to destroy their physical bodies to upload themselves into computers. Unsurprisingly, this leads to some fascinating philosophical possibilities:

Well, for one thing you could duplicate yourself. You could back yourself up. Multiple times.

And then have divergent lives, as it were, in parallel but diverging.

Yes, and then there'd be the question, "do you want to merge back together with the person you diverged from?"

Egan wrote Diaspora before the heyday of distributed version control, before darcs and mercurial and git. With distributed VCS, a person could checkout a new personality, or change branches and be a different person every day. We could run diffs to figure out what makes one version of a self so different from another. If things start going too wrong, we could always revert to an earlier version of ourselves and try again. And all of this could happen with copies of the software -- ourselves -- running in parallel somewhere in the world.

And then there's Git. Imagine writing such a story now, with Git's complex model of versioning and prodigious set of commands and flags. Not only could people branch and merge, checkout and diff... A person could try something new without ever committing changes to the repository. We'd have to figure out what it means to push origin or reset --hard HEAD. We'd be able to rewrite history by rebasing, amending, and squashing. A Git guru can surely explain why we'd need to --force-with-lease or --unset-upstream, but even I can imagine the delightful possibilities of git stash in my personal improvement plan.

Perhaps the final complication in our novel would involve a merge so complex that we need a third-party diff tool to help us put our desired self back together. Alas, a Python library or Ruby gem required by the tool has gone stale and breaks an upgrade. Our hero must find a solution somewhere in her tree of blobs, or be doomed to live a forever splintered life.

If you ever see a book named Dreaming in Git or Bug Report on an airport bookstore's shelves, take a look. Perhaps I will have written the first of my Git fantasies.

It's been a long time since I was excited by a new piece of software the way I was excited by Loglo, Avi Bryant's new creation. Loglo is "LOGO for the Glowforge", an experimental programming environment for creating SVG images. That's not a problem I need to solve, but the way Loglo works drew me in immediately. It consists of a stack programming language and a set of primitives for describing vector graphics, integrated into a spreadsheet interface. It's the use of a stack language to program a spreadsheet that excites me so much.

Actually, it's the reverse relationship that really excites me: using a spreadsheet to build and visualize a stack-based program. Long-time readers know that I am interested in this style of programming (see Summer of Joy for a post from last year) and sometimes introduce it in my programming languages course. Students understand small examples easily enough, but they usually find it hard to grok larger programs and to fully appreciate how typing in such a language can work. How might Loglo help?

In Loglo, a cell can refer to the values produced by other cells in the familiar spreadsheet way, with an absolute address such as "a1" or "f2". But Loglo cells have two other ways to refer to other cell's values. First, any cell can access the value produced by the cell to its left implicitly, because Loglo leaves the result of a cell's computation sitting on top of the stack. Second, a cell can access the value produced by the cell above it by using the special variable "^". These last two features strike me as a useful way for programmers to see their computations grow over time, which can be an even more powerful mode of interaction for beginners who are learning this programming style.

Stack-oriented programming of this sort is concatenative: programs are created by juxtaposing other programs, with a stack of values implicitly available to every operator. Loglo uses the stack as leverage to enable programmers to build images incrementally, cell by cell and row by row, referring to values on the stack as well as to predecessor cells. The programmer can see in a cell the value produced by a cumulative bit of code that includes new code in the cell itself. Reading Bryant's description of programming in Loglo, it's easy to see how this can be helpful when building images. I think my students might find it helpful when learning how to write concatenative programs or learning how types and programs work in a concatenative language.

For example, here is a concatenative program that works in Loglo as well as other stack-based languages such as Forth and Joy:

 2 3 + 5 * 2 + 6 / 3 /

Loglo tells us that it computes the value 1.5:

This program consists of eleven tokens, each of which is a program in its own right. More interestingly, we can partition this program into smaller units by taking any subsequences of the program:

 2 3 + 5 *   2 + 6 /   3 /
 ---------   -------   ---

These are the programs in cells A1, B1, and C1 of our spreadsheet. The first computes 25, the second uses that value to compute 4.5, and the third uses the 4.5 to compute 1.5. Notice that the programs in cells B1 and C1 require an extra value to do their jobs. They are like functions of one argument. Rather than pass an argument to the function, Loglo allows it to read a value from the stack, produced by the cell to its left.

By making the intermediate results visible to the programmer, this interface might help programmers better see how pieces of a concatenative program work and learn what the type of a program fragment such as 2 + 6 / (in cell B1 above) or 3 / is. Allowing locally-relative references on a new row will, as Avi points out, enable an incremental programming style in which the programmer uses a transformation computed in one cell as the source for a parameterized version of the transformation in the cell below. This can give the novice concatenative programmer an interactive experience more supportive than the usual REPL. And Loglo is a spreadsheet, so changes in one cell percolate throughout the sheet on each update!

Am I the only one who thinks this could be a really cool environment for programmers to learn and practice this style of programming?

Teaching concatenative programming isn't a primary task in my courses, so I've never taken the time to focus on a pedagogical environment for the style. I'm grateful to Avi for demonstrating a spreadsheet model for stack programs and stimulating me to think more about it.

For now, I'll play with Loglo as much as time permits and think more about its use, or use of a tool like it, in my courses. There are couple of features I'll have to get used to. For one, it seems that a cell can access only one item left on the stack by its left neighbor, which limits the kind of partial functions we can write into cells. Another is that named functions such as rotate push themselves onto the stack by default and thus require a ! to apply them, whereas operators such as + evaluate by default and thus require quotation in a {} block to defer execution. (I have an academic's fondness for overarching simplicity.) Fortunately, these are the sorts of features one gets used to whenever learning a new language. They are part of the fun.

Thinking beyond Loglo, I can imagine implementing an IDE like this for my students that provides features that Loglo's use cases don't require. For example, it would be cool to enable the programmer to ctrl-click on a cell to see the type of the program it contains, as well as an option to see the cumulative type along the row or built on a cell referenced from above. There is much fun to be had here.

To me, one sign of a really interesting project is how many tangential ideas flow out of it. For me, Loglo is teeming with ideas, and I'm not even in its target demographic. So, kudos to Avi!

Now, back to administrivia and that database course...

There's value to going into a field that you find difficult to grasp, as long as you're willing to be persistent. Even better, others can benefit from your persistence, too.

In an old essay, James Propp notes that working in a field where you lack intuition can "impart a useful freedom from prejudice". Even better...

... there's value in going into a field that you find difficult to grasp, as long as you're willing to be really persistent, because if you find a different way to think about things, something that works even for someone like you, chances are that other people will find it useful too.

This reminded me of a passage in Bob Nystroms's post about his new book, Crafting Interpreters. Nystrom took a long time to finish the book in large part because he wanted the interpreter at the end of each chapter to compile and run, while at the same time growing into the interpreter discussed in the next chapter. But that wasn't the only reason:

I made this problem harder for myself because of the meta-goal I had. One reason I didn't get into languages until later in my career was because I was intimidated by the reputation compilers have as being only for hardcore computer science wizard types. I'm a college dropout, so I felt I wasn't smart enough, or at least wasn't educated enough to hack it. Eventually I discovered that those barriers existed only in my mind and that anyone can learn this.

Some students avoid my compilers course because they assume it must be difficult, or because friends said they found it difficult. Even though they are CS majors, they think of themselves as average programmers, not "hardcore computer science wizard types". But regardless of the caliber of the student at the time they start the course, the best predictor of success in writing a working compiler is persistence. The students who plug away, working regularly throughout the two-week stages and across the entire project, are usually the ones who finish successfully.

One of my great pleasures as a prof is seeing the pride in the faces of students who demo a working compiler at the end of the semester, especially in the faces of the students who began the course concerned that they couldn't hack it.

As Propp points out in his essay, this sort of persistence can pay off for others, too. When you have to work hard to grasp an idea or to make something, you sometimes find a different way to think about things, and this can help others who are struggling. One of my jobs as a teacher is to help students understand new ideas and use new techniques. That job is usually made easier when I've had to work persistently to understand the idea myself, or to find a better way to help the students who teach me the ways in which they struggle.

In Nystrom's case, his hard work to master a field he didn't grasp immediately pays of for his readers. I've been following the growth of Crafting Interpreters over time, reading chapters in depth whenever I was able. Those chapters were uniformly easy to read, easy to follow, and entertaining. They have me thinking about ways to teach my own course differently, which is probably the highest praise I can give as a teacher. Now I need to go back and read the entire book and learn some more.

Teaching well enough that students grasp what they thought was not graspable and do what they thought was not doable is a constant goal, rarely achieved. It's always a work in progress. I have to keep plugging away.

Steve Wozniak in Founders at Work:

If you can just quickly whip something out and it's done, maybe it's time, once in a while, to think and think and think, "Can I make it better than it is, a little superior?" What that does is not necessarily make the product better in the end, but it brings you closer to the product, and your own head understands it better. Your neurons have gone through the code you wrote, or the circuits you designed, have gone through it more times, and it's just a little more solidly in your head and once in a while you'll wake up and say, "Oh my God, I just realized a bug that's in there, something I hadn't thought of."

Or, if you have to modify something, or add something new, you can do it very quickly when it's all in your head. You don't have to pull out the listing and find out where and maybe make a mistake. You don't make as many mistakes.

Many programmers know this feeling, of having a program in your head and moving in sync with it. When programs are small, it's easy for me to hold a program in my head. As it grows larger and spreads out over many functions, classes, and files, I have to live with it over an extended period of time. Taking one of Woz's dives into the just to work on it is a powerful way to refresh the feeling.

Beginning programmers have to learn this feeling, I think, and we should help them. In the beginning, my students know what it's like to have a program in their head all at once. The programs are small, and the new programmer has to pay attention to every detail. As programs grow, it becomes harder for them. They work locally to make little bits of code work, and suddenly they have a program that does fit naturally in their head. But they don't have the luxury of time to do what Woz suggests, because they are on to the next reading assignment, the next homework, the next class across campus.

One of the many reasons I like project courses such as my compiler course is that students live with the same code for an entire semester. Sure, they finish the scanner and move on to the parser, and then onto a type checker and a code generator, but they use their initial stages every day and live with the decisions they made. It's not uncommon for a student to tell me 1/2 or 3/4 of the way through the course, "I was looking at our scanner (or parser) the other day, and now I understand why we were having that problem I told you about. I'm going to fix it over Thanksgiving break."

In my programming languages course, we close with a three week three assignment project building an interpreter. I love when a student submitting on Part 3 says, "Hey, I just noticed that some parts of Part 2 could be better. I hope you don't mind that I improved that, too." Um, no. No, I don't mind at all. They get it.

It's easy to shortchange our students with too many small projects. I like most of my courses to have at least some code grow over the course of the semester. Students may not have the luxury of a lot of free time, but at least they work in proximity to their old code for a while. Serendipity may strike if we create the right conditions for it.

I have already begun to think about how I can foster this in my new course this fall. I hope to design it into the course upfront.

This week I read one of Craig Mod's old essays and found a great line, one that everyone who writes programs for other people should keep front of mind:

When it comes to software that people live in all day long, a 3% increase in fun should not be dismissed.

Working hard to squeeze a bit more speed out of a program, or to create even a marginally better interaction experience, can make a huge difference to someone who uses that program everyday. Some people spend most of their professional days inside one or two pieces of software, which accentuates further the human value of Mod's three percent. With shelter-in-place and work-from-home the norm for so many people these days, we face a secondary crisis of software that is no fun.

I was probably more sensitive than usual to Mod's sentiment when I read it... This week I used Blackboard for the first time, at least my first extended usage. The problem is not Blackboard, of course; I imagine that most commercial learning management systems are little fun to use. (What a depressing phrase "commercial learning management system" is.) And it's not just LMSes. We use various PeopleSoft "campus solutions" to run the academic, administrative, and financial operations on our campus. I always feel a little of my life drain away whenever I spend an hour or three clicking around and waiting inside this large and mostly functional labyrinth.

It says a lot that my first thought after downloading my final exams on Friday morning was, "I don't have to login to Blackboard again for a good long while. At least I have that going for me."

I had never used our LMS until this week, and then only to create a final exam that I could reliably time after being forced into remote teaching with little warning. If we are in this situation again in the fall, I plan to have an alternative solution in place. The programmer in me always feels an urge to roll my own when I encounter substandard software. Writing an entire LMS is not one of my life goals, so I'll just write the piece I need. That's more my style anyway.

Later the same morning, I saw this spirit of writing a better program in a context that made me even happier. The Friday of finals week is my department's biennial undergrad research day, when students present the results of their semester- or year-long projects. Rather than give up the tradition because we couldn't gather together in the usual way, we used Zoom. One student talked about alternative techniques for doing parallel programming in Python, and another presented empirical analysis of using IR beacons for localization of FIRST Lego League robots. Fun stuff.

The third presentation of the morning was by a CS major with a history minor, who had observed how history profs' lectures are limited by the tools they had available. The solution? Write better presentation software!

As I watched this talk, I was proud of the student, whom I'd had in class and gotten to know a bit. But I was also proud of whatever influence our program had on his design skills, programming skills, and thinking. This project, I thought, is a demonstration of one thing every CS student should learn: We can make the tools we want to use.

This talk also taught me something non-technical: Every CS research talk should include maps of Italy from the 1300s. Don't dismiss 3% increases in fun wherever they can be made.

This passage from Remembering the LAN recalls an earlier time that feels familiar:

My father, a general practitioner, used this infrastructure of cheap 286s, 386s, and 486s (with three expensive laser printers) to write the medical record software for the business. It was used by a dozen doctors, a nurse, and receptionist. ...

The business story is even more astonishing. Here is a non-programming professional, who was able to build the software to run their small business in between shifts at their day job using skills learned from a book.

I wonder how many hobbyist programmers and side-hustle programmers of this sort there are today. Does programming attract people the way it did in the '70s or '80s? Life is so much easier than typing programs out of Byte or designing your own BASIC interpreter from scratch. So many great projects out on Github and the rest of the web to clone, mimic, adapt. I occasionally hear a student talking about their own projects in this way, but it's rare.

As Crawshaw points out toward the end of his post, the world in which we program now is much more complex. It takes a lot more gumption to get started with projects that feel modern:

So much of programming today is busywork, or playing defense against a raging internet. You can do so much more, but the activation energy required to start writing fun collaborative software is so much higher you end up using some half-baked SaaS instead.

I am not a great example of this phenomenon -- Crawshaw and his dad did much more -- but even today I like to roll my own, just for me. I use a simple accounting system I've been slowly evolving for a decade, and I've cobbled together bits and pieces of my own tax software, not an integrated system, just what I need to scratch an itch each year. Then there are all the short programs and scripts I write for work to make Spreadsheet City more habitable. But I have multiple CS degrees and a lot of years of experience. I'm not a doctor who decides to implement what his or her office needs.

I suspect there are more people today like Crawshaw's father than I hear about. I wish it were more of a culture that we cultivated for everyone. Not everyone wants to bake their own bread, but people who get the itch ought to feel like the world is theirs to explore.

... or at least differently. From Inside Google's Efforts to Engineer Its Food for Healthiness:

So, instead of merely changing the food, Bakker changed the foodscape, ensuring that nearly every option at Google is healthy -- or at least healthyish -- and that the options that weren't stayed out of sight and out of mind.

This is how I've been thinking lately about teaching functional programming to my students, who have experience in procedural Python and object-oriented Java. As with deciding what we eat, how we think about problems and programs is mostly unconscious, a mixture of habit and culture. It is also something intimate and individual, perhaps especially for relative beginners who have only recently begun to know a language well enough to solve problems with some facility. But even for us old hands, the languages and mental tools we use to write programs can become personal. That makes change, and growth, hard.

In my last few offerings of our programming languages course, in which students learn Racket and functional style, I've been trying to change the programming landscape my students see in small ways whenever I can. Here are a few things I've done:

• I've shrunk the set of primitive functions that we use in the first few weeks. A larger set of tools offers more power and reach, but it also can distract. I'm hoping that students can more quickly master the small set of tools than the larger set and thus begin to feel more accomplished sooner.


• We work for the first few weeks on problems with less need for the tools we've moved out of sight, such as local variables and counter variables. If a program doesn't really benefit from a local variable, students will be less likely to reach for one. Instead, perhaps, they will reach for a function that can help them get closer to their goal.


• In a similar vein, I've tried to make explicit connections between specific triggers ("We're processing a list of data, so we'll need a loop.") with new responses ("map can help us here."). We then follow up these connections with immediate and frequent practice.

By keeping functional tools closer at hand, I'm trying to make it easier for these tools to become the new habit. I've also noticed how the way I speak about problems and problem solving can subtly shape how students approach problems, so I'm trying to change a few of my own habits, too.

It's hard for me to do all these things, but it's harder still when I'm not thinking about them. This feels like progress.

So far students seem to be responding well, but it will be a while before I feel confident that these changes in the course are really helping students. I don't want to displace procedural or object-oriented thinking from their minds, but rather to give them a new tool set they can bring out when they need or want to.

I saw Robin Sloan's An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal floating around Twitter a few days back. It really is quite good; give it a read if you haven't already. This passage captures a lot of the essay's spirit in only a few words:

The exhortation "learn to code!" has its foundations in market value. "Learn to code" is suggested as a way up, a way out. "Learn to code" offers economic leverage, a squirt of power. "Learn to code" goes on your resume.

But let's substitute a different phrase: "learn to cook." People don't only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But far more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably, or in a specific way. Or because they want to carry on a tradition. Sometimes they learn just because they're bored! Or even because -- get this -- they love spending time with the person who's teaching them.

Sloan expresses better than I ever have an idea that I blog about every so often. Why should people learn to program? Certainly it offers a path to economic gain, and that's why a lot of students study computer science in college, whether as a major, a minor, or a high-leverage class or two. There is nothing wrong with that. It is for many a way up, a way out.

But for some of us, there is more than money in programming. It gives you a certain power over the data and tools you use. I write here occasionally about how a small script or a relatively small program makes my life so much easier, and I feel bad for colleagues who are stuck doing drudge work that I jump past. Occasionally I'll try to share my code, to lighten someone else's burden, but most of the time there is such a mismatch between the worlds we live in that they are happier to keep plugging along. I can't say that I blame them. Still, if only they could program and used tools that enabled them to improve their work environments...

But... There is more still. From the early days of this blog, I've been open with you all:

Here's the thing. I like to write code.

One of the things that students like about my classes is that I love what I do, and they are welcome to join me on the journey. Just today a student in my Programming Languages drifted back to my office with me after class , where we ended up talking for half an hour and sketching code on a whiteboard as we deconstructed a vocabulary choice he made on our latest homework assignment. I could sense this student's own love of programming, and it raised my spirits. It makes me more excited for the rest of the semester.

I've had people come up to me at conferences to say that the reason they read my blog is because they like to see someone enjoying programming as much as they do. many of them share links with their students as if to say, "See, we are not alone." I look forward to days when I will be able to write in this vein more often.

Sloan reminds us that programming can be -- is -- more than a line on a resume. It is something that everyone can do, and want to do, for a lot of different reasons. It would be great if programming "were marbled deeply into domesticity and comfort, nerdiness and curiosity, health and love" in the way that cooking is. That is what makes Computing for All really worth doing.

Campaign Security is a Wood Chipper for Your Hopes and Dreams

Practical campaign security is a wood chipper for your hopes and dreams. It sits at the intersection of 19 kinds of status quo, each more odious than the last. You have to accept the fact that computers are broken, software is terrible, campaign finance is evil, the political parties are inept, the DCCC exists, politics is full of parasites, tech companies are run by arrogant man-children, and so on.

This piece from last year has some good advice, plenty of sarcastic humor from Maciej, and one remark that was especially timely for the past week:

You will fare especially badly if you have written an app to fix politics. Put the app away and never speak of it again.

Know the Difference Between Neurosis and Process

In a conversation between Tom Waits and Elvis Costello from the late 1980s, Waits talks about tinkering too long with a song:

TOM: "You have to know the difference between neurosis and actual process, 'cause if you're left with it in your hands for too long, you may unravel everything. You may end up with absolutely nothing."

In software, when we keep code in our hands for too long, we usually end up with an over-engineered, over-abstracted boat anchor. Let the tests tell you when you are done, then stop.

Sometimes, Work is Work

People say, "if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life." I think good work can be painful--I think sometimes it feels exactly like work.

Some weeks more than others. Trust me. That's okay. You can still love what you do.

In 1957, Dan McCracken published Digital Computer Programming, perhaps the first book on the new art of programming. His book shows that the roots of extreme programming run deep. In this passage, McCracken encourages both the writing of tests before the writing of code and the involvement of the customer in the software development process:

The first attack on the checkout problem may be made before coding is begun. In order to fully ascertain the accuracy of the answers, it is necessary to have a hand-calculated check case with which to compare the answers which will later be calculated by the machine. This means that stored program machines are never used for a true one-shot problem. There must always be an element of iteration to make it pay. The hand calculations can be done at any point during programming. Frequently, however, computers are operated by computing experts to prepare the problems as a service for engineers or scientists. In these cases it is highly desirable that the "customer" prepare the check case, largely because logical errors and misunderstandings between the programmer and customer may be pointed out by such procedure. If the customer is to prepare the test solution is best for him to start well in advance of actual checkout, since for any sizable problem it will take several days or weeks to calculate the test.

I don't have a copy of this book, but I've read a couple of other early books by McCracken, including one of his Fortran books for engineers and scientists. He was a good writer and teacher.

I had the great fortune to meet Dan at an NSF workshop in Clemson, South Carolina, back in the mid-1990s. We spent many hours in the evening talking shop and watching basketball on TV. (Dan was cheering his New York Knicks on in the NBA finals, and he was happy to learn that I had been a Knicks and Walt Frazier fan in the 1970s.) He was a pioneer of programming and programming education who was willing to share his experience with a young CS prof who was trying to figure out how to teach. We kept in touch by email thereafter. It was honor to call him a friend.

You can find the above quotation in A History of Test-Driven Development (TDD), as Told in Quotes, by Rob Myers. That post includes several good quotes that Myers had to cut from his upcoming book on TDD. "Of course. How else could you program?"

I recently read an interview with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, who has unorthodox opinions about documentaries and how to make them. In particular, he prefers to build his films out of extended interviews with a single subject. These interviews give him all the source material he needs, because they aren't about questions and answers. They are about stories:

First of all, I think all questions are more or less rhetorical questions. No one wants their questions answered. They just want to state their question. And, in answering the question, the person never wants to answer the question. They just want to talk.

Morris isn't asking questions; he is stating them. His subjects are not answering questions; they are simply talking.

(Think about this the next time your listening to an interview with a politician or candidate for office...)

At first, I was attracted to the sentiment in this paragraph. Then I became disillusioned with what I took to be its cynicism. Now, though, after a week or so, I am again enamored with its insight. How many of the questions I ask of software clients and professional colleagues are really statements of a position? How many of their answers are disconnected from the essential element of my questions? Even when these responses are disconnected, they communicate a lot to me, if only I listen. My clients and colleagues are often telling me exactly what they want me to know. This dynamic is present surprisingly often when I work with students at the university, too. I need to listen carefully when students don't seem to be answering my question. Sometimes it's because they have misinterpreted the question, and I need to ask differently. Sometimes it's because they are telling me what they want me to know, irrespective of the question.

And when my questions aren't really questions, but statements or some other speech act... well, I know I have some work to do.

In case you find Morris's view on interviews cynical and would prefer to ponder the new year with greater hope, I'll leave you with a more ambiguous quote about questions:

There are years that ask questions, and years that answer.

That's from Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. In hindsight, it may be true or false for any given year. As a way to frame the coming months, though, it may be useful.

I hope that 2020 brings you the answers you seek, or the questions.

I like tennis. The Tennis Abstract blog helps me keep up with the game and indulge my love of sports stats at the same time. An entry earlier this month gave a gentle introduction to Elo ratings as they are used for professional tennis:

One of the main purposes of any rating system is to predict the outcome of matches--something that Elo does better than most others, including the ATP and WTA rankings. The only input necessary to make a prediction is the difference between two players' ratings, which you can then plug into the following formula:

1 - (1 / (1 + (10 ^ (difference / 400))))

This formula always makes me smile. The first computer program I ever wrote because I really wanted to was a program to compute Elo ratings for my high school chess club. Over the years I've come back to Elo ratings occasionally whenever I had an itch to dabble in a new language or even an old favorite. It's like a personal kata of variable scope.

I read the Tennis Abstract piece this week as my students were finishing up their compilers for the semester and as I was beginning to think of break. Playful me wondered how I might implement the prediction formula in my students' source language. It is a simple functional language with only two data types, integers and booleans; it has no loops, no local variables, no assignments statements, and no sequences. In another old post, I referred to this sort of language as akin to an integer assembly language. And, heaven help me, I love to program in integer assembly language.

To compute even this simple formula in Klein, I need to think in terms of fractions. The only division operator performs integer division, so 1/x for any x gives 0. I also need to think carefully about how to implement the exponentiation 10 ^ (difference / 400). The difference between two players' ratings is usually less than 400 and, in any case, almost never divisible by 400. So My program will have to take an arbitrary root of 10.

Which root? Well, I can use our gcd() function (implemented using Euclid's algorithm, of course) to reduce diff/400 to its lowest terms, n/d, and then compute the dth root of 10^n. Now, how to take the dth root of an integer for an arbitrary integer d?

Fortunately, my students and I have written code like this in various integer assembly languages over the years. For instance, we have a SQRT function that uses binary search to hone in on the integer closest to the square of a given integer. Even better, one semester a student implemented a square root program that uses Newton's method:

   xn+1 = xn - f(xn)/f'(xn)

That's just what I need! I can create a more general version of the function that uses Newton's method to compute an arbitrary root of an arbitrary base. Rather than work with floating-point numbers, I will implement the function to take its guess as a fraction, represented as two integers: a numerator and a denominator.

This may seem like a lot of work, but that's what working in such a simple programming language is like. If I want my students' compilers to produce assembly language that predicts the result of a professional tennis match, I have to do the work.

This morning, I read a review of Francis Su's new popular math book, Mathematics for Human Flourishing. It reminds us that math isn't about rules and formulas:

Real math is a quest driven by curiosity and wonder. It requires creativity, aesthetic sensibilities, a penchant for mystery, and courage in the face of the unknown.

Writing my Elo rating program in Klein doesn't involve much mystery, and it requires no courage at all. It does, however, require some creativity to program under the severe constraints of a very simple language. And it's very much true that my little programming diversion is driven by curiosity and wonder. It's fun to explore ideas in a small space uses limited tools. What will I find along the way? I'll surely make design choices that reflect my personal aesthetic sensibilities as well as the pragmatic sensibilities of a virtual machine that know only integers and booleans.

As I've said before, I love to program.

I've been thinking a lot about technical debt this week. My student teams are in Week 13 of their compiler project and getting ready to submit their final systems. They've been living with their code long enough now to appreciate Ward Cunningham's original idea of technical debt: the distance between their understanding and the understanding embodied in their systems.

... it was important to me that we accumulate the learnings we did about the application over time by modifying the program to look as if we had known what we were doing all along and to look as if it had been easy to do in Smalltalk.

Actually, I think they are experiencing two gulfs: one relates to their understanding of the domain, compilers, and the other to their understanding of how to build software. Obviously, they are just learning about compilers and how to build one, so their content knowledge has grown rapidly while they've been programming. But they are also novice software engineers. They are really just learning how to build a big software system of any kind. Their knowledge of project management, communication, and their tools has also grown rapidly in parallel with building their system.

They have learned a lot about both content and process this semester. Several of them wish they had time to refactor -- to pay back the debt they accumulated honestly along the way -- but university courses have to end. Perhaps one or two of them will do what one or two students in most past semesters have done: put some of their own time into their compilers after the course ends, to see if they can modify the program to look as if they had known what they were doing all along, and to look as if it had been easy to do in Java or Python. There's a lot of satisfaction to be found at the end of that path, if they have the time and curiosity to take it.

One team leader tried to bridge the gulf in real time over the last couple of weeks: He was so unhappy with the gap between his team's code and their understanding that he did a complete rewrite of the first five stages of their compiler. This team learned what every team learns about rewrites and large-scale refactoring: they spend time that could otherwise have been spent on new development. In a time-boxed course, this doesn't always work well. That said, though, they will likely end up with a solid compiler -- as well as a lot of new knowledge about how to build software.

Being a prof is fun in many ways. One is getting to watch students learn how to build something while they are building it, and coming out on the other side with new code and new understanding.

This morning I read an old blog post by Michael Feathers, The Flawed Theory Behind Unit Testing. It discusses what makes TDD and Clean Room software development so effective for writing code with fewer defects: they define practices that encourage developers to work in a continuous state of reflection about their code. The post holds up well ten years on.

The line that lit my mind up, though, was this one:

John Nolan gave his developers a challenge: write OO code with no getters.

Twenty-plus years after the movement of object-oriented programming into the mainstream, this still looks like a radical challenge to many people. "Whenever possible, tell another object to do something rather than ask for its data." This sort of behavioral abstraction is the heart of OOP and the source of its design power. Yet it is rare to find big Java or C++ systems where most classes don't provide public accessors. When you open that door, client code will walk in -- even if you are the person writing the client code.

Whenever I look at a textbook intended for teaching undergraduates OOP, I look to see how it introduces encapsulation and the use of "getters" and "setters". I'm usually disappointed. Most CS faculty think doing otherwise would be too extreme for relative beginners. Once we open the door , though, it's a short step to using (gulp) instanceof to switch on kinds of objects. No wonder that some students are unimpressed and that too many students don't see any much value in OO programming, which as they learn it doesn't feel much different from what they've done before but which puts new limitations on them.

To be honest, though, it is hard to go Full Metal OOP. Nolan was working with professional programmers, not second-year students, and even so programming without getters was considered a challenge for them. There are certainly circumstances in which the forces at play may drive us toward cracking the door a bit and letting an instance variable sneak out. Experienced programmers know how to decide when the trade-off is worth it. But our understanding the downside of the trade-off is improved after we know how to design independent objects that collaborate to solve problems without knowing anything about the other objects beyond the services they provide.

Maybe we need to borrow an idea from the TDD As If You Meant It crowd and create workshops and books that teach and practice OOP as if we really meant it. Nolan's challenge above would be one of the central tenets of this approach, along with the Polymorphism Challenge and other practices that look odd to many programmers but which are, in the end, the heart of OOP and the source of its design power.

~~~~~

If you like this post, you might enjoy The Summer Smalltalk Taught Me OOP. It's isn't about OOP itself so much as about me throwing away systems until I got it right. But the reason I was throwing systems away was that I was still figuring out how to build an object-oriented system after years programming procedurally, and the reason I was learning so much was that I was learning OOP by building inside of Smalltalk and reading its standard code base. I'm guessing that code base still has a lot to teach many of us.

Brian Marick recently retweeted this old tweet from Ron Jeffries:

You: Explain this code to me, please.
They: blah blah blah.
You: Show me where the code says that.
They: <silence>
You: Let's make it say that.

I find this strategy quite helpful when writing my own code. If I can't explain any bit of code to myself clearly and succinctly, then I can take a step back and work on fixing my understanding before trying to fix the code. Once I understand, I'm a big fan of creating functions or methods whose names convey their meaning.

This is also a really handy strategy for me in my teaching. As a prof, I spend a fair amount of time explaining code I've written to students. The act of explaining a piece of code, whether written or spoken, often points me toward ways I can make the program better. If I find myself explaining the same piece of code to several students over time, I know the code can probably be better. So I try to fix it.

I also use a gentler variation of Jeffries' approach when working directly with students and their code. I try whenever I can to help my students learn how to write better programs. It can be tempting to start lecturing them on ways that their program could be better, but unsolicited advice of this sort rarely finds a happy place to land in their memory. Asking questions can be more effective, because questions can lead to a conversation in which students figure some things out on their own. Asking general questions usually isn't helpful, though, because students may not have enough experience to connect the general idea to the details of their program.

So: I find it helpful to ask a student to explain their code to me. Often they'll give me a beautiful answer, short and clear, that stands in obvious contrast to the code we are looking at out. This discrepancy leads to a natural follow-up question: How might we change the code so that it says that? The student can take the lead in improving their own programs, guided by me with bits of experience they haven't had yet.

Of course, sometimes the student's answer is complex or rambles off into silence. That's a cue to both of us that they don't really understand yet what they are trying to do. We can take a step back and help them fix their understanding -- of the problem or of the programming technique -- before trying to fix the code itself.

I recently read Anne-Laure Le Cunff's Interleaving: Rethink The Way You Learn. Le Cunff explains why interleaving -- "the process of mixing the practice of several related skills together" -- is more effective for long-term learning than blocked practice, in which students practice a single skill until they learn it and then move on to the next skill. Interleaving forces the brain to retrieve different problem-solving strategies more frequently and under different circumstances, which reinforces neural connections and improves learning.

To illustrate the distinction between interleaving and blocked practice, Le Cunff uses this image:

When I saw that diagram, I thought immediately of Extreme Programming. In particular, I thought of a diagram I once saw that distinguished XP from more traditional ways of building software in terms of how quickly it moved through the steps of the development life cycle. That image looked something like this:

If design is good, why not do it all the time? If testing is good, why not do it all the time, too?

I don't think that the similarity between these two images is an accident. It reflects one of XP's most important, if sometimes underappreciated, benefits: By interleaving short spurts of analysis, design, implementation, and testing, programmers strengthen their understanding of both the problem and the evolving code base. They develop stronger long-term memory associations with all phases of the project. Improved learning enables them to perform even more effectively deeper in the project, when these associations are more firmly in place.

Le Cunff offers a caveat to interleaved learning that also applies to XP: "Because the way it works benefits mostly our long-term retention, interleaving doesn't have the best immediate results." The benefits of XP, including more effective learning, accrue to teams that persist. Teams new to XP are sometimes frustrated by the small steps and seemingly narrow focus of their decisions. With a bit more experience, they become comfortable with the rhythm of development and see that their code base is more supple. They also begin to benefit from the more effective learning that interleaved practice provides.

~~~~

Image 1: This image comes from Le Cunff's article, linked above. It is by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, copyright Ness Labs 2019, and reproduced here with permission.

Image 2: I don't remember where I saw the image I hold in my memory, and a quick search through Extreme Programming Explained and Google's archives did not turn up anything like it. So I made my own. It is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

Earlier this week, I read this snippet about the benefits of "enjoyment bias" in Morgan Housel's latest blog post:

2. Enjoyment bias: An inefficient investing strategy that you enjoy will outperform an efficient one that feels like work because anything that feels like work will eventually be abandoned.

Getting anything to work requires giving it an appropriate amount of time. Giving it time requires not getting bored or burning out. Not getting bored or burning out requires that you love what you're doing, because that's when the hard parts become acceptable.

The programmer in me immediately thought, "I have this pattern." My guess is that this bias applies to a lot of things outside of investing. In software development, the choices of development methodology and programming language often benefit from enjoyment bias.

In programming as in investing, we can take this too far and hurt ourselves, our teams, and our users. Anything can be overdone. But, in general, we are more likely to stick with the hard work of building software when we enjoy the way we are building it and the tools we are using. Don't let others shame you away from what works for you.

This bias actually reminded me of a short bit from one of Paul Graham's essays on, of all things, procrastination:

I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you. Work on an ambitious project you really enjoy, and sail as close to the wind as you can, and you'll leave the right things undone.

Delight can keep you happily working when the going gets rough, and it can pull you toward work when a lack of delight would leave you killing time on stuff that doesn't matter.

(By the way, I think that several other biases described by Housel are also useful in programming. Consider the value of reasonable ignorance, number three on his list....)

In an old interview at Alphachatterbox, economist Brad DeLong adds another programming tale to the annals of unintended consequences:

So the Sage Air Defense system, which never produced a single usable line of software running on any piece of hardware -- we spent more on the Sage Air Defense System than we did on the entire Manhattan Project. And it was in one sense the ultimate government Defense Department boondoggle. But on the other hand it trained a whole generation of computer programmers at a time when very little else was useful that computer programmers could exercise their skills on.

And by the time the 1960s rolled around we not only ... the fact that Sage had almost worked provided say American Airlines with the idea that maybe they should do a computer-driven reservations system for their air travel, which I think was the next big Manhattan Project-scale computer programming project.

And as that moved on the computer programmers began finding more and more things to do, especially after IBM developed its System 360.

And we were off and running.

As DeLong says earlier in the conversation, this development upended IBM president Thomas Watson's alleged claim that there was "a use for maybe five computers in the world". This famous quote is almost certainly an urban legend, but Watson would not have been as off-base as people claim even if he had said it. In the 1950s, there was not yet a widespread need for what computers did, precisely because most people did not yet understand how computing could change the landscape of every activity. Training a slew of programmers for a project that ultimately failed had the unexpected consequence of creating the intellectual and creative capital necessary to begin exploring the ubiquitous applications of computing. Money unexpectedly well spent.

Today's lecture notes for my course include a link to @KentBeck's article on Prune, which I still enjoy.

The line that merits its link in today's session is:

We wrote an ugly, fragile state machine for our typeahead, which quickly became a source of pain and shame.

My students will soon likely experience those emotions about the state machines; they are building for lexers for their semester-long compiler project. I reassure them: These emotions are normal for programmers.

Raganwald tweeted:

If you design a language for people who have a talent for managing accidental complexity, you'll beget more and more accidental complexity over time.

Someone who can manage accidental complexity will always take on more if it makes them more productive.

This reminded me of a blog post from last November in which I half-jokingly coined The Peter Principle of Software Growth:

Software grows until it exceeds our capacity to understand it.

In the case of Raganwald's tweet, languages that enable us to handle accidental complexity well lead to more accidental complexity, because the people who use them will be more be more ambitious -- until they reach their saturation point. Both of these observations about software resemble the original Peter Principle, in which people who succeed are promoted until they reach a point at which they can't, or don't, succeed.

I am happy to dub Raganwald's observation "The Peter Principle of Accidental Complexity", but after three examples, I begin to recognize a pattern... Is there a general name for this phenomenon, in which successful actors advance or evolve naturally until they reach a point at which the can't, or don't, succeed?

If you have any ideas, please email me or respond on Twitter.

In a playful mood at the end of a strange and hectic week, I am now wondering whether there is a Peter Principle of Peter Principles.

I wasn't getting any work done today on my to-do list, so I decided to write some code.

One of my learning exercises to open the Summer of Joy is to solve the term frequency problem from Crista Lopes's Exercises in Programming Style. Joy is a little like Scheme: it has a lot of cool operations, especially higher-order operators, but it doesn't have much in the way of practical level tools for basic tasks like I/O. To compute term frequencies on an arbitrary file, I need to read the file onto Joy's stack.

I played around with Joy's low-level I/O operators for a while and built a new operator called readfile, which expects the pathname for an input file on top of the stack:

    DEFINE readfile ==
        (* 1 *)  [] swap "r" fopen
        (* 2 *)  [feof not] [fgets swap swonsd] while
        (* 3 *)  fclose.

The first line leaves an empty list and an input stream object on the stack. Line 2 reads lines from the file and conses them onto the list until it reaches EOF, leaving a list of lines under the input stream object on the stack. The last line closes the stream and pops it from the stack.

This may not seem like a big deal, but I was beaming when I got it working. First of all, this is my first while in Joy, which requires two quoted programs. Second, and more meaningful to me, the loop body not only works in terms of the dip idiom I mentioned in my previous post, it even uses the higher-order swonsd operator to implement the idiom. This must be how I felt the first time I mapped an anonymous lambda over a list in Scheme.

readfile leaves a list of lines on the stack. Unfortunately, the list is in reverse order: the last line of the file is the front of the list. Besides, given that Joy is a stack-based language, I think I'd like to have the lines on the stack itself. So I noodled around some more and implemented the operator pushlist:

    DEFINE pushlist ==
        (* 1 *)  [ null not ] [ uncons ] while
        (* 2 *)  pop.

Look at me... I get one loop working, so I write another. The loop on Line 1 iterates over a list, repeatedly taking (head . tail) and pushing head and tail onto the stack in that order. Line 2 pops the empty list after the loop terminates. The result is a stack with the lines from the file in order, first line on top:

    line-n ... line-3 line-2 line-1

Put readfile and pushlist together:

    DEFINE fileToStack == readfile pushlist.

and you get fileToStack, something like Python's readlines() function, but in the spirit of Joy: the file's lines are on the stack ready to be processed.

I'll admit that I'm pleased with myself, but I suspect that this code can be improved. Joy has a lot of dandy higher-order operators. There is probably a better way to implement pushlist and maybe even readfile. I won't be surprised if there is a more idiomatic way to implement the two that makes the two operations plug together with less rework. And I may find that I don't want to leave bare lines of text on the stack after all and would prefer having a list of lines. Learning whether I can improve the code, and how, are tasks for another day.

My next job for solving the term frequency problem is to split the lines into individual words, canonicalize them, and filter out stop words. Right now, all I know is that I have two more functions in my toolbox, I learned a little Joy, and writing some code made my day better.

"Elementary" ideas are really hard & need to be revisited
& explored & re-revisited at all levels of mathematical
sophistication. Doing so actually moves math forward.
-- James Tanton

Three summers ago, I spent a couple of weeks re-familiarizing myself with the concatenative programming language Joy and trying to go a little deeper with the style. I even wrote a few blog entries, including a few quick lessons I learned in my first week with the language. Several of those lessons hold up, but please don't look at the code linked there; it is the raw code of a beginner who doesn't yet get the idioms of the style or the language. Then other duties at work and home pulled me away, and I never made the time to get back to my studies.

I have dubbed this the Summer of Joy. I can't devote the entire summer to concatenative programming, but I'm making a conscious effort to spend a couple of days each week in real study and practice. After only one week, I have created enough forward momentum that I think about problems and solutions at random times of the day, such as while walking home or making dinner. I think that's a good sign.

An even better sign is that I'm starting to grok some of the idioms of the style. Joy is different from other concatenative languages like Forth and Factor, but it shares the mindset of using stack operators effectively to shape the data a program uses. I'm finally starting to think in terms of dip, an operator that enables a program to manipulate data just below the top of the stack. As a result, a lot of my code is getting smaller and beginning to look like idiomatic Joy. When I really master dip and begin to think in terms of other "dipping" operators, I'll know I'm really on my way.

One of my goals for the summer is to write a Joy compiler from scratch that I can use as a demonstration in my fall compiler course. Right now, though, I'm still in Joy user mode and am getting the itch for a different sort of language tool... As my Joy skills get better, I find myself refactoring short programs I've written in the past. How can I be sure that I'm not breaking the code? I need unit tests!

So my first bit of tool building is to implement a simple JoyUnit. As a tentative step in this direction, I created the simplest version of RackUnit's check-equal? function possible:

    DEFINE check-equal == [i] dip i =.

This operator takes two quoted programs (a test expression and an expected result), executes them, and compares the results. For example, this test exercises a square function:

    [ 2 square ] [ 4 ] check-equal.

This is, of course, only the beginning. Next I'll add a message to display when a test fails, so that I can tell at a glance which tests have failed. Eventually I'll want my JoyUnit to support tests as objects that can be organized into suites, so that their results can be tallied, inspected, and reported on. But for now, YAGNI. With even a few simple functions like this one, I am able to run tests and keep my code clean. That's a good feeling.

To top it all off, implementing JoyUnit will force me to practice writing Joy and push me to extend my understanding while growing the set of programming tools I have at my disposal. That's another good feeling, and one that might help me keep my momentum as a busy summer moves on.

A thought from <antirez> in an essay on the struggles of an open source maintainer (paraphrased a bit):

Sometimes I believe that writing software, while great, will never be huge like writing a book that will survive for centuries. Not because software is not as great per se, but because as a side effect it is also useful... and will be replaced when something more useful is around.

We write most software with a particular use in mind, so it is really only fair to compare it to non-fiction books, which also have a relatively short shelf life. To be fair, though, not many fiction books survive for centuries, either. Language and fashion doom them almost as much as evolving technology destines most software to fade away within a generation, and a short generation at that.

Still, I won't be surprised if the DNA of Smalltalk-80 or some early Lisp implementation lives on deep in a system that developers use in the 22nd century.

In an answer on Quora from earlier this year:

There are several modern APL-like languages today -- such as J and K -- but I would criticize them as being too much like the classic APL. It is possible to extract what is really great from APL and use it in new language designs without being so tied to the past. This would be a great project for some grad students of today: what does the APL perspective mean today, and what kind of great programming language could be inspired by it?

The APL perspective was more radical even twenty years ago, before MapReduce became a thing and before functional programming ascended. When I was an undergrad, though, it seemed otherworldly: setting up a structure, passing it through a sequence of operators that changed its shape, and then passing it through a sequence of operators that folded up a result. We knew we weren't programming in Fortran anymore.

I'm still fascinated by APL, but I haven't done a lot with it in the intervening years. These days I'm still thinking about concatenative programming in languages like Forth, Factor, and Joy, a project I reinitiated (and last blogged about) three summers ago. Most concatenative languages work with an implicit stack, which gives it a very different feel from APL's dataflow style. I can imagine, though, that working in the concision and abstraction of concatenative languages for a while will spark my interest in diving back into APL-style programming some day.

Kay's full answer is worth a read if only for the story in which he connects Iverson's APL notation, and its effect on how we understand computer systems, to the evolution of Maxwell's equations. Over the years, I've heard Kay talk about McCarthy's Lisp interpreter as akin to Maxwell's equations, too. In some ways, the analogy works even better with APL, though it seems that the lessons of Lisp have had a larger historical effect to date.

Perhaps that will change? Alas, as Kay says in the paragraph that precedes his challenge:

As always, time has moved on. Programming language ideas move much slower, and programmers move almost not at all.

Kay often comes off as pessimistic, but after all the computing history he has lived through (and created!), he has earned whatever pessimism he feels. As usual, reading one of his essays makes me want to buckle down and do something that would make him proud.

Dick Gabriel writes, in Lessons From The Science of Nothing At All:

Nevertheless, the spreadsheet was something never seen before. A chart indicating the 64 greatest events in accounting and business history contains VisiCalc.

This reminds me of a line from The Tao of Pooh:

Take the path to Nothing, and go Nowhere until you reach it.

A lot of research is like this, but even more so in computer science, where the things we produce are generally made out of nothing. Often, like VisiCalc, they aren't really like anything we've ever seen or used before either.

In one of his "Conversations with Tyler", Tyler Cowen talks with Daniel Kahneman about intuition and its relationship to thinking fast and slow. According to Kahneman, evidence supports his position that most people have not had the experience necessary to develop intuition that is good enough for solving problems directly. So he thinks that most people, including most so-called experts, should slow down.

So I think delaying intuition is a very good idea. Delaying intuition until the facts are in, at hand, and looking at dimensions of the problem separately and independently is a better use of information.

The problem with intuition is that it forms very quickly, so that you need to have special procedures in place to control it except in those rare cases...

...

Break the decision up. It's not so much a matter of time because you don't want people to get paralyzed by analysis. But it's a matter of planning how you're going to make the decision, and making it in stages, and not acting without an intuitive certainty that you are doing the right thing. But just delay it until all the information is available.

This is one of the things that I find most helpful about test-driven design when I practice it faithfully. It's pretty easy for me to think that I know everything I need to implement a program after I've read the spec and thought about it for a few minutes. I mean, I've written a lot of code over the years... If my intuition tells me where to go, I can start right away and have the whole path ahead of me in my mind.

But how often do I really have evidence that my intuitive plan is the correct one? If I'm wrong, I'll spend a bunch of time and write a bunch of code, only later to find out I'm wrong. What's worse, all that code I've written usually ends up feeling like a constraint within which I have to work as I try to dig myself out of the mess.

Writing one test at a time and implementing just the code I need to pass it is a way to force my intuitive mind to slow down. It helps me think about the actual problem I'm solving, rather than the abstraction my expert brain infers from the spec. The program grows slowly along side my understanding and points me in the direction of the next small step to take.

TDD is a procedure I can put in place to help me control my intuition until the facts are in, and it encourages me to look at different dimensions of the problem independently as write the code to solve them.

When I refactor my code, I most often think in terms of what Martin Fowler calls preparatory refactoring: if it's difficult to add a new feature to my program, I refactor the existing code into a state where the feature fits naturally somewhere, then I add the feature. As is often the case, Kent Beck captured this notion memorably in a tweet-sized aphorism. I was delighted to see that Martin's blog post, which I remember fondly, cites the same tweet!

Ideas from programming are usually instances of more general ideas from the broader world, specialized to a world of bits and computation. Back when I taught our object-oriented programming course every semester, I often referred my students to a web site that offered real-life examples of the various design patterns we were learning. I remember an example of Decorator that showed how we can embellish a painting with a matte or a frame, and its use of the U.S. Constitution's specification of the President to illustrate the idea of a Singleton. I can't find that site on the web just now, but there's almost surely a local copy buried in one of my course websites from way back.

The idea of refactoring is useful outside the world of software, too. Just yesterday, my dean suggested what I consider to be a preparatory refactoring.

A committee on campus is charged with proposing ways that the university can restructure its colleges and departments. With the exception of a merger of two colleges a few years ago, we have had essentially the same academic structure for my entire time here. In those years, disciplines have changed and budgets have changed, so now the administration is thinking that the university might be more efficient or more productive with a different structure. Thinking about the process from this perspective, restructuring is largely a reaction to change that has already happened.

My dean suggested another way to approach the task. Think, he said, of the new academic programs that you'd like to create in the future. We may not have money available right now to create a new major or to organize a new research center, but one day we might. What university structure would make adding this program go more smoothly and work better once in place? Which departments would the new program want to work with? Which administrative structures already in place would minimize unnecessary overhead of the new program? As much as possible, he suggested, let's try to create a new academic structure that suits the future programs we'd like to build. That will reduce friction later, which is good: Administrative friction often grinds new academic ideas to a halt before they get off the ground.

In programming terms, this is quite bit different than the sort of refactoring I prefer. I try to practice YAGNI and refactor only for the specific feature that I want to add right now, not taking into account imagined future features I may never need. In terms of academic structure, though, this sort of ip-front design makes a lot of sense. Academic structures are much harder to change than software; getting a few things right now may make future changes at the program level much easier to implement later.

Thinking about academic restructuring this way has another positive side effect: it might entice faculty to be more engaged, because what we do now matters to the future we would like to build. It's not merely a reaction to past changes.

My dean is suggesting that we build academic structures now that make the changes we want to implement later (when the resources and requisite will exist) easier to implement. Building those structures now may take more work than simply responding to past changes, but it will be worth the effort when we are ready to create new programs. I think Kent and Martin might be proud.

I ran across an old interview with Douglas Crockford recently. When asked what traits were common to the weak programmers he'd seen over his career, Crockford said:

That's an easy one: lack of curiosity. They were so satisfied with the work that they were doing was good enough (without an understanding of what 'good' was) that they didn't push themselves.

I notice a lack of curiosity in many CS students, too. It's even easier for beginners than professional programmers to be satisfied with meeting the minimal requirements of a project -- "I got the right answers!" or, much worse, "It compiles!" -- and not realize that good code can be more. Part of our goal as teachers is to help students develop higher standards and more refined taste while they are in school.

There's another sense, though, in which holding students' lack of curiosity against them is a dangerous trap for professors. In moments of weakness, I occasionally look at my students and think, "Why doesn't this excite them more? Why don't they want to write code for fun?" I've come to realize over the years that our school system doesn't always do much to help students cultivate their curiosity. But with a little patience and a little conversation, I often find that my students are curious -- just not always about the things that intrigue me.

This shouldn't be a surprise. Even at the beginning of my career as a prof, I was a different sort of person than most of my students. Now that I'm a few years older, it's almost certain that I will not be in close connection with my students and what interests them most. Why would they necessarily care about the things I care about?

Bridging this gap takes time and energy. I have to work to build relationships both with individuals and with the group of students taking my course each semester. This work requires patience, which I've learned to appreciate more and more as I've taught. We don't always have the time we need in one semester, but that's okay. One of the advantages of teaching at a smaller school is time: I can get to know students over several semesters and multiple courses. We have a chance to build relationships that enrich the students' learning experience -- and my experience as a teacher.

Trying to connect with the curiosity of many different students creates logistical challenges when designing courses, examples, and assignments, of course. I'm often drawn back to Alan Kay's paradigm, Frank Oppenheimer's Exploratorium, which Kay discussed in his Turing Award lecture. The internet is, in many ways, a programmer's exploratorium, but it's so big, so disorganized, and of such varying levels of quality... Can we create collections of demos and problems that will contain something to connect with just about every student? Many of my posts on this blog, especially in the early years, grappled with this idea. (Here are two that specifically mention the Exploratorium: Problems Are The Thing and Mathematics, Problems, and Teaching.)

Sometimes I think the real question isn't: "Why aren't students more curious?" It is: "Are we instructors curious enough about our students?"

Andy Ko, in SIGCSE 2019 report:

I always have to warn my students before they attend SIGCSE that it's not a place for deep and nuanced discussions about learning, nor is it a place to get critical feedback about their ideas.

It is, however, a wonderful place to be immersed in the concerns of CS teachers and their perceptions of evidence.

I'm not sure I agree that one can't have deep, nuanced discussions about learning at SIGCSE, but it certainly is not a research conference. It is a great place to talk to and learn from people in the trenches teaching CS courses, with a strong emphasis on the early courses. I have picked up a lot of effective, creative, and inspiring ideas at SIGCSE over the years. Putting them onto sure scientific footing is part of my job when I get back.

~~~~~

Stephen Kell, in Some Were Meant for C (PDF), an Onward! 2017 essay:

Unless we can understand the real reasons why programmers continue to use C, we risk researchers continuing to solve a set of problems that is incomplete and/or irrelevant, while practitioners continue to use flawed tools.

For example,

... "faster safe languages" is seen as the Important Research Problem, not better integration.

... whereas Kell believes that C's superiority in the realm of integration is one of the main reasons that C remains a dominant, essential systems language.

Even with the freedom granted by tenure, academic culture tends to restrict what research gets done. One cause is a desire to publish in the best venues, which encourages work that is valued by certain communities. Another reason is that academic research tends to attract people who are interested in a certain kind of clean problem. CS isn't exactly "round, spherical chickens in a vacuum" territory, but... Language support for system integration, interop, and migration can seem like a grungier sort of work than most researchers envisioned when they went to grad school.

"Some Were Meant for C" is an elegant paper, just the sort of work, I imagine, that Richard Gabriel had when envisioned the essays track at Onward. Well worth a read.

In a conversation with Tyler Cowen, economist John Nye expresses disappointment with the nature of discourse in his discipline:

The thing I'm really frustrated by is that it doesn't matter whether people are writing from a socialist or a libertarian perspective. Too much of the discussion of political economy is normative. It's about "what should the ideal state be?"

I'm much more concerned with the questions of "what good states are possible?" And once good states are created that are possible, what good states are sustainable? And that, in my view, is a still understudied and very poorly understood issue.

For some reason, this made me think about software development. Programming styles, static and dynamic typing, software development methodologies, ... So much that is written about these topics tells us what's the right the thing to do. "Do this, and you will be able to reliably make good software."

I know I've been partisan on some of these issues over the course of my time as a programmer, and I still have my personal preferences. But these days especially I find myself more interested in "what good states are sustainable?". What has worked for teams? What conditions seem to make those practices work well or not so well? How do teams adapt to changes in the domain or the business or the team's make-up?

This isn't too say that we can't draw conclusions about forces and context. For example, small teams seem to make it easier to adapt to changing conditions; to make it work with bigger teams, we need to design systems that encourage attention and feedback. But it does mean that we can help others succeed without always telling them what they must do. We can help them find a groove that syncs with them and the conditions under which they work.

Standing back and surveying the big picture, it seems that a lot of good states are sustainable, so long as we pay attention and adapt to the world around us. And that should be good news to us all.

Shriram Krishnamurthi, in Books as Software:

I have said that a book is a collection of components. I have concrete evidence that some of my users specifically excerpt sections that suit their purpose. ...

I forecast that one day, rich document formats like PDF will recognize this reality and permit precisely such specifications. Then, when a user selects a group of desired chapters to generate a thinner volume, the software will automatically evaluate constraints and include all dependencies. To enable this we will even need "program" analyses that help us find all the dependencies, using textual concordances as a starting point and the index as an auxiliary data structure.

I am one of the users Krishnamurthi speaks of, who has excerpted sections from his Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation to suit the purposes of my course. Though I've not written a book, I do post, use, adapt, and reuse detailed lecture notes for my courses, and as a result I have seen both sides of the divide he discusses. I occasionally change the order of topics in a course, or add a unit, or drop a unit. An unseen bit of work is to account for the dependencies among concepts, examples, problems, and code in the affected sections, but also in the new whole. My life is simpler than book writers who have to deal at least in part with rich document formats: I do everything in a small, old-style subset of HTML, which means I can use simple text-based tools for manipulating everything. But dependencies? Yeesh.

Maybe I need to write a big makefile for my course notes. Alas, that would not help me manage dependencies in the way I'd like, or in the way Krishnamurthi forecasts. As such, it would probably make things worse. I suppose that I could create the tool I need.

Last week I blogged about writing code that is easy to delete, drawing on some great lines from an old 'programming is terrible' post. Here's another passage from @tef's post that's worth thinking more about:

Step 1: Copy-paste code

Building reusable code is something that's easier to do in hindsight with a couple of examples of use in the code base, than foresight of ones you might want later. On the plus side, you're probably re-using a lot of code already just by using the file-system, why worry that much? A little redundancy is healthy.

It's good to copy-paste code a couple of times, rather than making a library function, just to get a handle on how it will be used. Once you make something a shared API, you make it harder to change.

There's not a great one-liner in there, but these paragraphs point to a really important lesson, one that we programmers sometimes have a hard time learning. We are told so often "don't repeat yourself" that we come to think that all repetition is the same. It's not.

One use of repetition is in avoiding what @tef calls, in another 'programming is terrible' post, "preemptive guessing". Consider the creation of a new framework. Oftentimes, designing a framework upfront doesn't work very well because we don't know the domain's abstractions yet. One of the best ways to figure out what they are is to write several applications first, and let framework fall out the applications. While doing this, repetition is our friend: it's most useful to know what things don't change from one application to another. This repetition is a hint on how to build the framework we need. I learned this technique from Ralph Johnson.

I use and teach a similar technique for programming in smaller settings, too. When we see two bits of code that resemble one another, it often helps to increase the duplication in order to eliminate it. (I learned this idea from Kent Beck.) In this case, the goal of the duplication is to find useful abstractions. Sometimes, though, code duplication is really a hint to think differently about a problem. Factoring out a function or class -- finding a new abstraction -- may be incidental to the learning that takes place.

For me, this line from from the second programming-is-terrible post captures this idea perfectly:

... duplicate to find the right abstraction first, then deduplicate to implement it.

My spell checker objects to the word "deduplicate", but I'll allow it.

All of these ideas taken together are the reason that I think copy-and-paste gets an undeservedly bad name. Used properly, it is a valuable programming technique -- essential, really. I've long wanted to write a Big Ball of Mud-style paper about copy-and-paste patterns. There are plenty of good reasons why we write repetitive code and, as @tef says in the two posts I link to above, sometimes leaving duplication in your code is the right thing to do.

One final tribute to repetition for now. While researching this blog post, I ran across a blog entry of mine from October 2016. Apparently, I had just read @tef's Write code that is easy to delete... post and felt an undeniable urge to quote and comment on it. If you read that 2016 post, you'll see that my Writing code that is easy to delete post from last week duplicates it in spirit and, in a few cases, even the details. I swear that I read @tef's post again last week and wrote the new blog entry from scratch, with no memory of the 2016 events. I am perfectly happy with this second act. Sometimes, ideas circle through our brains again, changing us in imperceptible ways. As @tef says, a little redundancy is healthy.

Alex Honnold is a rock climber who was the first person to "free solo" Yosemite's El Capitan rock wall. In an interview for a magazine, he was asked what it takes to reach ever higher goals. One bit of advice was to "aim for joy, not euphoria". When you prepare to achieve a goal, it may not feel like a big surprise when you achieve it because you prepared to succeed. Don't expect to be overwhelmed by powerful emotions when you accomplish something new; doing so sets too high a standard and can demotivate you.

This paragraph, though, is the one that spoke to me:

Someone recently said to me about running: "It never feels easier--you just go faster." A lot of sports always feel terrible. Climbing is always like that. You always feel weak and like you suck, but you can do harder and harder things.

As a one-time marathoner, never fast but always training to run a PR in my next race, I know what Honnold means. However, I also feel something similar as a programmer. Writing software often seems like a slog that I'm not very good at. I'm forever looking up language features in order to get my code to work, and then I end up with programs that are bulky and fight me at every turn. I refactor and rewrite and... find myself back in the slog. I don't feel terrible all that often, but I am usually a little on edge.

Yet if I compare the programs I write today with ones I wrote 5 or 10 or 30 years ago, I can see that I'm doing more interesting work. This is the natural order. Once I know how to do one thing, I seek tougher problems to solve.

In the article, the passage quoted above is labeled "Feeling awful is normal." I wonder if programming feels more accessible to people who are comfortable with a steady, low-grade intellectual discomfort punctuated by occasional bouts of head banging. Honnold's observation might reassure beginning programmers who don't already know that feeling uneasy is a natural part of pushing yourself to do more interesting work.

All that said, even when I was training for my next marathon, I was always able to run for fun. There was nothing quite like an easy run at sunrise to boost my mood. Fortunately, I am still able to program that way, too. Every once in a while, I like to write code to solve some simple problem I run across on Twitter or in a blog entry somewhere. I find that these interludes recharge me before I battling the next big problem I decide to tackle. I hope that my students can still programming in this way as they advance on to bigger challenges.

Last week someone tweeted a link to Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend. It contains a lot of great advice on how to create codebases that are easy to maintain and easy to change, the latter being an essential feature of almost any code that is the former. I liked this article so much that I wanted to share some of its advice here. What follows are a few of the many one- and two-liners that serve as useful slogans for building maintainable software, with light commentary.

... repeat yourself to avoid creating dependencies, but don't repeat yourself to manage them.

This line from the first page of the paper hooked me. I'm not sure I had ever had this thought, at least not so succinctly, but it captures a bit of understanding that I think I had. Reading this, I knew I wanted to read the rest of the article.

Make a util directory and keep different utilities in different files. A single util file will always grow until it is too big and yet too hard to split apart. Using a single util file is unhygienic.

This isn't the sort of witticism that I quote in the rest of this post, but its solid advice that I've come to live by over the years. I have this pattern.

Boiler plate is a lot like copy-pasting, but you change some of the code in a different place each time, rather than the same bit over and over.

I really like the author's distinction between boilerplate and copy-and-paste. Copy-and-paste has valuable uses (heresy, I know; more later), whereas boilerplate sucks the joy out of almost every programmer's life.

You are writing more lines of code, but you are writing those lines of code in the easy-to-delete parts.

Another neat distinction. Even when we understand that lines of code are an expense as much as (or instead of) an investment, we know that sometimes we have write more code. Just do it in units that are easy to delete.

A lesson in separating concerns, from Python libraries:

requests is about popular http adventures, urllib3 is about giving you the tools to choose your own adventure.

Layers! I have had users of both of these libraries suggest that the other should not exist, but they serve different audiences. They meet different needs in a way that that more than makes up for the cost of the supposed duplication.

Building a pleasant to use API and building an extensible API are often at odds with each other.

There's nothing earth-shattering in this observation, but I like to highlight different kinds of trade-off whenever I can. Every important decision we make writing programs is a trade-off.

Good APIs are designed with empathy for the programmers who will use it, and layering is realising we can't please everyone at once.

This advice elaborates on the quote earlier to repeat code in order not to create dependencies, but not to manage them. Creating a separate API is one way to avoid dependencies to code that are hard to delete.

Sometimes it's easier to delete one big mistake than try to delete 18 smaller interleaved mistakes.

Sometimes it really is best to write a big chunk of code precisely because it is easy to delete. An idea that is distributed throughout a bunch of functions or modules has to be disentangled before you can delete it.

Becoming a professional software developer is accumulating a back-catalogue of regrets and mistakes.

I'm going to use this line in my spring Programming Languages class. There are unforeseen advantages to all the practice we profs ask students to do. That's where experience comes from.

We are not building modules around being able to re-use them, but being able to change them.

This is another good bit of advice for my students, though I'll write this one more clearly. When students learn to program, textbooks often teach them that the main reason to write a function is that you can reuse it later, thus saving the effort of writing similar code again. That's certainly one benefit of writing a function, but experienced programmers know that there are other big wins in creating functions, classes, and modules, and that these wins are often even more valuable than reuse. In my courses, I try to help students appreciate the value of names in understanding and modifying code. Modularity also makes it easier to change and, yes, delete code. Unfortunately, students don't always get the right kind of experience in their courses to develop this deeper understanding.

Although the single responsibility principle suggests that "each module should only handle one hard problem", it is more important that "each hard problem is only handled by one module".

Lovely. The single module that handles a hard problem is a point of leverage. It can be deleted when the problem goes away. It can be rewritten from scratch when you understand the problem better or when the context around the problem changes.

This line is the heart of the article:

The strategies I've talked about -- layering, isolation, common interfaces, composition -- are not about writing good software, but how to build software that can change over time.

Good software is software that can you can change. One way to create software you can change is to write code that you can easily replace.

Good code isn't about getting it right the first time. Good code is just legacy code that doesn't get in the way.

A perfect aphorism to close to the article, and to perfect way to close this post: Good code is legacy code that doesn't get in the way.

I love this line from Organizational Debt:

So my proposal for Rust 2019 is not that big of a deal, I guess: we just need to redesign our decision making process, reorganize our governance structures, establish new norms of communication, and find a way to redirect a significant amount of capital toward Rust contributors.

A solid understatement usually makes me smile. Decision-making processes, governance structure, norms of communication, and compensation for open-source developers... no big deal, indeed. We all await the results. If the results come with advice that generalizes beyond a single project, especially the open-source compensation thing, all the better.

Communication is a big part of the recommendation for 2019. Changing how communication works is tough in any organization, let alone an organization with distributed membership and leadership. In every growing organization there eventually comes the time for intentional systems of communication:

But we've long since reached the point where coordinating our design vision by osmosis is not working well. We need an active and intentional circulatory system for information, patterns, and frameworks of decision making related to design.

I'm not a member of the Rust community, only an observer. But I know that the language inspires some programmers, and I learned a bit about its tool chain and community support a couple of years ago when an ambitious student used it successfully to implement his compiler in my course. It's the sort of language we need, being created in what looks to be an admirable way. I wish the Rust team well as they tackle their organizational debt and tackle their growing pains.

In Quality and Effort, Seth Godin reminds us that being careful can take us only so far toward the quality we seek. Humans make mistakes, so we need processes and systems in place to help us avoid them. Near the end of the post, he writes:

In school, we harangue kids to be more careful, and spend approximately zero time teaching them to build better systems instead. We ignore checklists and processes because we've been taught that they're beneath us.

This paragraph isolates one of the great powers we can teach our students, but also a glaring weakness in how most of us actually teach. I've been a professor for many years now, and before that I was a student for many years. I've seen a lot of students succeed and a few not do as well as they or I had hoped. Students who are methodical, patient, and disciplined in how they read, study, and program are much more likely to be in the successful group.

Rules and discipline sometimes get a bad rap these days. Creativity and passion are our catchwords. But dull, boring systems are often the keys that unlock the doors to getting things done and moving on to learn and do cooler things.

Students occasionally ask me why I slavishly follow the processes I teach them, whether it's a system as big as test-first development and refactoring or a process as simple as the technique for creating NFAs and converting them to DFAs. I tell them that I don't always trust myself but that I do trust the system: it almost always leads me to a working solution. Sure, in this moment or that I might be fine going off script, but... Good habits generate positive returns, while freewheeling it too often lets an error sneak in. (When I go off script in class, they too often get to see just that!)

We do our students a great favor when when we help them learn systems that work. Following a design recipe or something like it may be boring, but students who learn to follow it develop stronger programming skills, enjoy the success of getting projects done successfully, and graduate on to more interesting problems. As the system becomes ingrained as habit, they usually begin to appreciate it as an enabler of their success.

I agree with Godin: If it matters enough to be careful, then it matters enough to build (or learn) a system.

This morning I read Against Software Development, which considers two tragedies of software development and a moral exhortation. One of the tragedies:

Software grows until it exceeds our capacity to understand it.

This observation reminds me of the Peter Principle from business management, which points out that people in a business are promoted until to they reach a level at which they are incompetent. Success in the hierarchy ends when people find that their skills no longer match the needs of their job.

We see something similar in software. We write a program to solve a problem. At this point, we understand the program completely so, when we see an opportunity for a new feature, we extend it. We still understand the system, so we add a bit more complexity, either implementing a new subtask or elaborating an existing feature with more detail. This process keeps happening until... we don't understand the program any more. Or, more likely, we understand it at a macro level but no longer grok all of the interconnections and dependencies among components. The result is Peter-like: the program stops growing. The root cause is not the incompetence of developers, but a fear born out complexity.

Having a system under a comprehensive set of tests can help stave off this fear. With careful attention, some time, and energy, we can use refactoring can sometimes reverse the entropy that sets in over time. But often the practicalities of organizations leave us with a big piece of software that we don't really understand, a system that can't grow or be changed to fit the evolving context in which it operates.

Many companies then find themselves in an odd situation: ossifying the organization's processes and procedures in order to stay in conformance with a piece of software its developers no long understand. Software rigidity becomes organizational rigidity.

Stay vigilant! With good development practices, perhaps you can push the point of no understanding farther into the future. But be ready for the day. It will probably arrive, sooner or later.

Beds are useful. I enjoyed my bed at the hotel last night. But you won't find a pattern called bed in A Pattern Language, and that's because we don't have a problem with beds. Beds are solved. What we have a problem with is building with beds. And that's why, if you look in A Pattern Language, you'll find there are a number of patterns that involve beds.

Now, the analogy I want to make is, basically, the design patterns in the book Design Patterns are at the same level as the building blocks in the book A Pattern Language. So Bridge, which is one of the design patterns, is the same kind of thing as column. You can call it a pattern, but it's not really a pattern that gets at the root problem we're trying to solve. And if Alexander had written a book that had a pattern called Bed and another one called Chair, I imagine that that book would have failed and not inspired all of the people that the actual book did inspire. So that, I claim, is why patterns failed.

Those two nearly-sequential paragraphs are from Patterns Failed. Why? Should We Care?, a talk Brian Marick gave at Deconstruct 2017. It's a good talk. Marick's provocative claim that, as an idea, software patterns failed is various degrees of true and false depending on how you define 'patterns' and 'failed'. It's hard to declare the idea an absolute failure, because a lot of software developers and UI designers use patterns to good effect as a part of their work every day. But I agree with Brian that software patterns failed to live up to their promise or to the goals of the programmers who worked so hard to introduce Christopher Alexander's work to the software community. I agree, too, that the software pattern community's inability to document and share patterns at the granularity that made Alexander's patterns so irresistible is a big part of why.

I was a second- or third-generation member of the patterns community, joining in after Design Patterns had been published and, like Marick, I worked mostly on the periphery. Early on I wrote patterns that related to my knowledge-based systems work. Much of my pattern-writing, though, was at the level of elementary patterns, the patterns that novice programmers learn when they are first learning to program. Even at that level, the most useful patterns often were ones that operated up one level from the building blocks that novices knew.

Consider Guarded Linear Search, from the Loop Patterns paper that Owen Astrachan and I workshopped at PLoP 1998. It helps beginners learn how to arrange a loop and an if statement in a way that achieves a goal. Students in my beginning courses often commented how patterns like this one helped them write programs because, while they understood if statements and for statements and while statements, they didn't always know what to do with them when facing a programming task. At that most elementary level, the Guarded Linear Search pattern was a pleasing -- and useful -- whole.

That said, there aren't many "solved problems" for beginners, so we often wrote patterns that dropped down to the level of building blocks simply to help novices learn basic constructs. Some of the Loop Patterns paper does that, as does Joe Bergin's Patterns for Selection. But work in the elementary patterns community would have been much more valuable, and potentially had more effect, if we had thought harder about how to find and document patterns at the level of Alexander's patterns.

Perhaps the patterns sub-community in which I've worked in which best achieved its goals was the pedagogical patterns community. These are not software patterns but rather patterns of teaching techniques. They document solutions to problems that teachers face every day. I think I'd be willing to argue that the primary source of pedagogical patterns' effectiveness is that these solutions combine more primitive building blocks (delivery techniques, feedback techniques, interaction techniques) in a way that make learning and instruction both more effective and more fun. As a result, they captured a lot of teachers' interest.

I think that Marick's diagnosis also points out the error in a common criticism of software patterns. Over the years, we often heard folks say that software patterns existed only because people used horrible languages like C++ and Java. In a more powerful language, any purported pattern would be implemented as a language primitive or could be made a primitive by writing a macro. But this misses the point of Alexander's insight. The problem in software development isn't with inheritance and message passing and loops, just as the problem in architecture isn't with beds and windows and space. It's with finding ways to arrange these building blocks in a way that's comfortable and nice and, to use Alexander's term, "life-giving". That challenge exists in all programming languages.

Finally, you probably won't be surprised to learn that I agree with Marick that we should all care that software patterns failed to live up to their promise. Making software is fun, but it's also challenging. Alexander's idea of a pattern language is one way that we might help programmers do their jobs better, enjoy their jobs more, and produce software that is both functional and habitable. The first pass was a worthy effort, and a second pass, informed by the lessons of the first, might get us closer to the goal.

Thanks to Brian for giving this talk and to the folks at Deconstruct for posting it online. Go watch it.

Philip Wadler is a rockstar to the Strange Loop crowd. His 2015 talk on propositions as types introduced not a few developers to one of computer science's great unities. This year, he returned to add a third idea to what is really a triumvirate: categories. With a little help from his audience, he showed that category theory has elements which correspond directly to ...

• logical 'and', which models the record (or tuple, or pair) data type
• logical 'or', which models the union (or variant record) data type
• a map, which models the function data type

What's more, the product/sum dual models De Morgan's laws, but with more structure, which enables it to model sets beyond the booleans!

Wadler is an entertaining teacher; I recommend the video of his talk! But he is also as quotable as any CS prof I've encountered in a long while. Here is a smattering of his great lines from "Categories for the Working Hacker":

If you can use math to do something, do it. It will make your life better.

That's the great thing about math. It lets you see something obvious after only thirty or forty years.

Pick your favorite algebra. If you don't have one, get one.

Let's do that in Java. That's what you should always do when you learn a new idea: do it in Java.

That's what category theory is really about: avoiding traffic jams.

Sums are the secret origin of folds.

If you don't understand this, I don't mind, because it's Java.

While watching the presentation, I created a one-liner of my own: Surprise! If you do something that matches exactly what Haskell does, Haskell code will be much shorter than Java code.

This was a very good talk; I enjoyed it quite a bit. However, I also left the room with a couple of nagging questions. The talk was titled "Categories for the Working Hacker", and it did a nice job of presenting some basic ideas from category theory in a way that most any developer could understand, even one without much background in math. But... How does this knowledge make one a better hacker? Armed with this new, entertaining knowledge, what are software developers able to do that they couldn't do before?

I have my own ideas for answers to these questions, but I would love to hear Wadler's take.

I just read on the old Agile/XP mailing list that Jerry Weinberg passed away on Tuesday, August 7. The message hailed Weinberg as "one of the finest thinkers on computer software development". I, like many, was a big fan of work.

My first encounter with Weinberg came in the mid-1990s when someone recommended The Psychology of Computer Programming to me. It was already over twenty years old, but it captivated me. It augmented years of experience in the trenches developing computer software with a deep understanding of psychology and anthropology and the firm but gentle mindset of a gifted teacher. I still refer back to it after all these years. Whenever I open it up to a random page, I learn something new again. If you've never read it, check it out now. You can buy the ebook -- along with many of Weinberg's books -- online through LeanPub.

After the first book, I was hooked. I never had the opportunity to attend one of Weinberg's workshops, but colleagues lavished them with praise. I should have made more of an effort to attend one. My memory is foggy now, but I do think I exchanged email messages with him once back in the late 1990s. I'll have to see if I can dig them up in one of my mail archives.

Fifteen years ago or so, I picked up a copy of Introduction to General Systems Thinking tossed out by a retiring colleague, and it became the first in a small collection of Weinberg books now on my shelf. As older colleagues retire in the coming years, I would be happy to salvage more titles and extend my collection. It won't be worth much on the open market, but perhaps I'll be able to share my love of Weinberg's work with students and younger colleagues. Books make great gifts, and more so a book by Gerald Weinberg.

Perhaps I'll share them with my non-CS friends and family, too. A couple of summers back, my wife saw a copy of Are Your Lights On?, a book Weinberg co-wrote with Donald Gause, sitting on the floor of my study at home. She read it and liked it a lot. "You get to read books like that for your work?" Yes.

I just read Weinberg's final blog entry earlier this week. He wasn't a prolific blogger, but he wrote a post every week or ten days, usually about consulting, managing, and career development. His final post touched on something that we professors experience at least occasionally: students sometimes solve the problems we et before them better than we expected, or better than we ourselves can do. He reminded people not to be defensive, even if it's hard, and to see the situation as an opportunity to learn:

When I was a little boy, my father challenged me to learn something new every day before allowing myself to go to bed. Learning new things all the time is perhaps the most important behavior in my life. It's certainly the most important behavior in our profession.

Weinberg was teaching us to the end, with grace and gratitude. I will miss him.

Oh, and one last personal note: I didn't know until after he passed that we shared the same birthday, a few years apart. A meaningless coincidence, of course, but it made me smile.

I spent a couple of hours this morning at a roundtable discussion listening to area tech employers talk about their work and their companies' needs. It was pretty enjoyable (well, except perhaps for the CEO who too frequently prefaced his remarks with "What the education system needs to understand is ..."). To a company, they all place a lot of value on the projects that job candidates have done. Their comments reminded me of an old MAA blog post in which a recent grad said:

During the fall of my junior year, I applied for an internship at Red Ventures, a data analytics and technology company just outside Charlotte. Throughout the rigorous interview process, it wasn't my GPA that stood out. I stood out among the applicants, in part, because I was able to discuss multiple projects I had taken ownership of and was extremely passionate about.

I encourage this mentality in my students, though I think "passionate about" is too strong a condition (not to mention cliché). Students should have a few projects that they are interested in, or proud of, or maybe just completed.

Most of the students taking my compiler course this fall won't be applying for a compiler job when they graduate, but they will have written a compiler as part of a team. They will have met a spec, collaborated on code, and delivered a working product. That is evidence of skill, to be sure, but also of hard work and persistence. It's a significant accomplishment.

The students who take our intelligent systems course or our real-time embedded systems will be able to say the same thing. Some students will also be able to point to code they wrote for a club or personal projects. They key is to build things, care about them, and "deliver", whatever that means in the context of that particular project.

I made note of one new piece of advice to give our students, offered by a former student I mentioned in a blog post many years ago who is now head of a local development team for mobile game developer Jam City: Keep all the code you write. It can be a GitHub repo, as many people now recommend, but it doesn't have to be. A simple zip file organized by courses and projects can be enough. Such a portfolio can show prospective employers what you've done, how you've grown, and how much you care about the things you make. It can say a lot.

You might even want to keep all that code for Future You. I'm old enough that it was difficult to keep digital copies of all the code I wrote in college. I have a few programs from my undergrad days and a few more from grad school, which have migrated across storage media as time passed, but I missing much of my class work as a young undergrad and all of the code I wrote in high school. I sometimes wish I could look back at some of that code...

• Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach

I saw a lot of favorable links to this post a while back and finally got around to it. Meh. I generally agree with the author: GEB is verbose in places, there's a lot of unnecessary name checking, and the dialogues that lead off each chapter are often tedious. I even trust the author's assertion that Hofstadter's forays beyond math, logic, and computers are shallow.

So what? Things don't have to be perfect for me to like them, or for them to make me think. GEB was a swirl of ideas that caused me to think and helped me make a few connections. I'm sure if I read the book now that I would feel differently about it, but reading it when I did, as an undergrad CS major thinking about AI and the future, it energized me.

I do thank the author for his pointer (in a footnote) to Vi Hart's wonderful Twelve Tones. You should watch it. Zombie Schonberg!

• The Web Aesthetic

This post wasn't quite what I expected, but even a few years old it has something to say to web designers today.

Everything on the web ultimately needs to degrade down to plain text (images require alt text; videos require transcripts), so the text editor might just become the most powerful app in the designer's toolbox.

• XP Challenge: Compilers

People outside the XP community often don't realize how seriously the popularizers of XP explored the limitations of their own ideas. This page documents one of several challenges that push XP values and practices to the limits: When do they break down? Can they be adapted successfully to the task? What are the consequences of applying them in such circumstances?

Re-reading this old wiki page was worth it if only for this great line from Ron Jeffries:

The point of XP is to win, not die bravely.

Yes.

In Getting Critiqued, Adam Morse reflects on his evolution from art student to web designer, and how that changed his relationship with users and critiques. Artists create things in which they are, at some level, invested. Their process matters. As a result, critiques, however well-intentioned, feel personal. The work isn't about a user; it's about you. But...

... design is different. As a designer, I don't matter. My work doesn't matter. Nothing I make matters in the context of my process. It's all about the people you are building for. You're just trying to solve problems for people. Once you realize this, it's the most liberating thing.

Now, criticism isn't really about you as artist. It's about how well the design meets the needs of the user. With that in mind, the artist can put some distance between himself or herself and think about the users. That's probably what the users are paying for anyway.

I've never been a designer, but I was fortunate to learn how better to separate myself from my work by participating in the software patterns community and its writers' workshop format. From the workshops, I came to appreciate the value of providing positive and constructive feedback in a supportive way. But I also learned to let critiques from others be about my writing and not about me. The ethos of writers' workshops is one of shared commitment to growth and so creates as supportive framework as possible in which to deliver suggestions. Now, even when I'm not in such an conspicuously supportive environment, I am better able to detach myself from my work. It's never easy, but it's easier. This mindset can wear off a bit over time, so I find an occasional inoculation via PLoP or another supportive setting to be useful.

Morse offers another source of reminder: the designs we create for the web -- and for most software, too-- are not likely to last forever. So...

Don't fall in love with borders, gradients, a shade of blue, text on blurred photos, fancy animations, a certain typeface, flash, or music that autoplays. Just get attached to solving problems for people.

That last sentence is pretty good advice for programmers and designers alike. If we detach ourselves from our specific work output a bit and instead attach ourselves to solving problems for other people, we'll be able to handle their critiques more calmly. As a result, we are also likely to do better work.

In Collaboration considered helpful, Ken Perlin writes:

In the last few days I have needed to make the transition from writing a piece of software all on my own to bringing in a collaborator. Which means I've needed to go into my code and change a lot of things, in order to make everything easier to understand and communicate.

There was a part of me that felt grumpy about this. After all, I already knew exactly where everything was before this other person ever came on board.

But then I looked at the changes I had made, and realized that the entire system was now much cleaner, more robust, and far easier to maintain. Clearly there is something intrinsically better about code that is designed for collaboration.

Knowing that our code must communicate with other people causes us to write better code.

The above is an usually large quotation from another post for me. Even so, Perlin makes a bigger point than this, so read the entire post.

By the way, Perlin's blog has probably been the happiest addition I've made to my blog reader over the past year. He writes short, thoughtful posts everyday, on topics that include programming, teaching, academic life, and virtual reality. I enjoy almost all of them and always look forward to the next one.

From an old New Yorker article about Spotify:

YouTube, which is by far the largest streaming-music site in the world (it wasn't designed that way--that's just what it became)...

Companies starting in one line of business and evolving into something else is nothing new. I mean, The Connecticut Leather Company became Coleco and made video game consoles. But there's something about software that make this sort of evolution seem so normal. We build a computer system to solve one problem and find that our users -- who have needs and desires that neither we nor they fully comprehend -- use it to solve a different problem. Interesting times. Don't hem yourself in, and don't hem your software in, or the people who use it.

In Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers, Eliezer Yudkowsky talks about how evolution has led to human traits that may no longer be ideal in the our current environment. He also talks about tools, though, and this summary sentence made me think of programs:

So the screwdriver's cause, and its shape, and its consequence, and its various meanings, are all different things; and only one of these things is found within the screwdriver itself.

I often fall victim to thinking that the meaning of software is at least somewhat inherent in its code, but that really is what the designer intended as its use -- a mix of what Yudkowsky calls its cause and its consequence. These are things that exist only in the mind of the designer and the user, not in the computational constructs that constitute the code.

When approaching new software, especially a complex piece of code with many parts, it's helpful to remember that it doesn't really have objective meaning or consequences, only those intended by its designers and those exercised by its users. Over time, the users' conception tends to drive the designers' conception as they put the software to particular uses and even modify it to better suit these new uses.

Perhaps software is best thought of as an adaptation-executer, too, and not as a fitness-maximizer.

Sidney Lumet, in his book Making Movies, writes:

Arthur Miller's first, and I think, only novel, Focus, was, in my opinion, every bit as good as his first produced play, All My Sons. I once asked him why, if he was equally talented in both forms, he chose to write plays. Why would he give up the total control of the creative process that a novel provides to write instead for communal control, where a play would first go into the hands of a director and then pass into the hands of a cast, set designer, producer, and so forth? His answer was touching. He loved seeing what his work evoked in others. The result could contain revelations, feelings, and ideas that he never knew existed when he wrote the play. That's what he hoped for.

Writing software for people to use is something quite different from writing a play for audiences to watch, but this paragraph brought to mind experiences I had as a grad student and new faculty member. As a part of my doctoral work, I implemented a expert system shells for a couple of problem-solving styles. Experts and grad students in domains such as chemical engineering, civil engineering, education, manufacturing, and tax accounting used these shells to build expert systems in their domains. I often found myself in the lab with these folks as they used my tools. I learned a lot by watching them and discussing with them the languages implemented in the tools. Their comments and ideas sometimes changed how I thought about the languages and tools, and I was able to fold some of these changes back into the systems.

Software design can be communal, too. This is, of course, one of the cornerstones of agile software development. Giving up control can help us write better software, but it can also be a source of the kind of pleasure I imagine Miller got from working to bring his plays to life on stage.

In an old blog post promoting his book on timing, Daniel Pink writes:

... Connie Gersick's research has shown that group projects rarely progress in a steady, linear way. Instead, at the beginning of a project, groups do very little. Then at a certain moment, they experience a sudden burst of activity and finally get going. When is that moment? The temporal midpoint. Give a team 34 days, they get started in earnest on day 17. Give a team 11 days, they get really get going on day 6. In addition, there’s other research showing that being behind at the midpoint--in NBA games and in experimental settings--can boost performance in the second half.

So we need to recognize midpoints and try to use them as a spark rather than a slump.

I wonder if this research suggests that we should favor shorter projects over longer ones. If most of us start going full force only at the middle of our projects, perhaps we should make the middle of our projects come sooner.

I'll admit that I have a fondness for short over long: short iterations over long iterations in software development, quarters over semesters in educational settings, short books (especially non-fiction) over long books. Shorter cycles seem to lead to higher productivity, because I spend more time working and less time ramping up and winding down. That seems to be true for my students and faculty colleagues, too.

In the paragraph that follows the quoted passage, Pink points inadvertently to another feature of short projects that I appreciate: more frequent beginnings and endings. He talks about the poignancy of endings, which adds meaning to the experience. On the other end of the cycle are beginnings, which create a sense of newness and energy. I always look forward to the beginning of a new semester or a new project for the energy it brings me.

Agile software developers know that, on top of these reasons, short projects offer another potent advantage: more opportunities to take stock of what we have learned and feed that learning back into what we do.

Joshua Bloch, in this oldie but goodie:

The general lesson that I take away from this bug is humility: It is hard to write even the smallest piece of code correctly, and our whole world runs on big, complex pieces of code.

Having just written a small interpreter for my programming languages course, I, too, am feeling humble. Even in code that couldn't possibly go wrong, I had a small bug that bedeviled me for fifteen minutes. (You have to dereference those bindings in order to get the cells you want to mutate...) The experience is good preparation for a couple of software projects I hope to do this summer and for my compiler course this fall.

Oh, and Bloch's old post reminds me that it may be a good time to work through "Programming Pearls" again. It's been a while.

For years now, I've been listening to many people -- smart, accomplished people -- feverishly proclaim that functional programming is here to right the wrongs of object-oriented programming. For many years before that, I heard many people -- smart, accomplished people -- feverishly proclaim that object-oriented programming was superior to functional programming, an academic toy, for building real software.

Alas, I don't have a home in the battle between OOP and FP. I like and program in both styles. So it's nice whenever I come across something like Alan Kay's recent post on Quora, in response to the question, "Why is functional programming seen as the opposite of OOP rather than an addition to it?" He closes with a paragraph I could take on as my credo:

So: both OOP and functional computation can be completely compatible (and should be!). There is no reason to munge state in objects, and there is no reason to invent "monads" in FP. We just have to realize that "computers are simulators" and figure out what to simulate.

As in many things, Kay encourages to go beyond today's pop culture of programming to create a computational medium that incorporates big ideas from the beginning of our discipline. While we work on those ideas, I'll continue to write programs in both styles, and to enjoy them both. With any luck, I'll bounce between mindsets long enough that I eventually attain enlightenment, like the venerable master Qc Na. (See the koan at the bottom of that link.)

Oh: Kay really closes his post with

I will be giving a talk on these ideas in July in Amsterdam (at the "CurryOn" conference).

If that's not a reason to go to Amsterdam for a few days, I don't know what is. Some of the other speakers looks pretty good, too.

Greg Wilson wrote a short blog post recently about why JavaScript isn't suitable for teaching Data Carpentry-style workshops. In closing, he suggests an unusual way to design programming languages:

What I do know is that the world would be a better place if language designers adopted tutorial-driven design: write the lessons that introduce newcomers to the language, then implement the features those tutorials require.

That's a different sort of TDD than I'm used to...

This is the sort of idea that causes me to do a double or triple take. At first, it has an appealing ring to it, when considering how difficult it is to teach most programming languages to novices. Then I think a bit and decide that it sounds crazy because, really, are we going to hamstring our languages by focusing on the struggles of beginners? But then it sits in my mind for a while and I start to wonder if we couldn't grow a decent language this way. It's almost like using the old TDD to implement new the TDD.

The PLT Scheme folks have designed a set of teaching languages that enable beginners to grow into an industry-strength language. That design project seems to have worked from the outsides in, with a target language in mind while designing the teaching languages. Maybe Wilson's idea of starting at the beginning isn't so crazy after all.

Racket -- "A Programmable Programming Language" -- is the cover story for next month's Communications of the ACM. The new issue is already featured on the magazine's home page, including a short video in which Matthias Felleisen explains the idea of code as more than a machine artifact.

My love of Racket is no surprise to readers of this blog. Still one of my favorite old posts here is The Racket Way, a write-up of my notes from Matthew Flatt's talk of the same name at StrangeLoop 2012. As I said in that post, this was a deceptively impressive talk. I think that's especially fitting, because Racket is a deceptively impressive language.

One last little bit of love from a recent message to the Racket users mailing list... Stewart Mackenzie describes his feelings about the seamless interweaving of Racket and Typed Racket via a #lang directive:

So far my dive into Racket has positive. It's magical how I can switch from untyped Racket to typed Racket simply by changing #lang. Banging out my thoughts in a beautiful lisp 1, wave a finger, then finger crack to type check. Just sublime.

That's what you get when your programming language is as programmable as your application.

In this Los Angeles Review of Books interview, novelist Jenny Offill says:

I was reading a poet from the Tang dynasty... One of his lines from, I don't know, page 812, was "No new feelings". When I read that I laughed out loud. People have been writing about the same things since the invention of the written word. The only originality comes from the language itself.

After a week revising lecture notes and rewriting a recruiting talk intended for high school students and their parents, I know just what Offill and that Tang poet mean. I sometimes feel the same way about code.

In Material as Metaphor, the artist Anni Albers talks about how she came to choose media in which she worked:

How do we choose our specific material, our means of communication? "Accidentally". Something speaks to us, a sound, a touch, hardness or softness, it catches us and asks us to be formed. We are finding our language, and as we go along we learn to obey their rules and their limits. We have to obey, and adjust to those demands. Ideas flow from it to us and though we feel to be the creator we are involved in a dialogue with our medium. The more subtly we are tuned to our medium, the more inventive our actions will become. Not listening to it ends in failure.

This expresses much the way I feel about different programming languages and styles. I can like them all, and sometimes do! I go through phases when one style speaks to me more than another, or when one language seems to be in sync with how I am thinking. When that happens, I find myself wanting to learn its rules, to conform so that I can reach a point where I feel creative enough to solve interesting problems in the language.

If I find myself not liking a language, it's usually because I'm not listening to it; I'm fighting back. When I first tried to learn Haskell, I refused to bend to its style of functional programming. I had worked hard to grok FP in Scheme, and I was so proud of my hard-won understanding that I wanted to impose it on the new language. Eventually, I retreated for a while, returned more humbly, and finally came to appreciate Haskell, if not master it deeply.

My experience with Smalltalk went differently. One summer I listened to what it was telling me, slowly and patiently, throwing code away and starting over several times on an application I was trying to build. This didn't feel like a struggle so much as a several-month tutoring session. By the end, I felt ideas flowing through me. I think that's the kind of dialogue Albers is referring to.

If I want to master a new programming language, I have to be willing to obey its limits and to learn how to use its strengths as leverage. This can be a conscious choice. It's frustrating when that doesn't seem to be enough.

I wish I could always will myself into the right frame of mind to learn a new way of thinking. Albers reminds us that often a language speaks to us first. Sometimes, I just have to walk away and wait until the time is right.

In In the Blink of an Eye, Walter Murch tells the story of human and chimpanzee DNA, about how the DNA itself is substantially the same and how the sequencing, which we understand less well, creates different beings during the development of the newborn. He concludes by bringing the analogy back to film editing:

My point is that the information in the DNA can be seen as uncut film and the mysterious sequencing as the editor. You could sit in one room with a pile of dailies and another editor could sit in the next room with exactly the same footage and both of you could make different films out of the same material.

This struck me as quite the opposite of what programmers do. When given a new problem and a large language in which to solve it, two programmers can choose substantially different source material and yet end up telling the same story. Functional and OO programmers, say, may decompose the problem in a different way and rely on different language features to build their solutions, but in the end both programs will solve the same problem and meet the same user need. Like the chimp and the human, though, the resulting programs may be better adapted for living in different environments.

While grading one last project for the semester, I ran across this gem:

    if checkInputParameters() == False:
       [...]

This code was not written by a beginning programmer, but a senior who likely will graduate in May. Sigh.

I inherited this course late in the semester, so it would be nice if I could absolve myself of responsibility for allowing a student to develop such a bad habit. But this isn't the first time I've seen this programming pattern. I've seen it in my courses and in other faculty's courses, in first-year courses and fourth-year courses. In fact, I was so certain that I blogged about the pattern before that I spent several minutes trolling the archive. Alas, I never found the entry.

Don't let anyone tell you that Twitter can't be helpful. Within minutes of tweeting my dismay, two colleagues suggested new strategies for dealing with this anti-pattern.

Sylvain Leroux invoked Star Trek:

James T. Kirk "Kobayashi Maru"-style solution: Hack CPython to properly parse that new syntax:

unless checkInputParameters(): ...

Maybe I'll turn this into a programming exercise for the next student in my compiler class who wanders down the path of temptation. Deep in my heart, though, I know that enterprising programmers will use the new type of statement to write this:

    unless checkInputParameters() == True:
       [...]

Agile Hulk suggested a fix:

    if (checkInputParameters() == False) == True:

This might actually be a productive pedagogical tack to follow: light-hearted and spot on, highlighting the anti-pattern's flaw by applying it to its own output. ("Anti-pattern eats its own dog food.") With any luck, some students will be enlightened, Zen-like. Others will furrow their brow and say "What?"

... and even if we look past the boolean crime in our featured code snippet, we really ought to take on that function name. 'Tis the season, though, and the semester is over. I'll save that rant for another time.

After implementing the patterns from James Noble's Arguments and Results, Gregory Brown reflects:

After taking a look at the finished Turtle object, I did wonder a little bit about whether the idea of a curried object in Ruby is nothing more than an ordinary object making use of object composition. However, because the name of the pattern is helpful for describing the intent of this sort of object in a succinct way, it may be a good label for us to use when discussing the merits of different design options.

In the end it is, indeed, all just objects, or functions, or whatever the primitives structures are in your programming style du jour. The value of design patterns in any styles lies in teaching us stereotypical patterns of usage, the web of objects or functions we might not have thought of in the course of design. Once we know about the patterns, the names become a valuable part of the vocabulary we use to talk about design.

I know that Brown's blog entry is six years old, that Noble's paper is seventeen, and that talking about design patterns is passé in many circles. But I still find the notion of patterns and pattern languages to be immensely useful, and even in 2017 I hear people express surprise at patterns are just commonsense or bad design dressed up in fancy writing. That makes me sad. We need more descriptions of experts' implicit holistic design knowledge, not fewer.

In closing, though, please don't read my reaction here as a diss of Brown's blog entry. His two entries on Noble's patterns do a nice job showing how these patterns can improve a Ruby program and exploring the trade-offs between the "before" and "after" versions of the code. I hope that he bring his Practicing Ruby project back to life.

I recently ran across an old post from Spotify about how the confluence of Spotify's generous policy for usernames, the oddities of Unicode, and a change in standard Python libraries led to a situation in which a person could hijack an existing username. The post explains how Spotify tracked down the problem and fixed it -- a good read.

The paragraph before the closing "Some Take-Aways" section says:

So changes in the standard python library from one python version to the next introduced a subtle bug in twisted's nodepre.prepare() function which in turn introduced a security issue in Spotify's account creation.

... which, to my mind, hints at a bonus takeaway not listed in the closing. It would really have been nice to have had a test that noticed when nodeprep's method for canonicalizing (ugh) usernames was no longer idempotent.

Not having such a test is understandable. I don't write tests for all or even many of the library functions I use. This means trusting the creators of the libraries I use. (It also means choosing libraries judiciously.) In this case, there wasn't even a bug in twisted's original code; a change in Python introduced one. It is hard to anticipate when a language upgrade will create a bug in a library that I am using.

However, when something like this occurs, I find that it is a good time to add a test. This bug exposed just how important it is for the code to ensure idempotence when lower-casing a username. A new test or two can protect the code base from unexpected errors from without without placing an unreasonable burden on me as a developer. And those tests give me peace of mind, which is usually more than worth an extra millisecond when running my tests.

If you have read any of Chuck Moore's work, you know that he is an extreme programmer in the literal sense of the word: a unique philosophy that embraces small, fast, self-contained programs in a spare language and an impressive development environment. But as I read the opening sections of Moore's book Programming a Problem-Oriented Language, I began to mistake him for an XP-style extreme programmer.

Here is You Aren't Gonna Need It or, as Moore says, Do Not Speculate!:

Do not put code in your program that might be used. Do not leave hooks on which you can hang extensions. The things you might want to do are infinite; that means that each one has 0 probability of realization. If you need an extension later, you can code it later - and probably do a better job than if you did it now. And if someone else adds the extension, will they notice the hooks you left? Will you document that aspect of your program?

Moore also has a corollary called Do It Yourself!, which encourages you, in general, to write your own subroutines rather than import one a canned subroutine from a library. That doesn't sound like Doing the Simplest Thing That Can Work, but his intent is similar: an external routine is a dependency, and it probably doesn't match the specific needs of the problem you are solving. Indeed, Moore closes this section with:

Let me take a stand: I can't solve the problems of the world. With luck, I can write a good program.

That could well be the manifesto of XP.

In the next section, a preview of the rest of the book, Moore tells his readers that they won't find flowcharts in the pages to come documenting the algorithms he describes:

I've never liked them, for they seem to include a useless amount of information - either too little or too much. Besides they imply a greater rigidity in program structure than usually exists. I will be quite specific about what I think you should do and how you should do it. But I will use words, and not diagrams. I doubt that you would give a diagram the attention it deserved, anyway. Or that I would in preparing it.

Other than using a few words, he lets the code stands for itself. Documentation would not add enough value to outweigh the cost of preparing it, or reading it. Usually, the best thing to do with Moore's books is to Listen To The Code: settle into your Forth environment, type the code in, run it, and learn from it.

There is no accounting for my weird fascination with stack-based languages. Chuck Moore always give me more to think about than I expected. I suspect that he would be at odds with some of the practices encouraged by XP, but I often feel the spirit of XP in his philosophy.

I learned about a couple of cool CLI tools from Nikita Sobolev's Using Better CLIs. hub and tig look like they may be worth a deeper look. This article also reminded me of one of the examples in the blog entry I rmed the other day. It reflects a certain attitude about languages and development.

One of the common complaints about OOP is that what would be a single function in other programming styles usually ends up distributed across multiple classes in an OO program. For example, instead of:

    void draw(Shape s) {
       case s of
          Circle : [code for circle]
          Square : [code for square]
          ...
    }

the code for the individual shapes ends up in the classes for Circle, Square, and so on. If you have to change the drawing code for all of the shapes, you have to track down all of the classes and modify them individually.

This is true, and it is a serious issue. We can debate the relative benefits and costs of the different designs, of course, but we might also think about ways that our development tools can help us.

As a grad student in the early 1990s, I worked in a research group that used VisualWorks Smalltalk to build all of its software. Even within a single Smalltalk image, we faced this code-all-over-the-place problem. We were adding methods to classes and modifying methods all the time as part of our research. We spent a fair amount of time navigating from class to class to work on the individual methods.

Eventually, one of my fellow students had an epiphany: we could write a new code browser. We would open this browser on a particular class, and the browser would provide a pane listing and all of its subclasses, and all of their subclasses. When we selected a method in the root class, the browser enabled us to click on any of the subclasses, see the code for the subclass's corresponding method, and edit it there. If the class didn't have an overriding method, we could add one in the empty pane, with the method signature supplied by the browser.

This browser didn't solve all of the problems we had learning to manage a large code base spread out over many classes, but it was a huge win for dealing with the specific issue of an algorithm being distributed across several kinds of object. It also taught me two things:

• to appreciate the level of control that Smalltalk gave developers to inspect code and shape the development experience
• to appreciate the mindset that creating new tools is the way to mitigate many problems in software development, if not to solve them completely

The tool-making mindset is one that I came to appreciate and understand more and more as the years past. I'm disappointed whenever I don't put it to good use, but oftentimes I wise up and make the tools I need to help me do my work.

Yesterday, I wrote an entire blog entry that I rm'ed before posting. I had read a decent article on a certain flavor of primitive obsession and design alternatives, which ended with what I thought was a misleading view of object-oriented programming. My blog entry set out to right this wrong.

In a rare moment of self-restraint, I resisted the urge to correct someone who was wrong on the internet. There is no sense in subjecting you to that. Instead, I'll just say that I like both OOP and functional programming, and use both regularly. I remain, in my soul, object-oriented.

On a more positive note, this morning I read an old article that made me smile, Why I'm Productive in Clojure. I don't use Clojure, but this short piece brought to mind many of the same feelings in me, but about Smalltalk. Interestingly, the sources of my feelings are similar to the author's: the right amount of syntax, facilities for meta-programming, interactive development. The article gave me a feeling that is the opposite of schadenfreude: pleasure from the pleasure of others. Some Buddhists call this mudita. I felt mudita after reading this blog entry. Rock on, Clojure dude.

Blaise Pascal believed that the key error of the school of philosophy known as Stoicism lay in thinking that people can do always what they can, in reality, only do sometimes.

Had Pascal lived in the time of software development, he would probably have felt the same way about Extreme Programming and test-driven design.

I was reminded of Pascal the philosopher (not the language) earlier this week when I wrote code for several hours without writing my unit tests. As a result, I found myself refactoring blind for most of the project. The code was small enough that this worked out fine, and I didn't even feel much fear while moving along at a decent pace. Even so, I felt a little guilty.

Pascal made a good point about Stoicism, but I don't think that this means I ought not be a Stoic -- or a practitioner of XP. XP helps me to be a better programmer. I do have to be aware, though, that it asks me to act against my natural tendencies, just as Stoicism encourages us not to be controlled by desire or fear.

One of the beauties of XP is that it intertwines a number of practices that mutually support one another, which helps to keep me in a groove. It helps me to reduce the size of my fear, so that I don't as much to control. If I hadn't been refactoring so often this week, I probably wouldn't have even noticed that I hadn't written tests!

One need not live in fear of coming up short of the ideal. No one is perfect. I'll get back to writing my tests on my next program. There is no need to beat myself up about one program. Everything worked out fine.

Yesterday, I mentioned rewriting the rules for computing FIRST and FOLLOW sets using only "plain English". As I was refactoring my descriptions, I realized that one of the reasons students have difficulty with many textbook treatments of the algorithms is that the books give complete and correct definitions of the sets upfront. The presence of X := ε rules complicates the construction of both sets, but they are unnecessary to understanding the commonsense ideas that motivate the sets. Trying to deal with ε too soon can interfere with the students learning what they need to learn in order to eventually understand ε!

When I left the ε rules out of my descriptions, I ended up with what I thought were an approachable set of rules:

• The FIRST set of a terminal contains only the terminal itself.


• To compute FIRST for a non-terminal X, find all of the grammar rules that have X on the lefthand side. Add to FIRST(X) all of the items in the FIRST set of the first symbol of each righthand side.


• The FOLLOW set of the start symbol contains the end-of-stream marker.


• To compute FOLLOW for a non-terminal X, find all of the grammar rules that have X on the righthand side. If X is followed by a symbol in the rule, add to FOLLOW(X) all of the items in the FIRST set of that symbol. If X is the last symbol in the rule, add to FOLLOW(X) all of the items in the FOLLOW set of the symbol on the rule's lefthand side.

These rules are incomplete, but they have offsetting benefits. Each of these cases is easy to grok with a simple example or two. They also account for a big chunk of the work students need to do in constructing the sets for a typical grammar. As a result, they can get some practice building sets before diving into the gnarlier details ε, which affects both of the main rules above in a couple of ways.

These seems like a two-fold application of the Concrete, Then Abstract pattern. The first is the standard form: we get to see and work with accessible concrete examples before formalizing the rules in mathematical notation. The second involves the nature of the problem itself. The rules above are the concrete manifestation of FIRST and FOLLOW sets; students can master them before considering the more abstract ε cases. The abstract cases are the ones that benefit most from using formal notation.

I think this is an example of another pattern that works well when teaching. We might call it "Learn Exceptions Later", "Handle Exceptions Later", "Save Exceptions For Later", or even "Treat Exceptions as Exceptions". (Naming things is hard.) It is often possible to learn a substantial portion of an idea without considering exceptions at all, and doing so prepares students for learning the exceptions anyway.

I guess I now have at least one idea for my next PLoP paper.

Ironically, writing this post brings to mind a programming pattern that puts exceptions up top, which I learned during the summer Smalltalk taught me OOP. Instead of writing code like this:

    if normal_case(x) then
       // a bunch
       // of lines
       // of code
       // processing x
    else
       throw_an_error

you can write:

    if abnormal_case(x) then
       throw_an_error

    // a bunch
    // of lines
    // of code
    // processing x

This idiom brings the exceptional case to the top of the function and dispatches with it immediately. On the other hand, it also makes the normal case the main focus of the function, unindented and clear to the eye. It may look like this idiom violates the "Save Exceptions For Later" pattern, but code of this sort can be a natural outgrowth of following the pattern. First, we implement the function to do its normal business and makes sure that it handles all of the usual cases. Only then do we concern ourselves with the exceptional case, and we build it into the function with minimal disruption to the code.

This pattern has served me well over the years, far beyond Smalltalk.

I've been meaning to blog about my compilers course for more than a month, but life -- including my compilers course -- have kept me busy. Here are three quick notes to prime the pump.

• I recently came across Lindsey Kuper's My First Fifteen Compilers and thought again about this unusual approach to a compiler course: one compiler a week, growing last week's compiler with a new feature or capability, until you have a complete system. Long, long-time readers of this blog may remember me writing about this idea once over a decade ago.
  
  The approach still intrigues me. Kuper says that it was "hugely motivating" to have a working compiler at the end of each week. In the end I always shy away from the approach because (1) I'm not yet willing to adopt for my course the Scheme-enabled micro-transformation model for building a compiler and (2) I haven't figured out how to make it work for a more traditional compiler.
  
  I'm sure I'll remain intrigued and consider it again in the future. Your suggestions are welcome!


• Last week, I mentioned on Twitter that I was trying to explain how to compute FIRST and FOLLOW sets using only "plain English". It was hard. Writing a textual description of the process made me appreciate the value of using and understanding mathematical notation. It is so expressive and so concise. The problem for students is that it is also quite imposing until they get it. Before then, the notation can be a roadblock on the way to understanding something at an intuitive level.
  
  My usual approach in class to FIRST and FOLLOW sets, as for most topics, is to start with an example, reason about it in commonsense terms, and only then to formalize. The commonsense reasoning often helps students understand the formal expression, thus removing some of its bite. It's a variant of the "Concrete, Then Abstract" pattern.
  
  Mathematical definitions such as these can motivate some students to develop their formal reasoning skills. Many people prefer to let students develop their "mathematical maturity" in math courses, but this is really just an avoidance mechanism. "Let the Math department fail them" may solve a practical problem, sometimes we CS profs have to bite the bullet and help our students get better when they need it.


• I have been trying to write more code for the course this semester, both for my enjoyment (and sanity) and for use in class. Earlier, I wrote a couple of toy programs such as a Fizzbuzz compiler. This weekend I took a deeper dive and began to implement my students' compiler project in full detail. It was a lot of fun to be deep in the mire of a real program again. I have already learned and re-learned a few things about Python, git, and bash, and I'm only a quarter of the way in! Now I just have to make time to do the rest as the semester moves forward.

In her post, Kuper said that her first compiler course was "a lot of hard work" but "the most fun I'd ever had writing code". I always tell my students that this course will be just like that for them. They are more likely to believe the first claim than the second. Diving in, I'm remembering those feelings firsthand. I think my students will be glad that I dove in. I'm reliving some of the challenges of doing everything that I ask them to do. This is already generating a new source of empathy for my students, which will probably be good for them come grading time.

This bullet point from @jessitron's Hyperproductive Development really connected with me:

As the host symbiont who lives and breathes the system: strike the words "just", "easy", "obvious", "simple", and "straightforward" from your vocabulary. These words are contextual, and no other human shares your context.

My first experience coming to grips with my use of these words was not in software development, but in the classroom. "Obvious" has never been a big part of my vocabulary, but I started to notice a few years ago how often I said "just", "easy", and "simple" in class and wrote them in my lecture notes. Since then, I have worked hard to cut back sharply on my uses of these minimizers in both spoken and written interactions with my students. I am not always successful, of course, but I am more aware now and frequently catch myself before speaking, or in the act of writing.

I find that I still use "straightforward" quite often these days. Often, I use it to express contrast explicitly, something to the effect, "This won't necessarily be easy, but at least it's straightforward." By this I mean that some problem or task may require hard work, but at least the steps they need to perform should be clear. I wonder now, though, whether students always take it this way, even when expressed explicitly. Maybe they hear me minimizing the task head, not putting the challenge they face into context.

Used habitually, even with good intentions, a word like "straightforward" can become a crutch, a substitute minimizer. It lets me to be lazy when I try to summarize a process or to encourage students when things get difficult. I'm going to try this fall to be more sensitive to my use of "straightforward" and see if I can't find a better way in most situations.

As for the blog post that prompted this reflection, Hyperproductive Development summarizes as effectively as anything I've read the truth behind the idea that some programmers are so much more effective than others: "it isn't the developers, so much as the situation". It's a good piece, well worth a quick read.

In his conversation with Tyler Cowen, Ben Sasse talks a bit about how students learn in our schools of public policy, business, and law:

We haven't figured out in most professional schools how to create apprenticeship models where you cycle through different aspects of what doing this kind of work will actually look like. There are ways that there are tighter feedback loops at a med school than there are going to be at a policy school. There are things that I don't think we've thought nearly enough about ways that professional school models should diverge from traditional, theoretical, academic disciplines or humanities, for example.

We see a similar continuum in what works best, and what is needed, for learning computer science and learning software engineering. Computer science education can benefit from the tighter feedback loops and such that apprenticeship provides, but it also has a substantial theoretical component that is suitable for classroom instruction. Learning to be a software engineer requires a shift to the other end of the continuum: we can learn important things, in the classroom, but much of the important the learning happens in the trenches, making things and getting feedback.

A few universities have made big moves in how they structure software engineering instruction, but most have taken only halting steps. They are often held back by a institutional loyalty to the traditional academic model, or out of sheer curricular habit.

The one place you see apprenticeship models in CS is, of course, graduate school. Students who enter research work in the lab under the mentorship of faculty advisors and more senior grad students. It took me a year or so in graduate school to figure out that I needed to begin to place more focus on my research ideas than on my classes. (I hadn't committed to a lab or an advisor yet.)

In lieu of a changed academic model, internships of the sort I mentioned recently can be really helpful for undergrad CS students looking to go into software development. Internships create a weird tension for faculty... Most students come back from the workplace with a new appreciation for the academic knowledge they learn in the classroom, which is good, but they also back to wonder why more of their schoolwork can't have the character of learning in the trenches. They know to want more!

Project-based courses are a way for us to bring the value of apprenticeship to the undergraduate classroom. I am looking forward to building compilers with ten hardy students this fall.

Last Thursday, I spent a day visiting a major IT employer in our state. Their summer interns, at least three of whom are students in my department, were presenting projects they had developed during a three-day codejam. The company invited educators from local universities to come in for the presentations, preceded by a tour of the corporate campus, a meeting with devs who had gone through the internship program in recent years, and a conversation about how the schools and company might collaborate more effectively. Here are a few of my impressions from the visit.

I saw and heard the word "agile" everywhere. The biggest effects of the agility company-wide seemed to be in setting priorities and in providing transparency. The vocabulary consisted mostly of terms from Scrum and kanban. I started to wonder how much the programming practices of XP or other agile methodologies had affected software development practices there. Eventually I heard about the importance of pair programming and unit testing and was happy to know that the developers hadn't been forgotten in the move to agile methods.

Several ideas came to mind during the visit of things we might incorporate into our programs or emphasize more. We do a pretty good job right now, I think. We currently introduce students to agile development extensively in our software engineering course, and we have a dedicated course on software verification and validation. I have even taught a dedicated course on agile software development several times before, most recently in 2014 and 2010. Things we might do better include:

• having students work on virtual teams. Our students rarely, if ever, work on virtual teams in class, yet this is standard operating procedure even within individual companies these days.


• having students connect their applications programs to front and back ends. Our students often solve interesting problems with programs, but they don't always have to connect their solution to front ends that engage real users or to back ends that ultimately provide source data. There is a lot to learn in having to address these details.


• encouraging students to be more comfortable with failure on projects. Schools tends to produce graduates who are risk-averse, because failure on a project in the context of a semester-long course might mean failure in the course. But the simple fact is that some projects fail. Graduates need to be able to learn from failure and create successes out of it. They also need to be willing to take risks; projects with risk are also where big wins come from, not to mention new knowledge.

Over the course of the day, I heard about many of the attributes this company likes to see in candidates for internships and full-time positions, among them:

• comfort speaking in public
• ability to handle, accept, and learn from failure
• curiosity
• initiative
• a willingness to work in a wide variety of roles: development, testing, management, etc.

Curiosity was easily the most-mentioned desirable attribute. On the matter of working in a wide variety of roles, even the people with "developer" in their job title reported spending only 30% of their time writing code. One sharp programmer said, "If you're spending 50% of your time writing code, you're doing something wrong."

The codejam presentations themselves were quite impressive. Teams of three to six college students can do some amazing things in three days when they are engaged and when they have the right tools available to them. One theme of the codejam was "platform as a service", and students used a slew of platforms, tools, and libraries to build their apps. Ones that stood out because they were new to me included IBM BlueMix (a l´ AWS and Azure), Twilio ("a cloud platform for building SMS, voice and messaging apps"), and Flask ("a micro web framework written in Python"). I also saw a lot of node.js and lots and lots of NoSQL. There was perhaps a bias toward NoSQL in the tools that the interns wanted to learn, but I wonder if students are losing appreciation for relational DBs and their value.

Each team gave itself a name. This was probably my favorite:

   int erns;

I am a programmer.

All in tools, the interns used too many different tools for me to take note of. That was an important reminder from the day for me. There are so many technologies to learn and know how to use effectively. Our courses can't possibly include them all. We need to help students learn how to approach a new library or framework and become effective users as quickly as possible. And we need to have them using source control all the time, as ingrained habit.

One last note, if only because it made me smile. Our conversation with some of the company's developers was really interesting. At the end of the session, one of the devs handed out his business card, in case we ever wanted to ask him questions after leaving. I looked down at the card and saw...

... Alan Kay. Who knew that Alan was moonlighting as an application developer for a major financial services company in the Midwest? I'm not sure whether sharing a name with a titan of computer science is a blessing or a curse, but for the first time in a long while I enjoyed tucking a business card into my pocket.

Someone wrote on the Software Carpentry mailing list:

I'm using Python's unittest framework and everything is already set up. The specific problem I need help with is what tests to write...

That is, indeed, a problem. I have the tool. What now?

Rather than snark off-line, like me, Titus Brown wrote a helpful answer with generic advice for how to get started writing tests for code that is already written, aimed at scientists relatively new to software development. It boils down to four suggestions:

• Write "smoke" tests that determine whether the program works as intended.
• Write a series of basic tests for edge cases.
• As you add new code to the program, write tests for it at the same time.
• "Whenever you discover a bug, write a test against that bug before fixing it."

Brown says that the smoke tests "should be as dumb and robust as possible". They deliver a lot of value for the little effort. I would add that they also get you in the rhythm of writing tests without a huge amount of thought necessary. That rhythm is most helpful as you start to tackle the tougher cases.

Brown calls his last bullet "stupidity driven testing", which is a self-deprecating way to describe a locality phenomenon that many of us have observed in our programs: code in which we've found errors is often likely to contain other errors. Adding tests to this part of the program helps the test suite to evolve to protect a potentially weak part of the codebase.

He also recommends a simple practice for the third bullet that I have found helpful for both bullets three and four: When you write these tests, try to cover some of the existing, working functionality, too. Whenever I add a new test to the growing test base, I try to add one or two more tests not called for by the new code or the bug I'm fixing. I realize that this may distract a bit from the task at hand, but it's a low-cost way to grow the test suite without setting aside dedicated time. I try to keep these add-on tests reasonably close to the part of the program I'm adding or fixing. This allows me to benefit from the thinking I'm already doing about that part of the program.

At some point, it's good to take a look at code coverage to see if there are parts of the code that con't yet have tests written for them. Those parts of the program can be the focus of dedicated test-writing sessions as time permits.

Brown also gives a piece of advice that seasoned developers should already know: make the tests part of continuous integration. They should run every time we update the application. This keeps us honest and our code clean.

All in all, this is pretty good advice. That's not surprising. I usually learn something from Brown's writing.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have spent a few minutes most afternoons writing a little code. It's been the best part of my work day. The project was a little compiler.

One of the first things we do in my compiler course is to study a small compiler for a couple of the days. This is a nice way to introduce the stages of a compiler and to raise some of the questions that we'll be answering over the course of the semester. It also gives students a chance to see the insides of a working compiler before they write their own. I hope that this demystifies the process a little: "Hey, a compiler really is just a program. Maybe I can write one myself."

For the last decade or so, I have used a compiler called acdc for this demo, based on Chapter 2 of Crafting A Compiler by Fischer, Cytron, and LeBlanc. ac is a small arithmetic language with two types of numbers, sequences of assignment statements, and print statements. dc is a stack-based desk calculator that comes as part of many Unix installations. I whipped up a acdc compiler in Java about a decade ago and have used it ever since. Both languages have enough features to be useful as a demo but not enough to overwhelm. My hacked-up compiler is also open to improvements as we learn techniques throughout the course, giving us a chance to use them in the small before students applied them to their own project.

I've been growing dissatisfied with this demo for a while now. My Java program feels heavy, with too many small pieces to be simple enough for a quick read. It requires two full class sessions to really understand it well, and I've been hoping to shorten the intro to my course. ac is good, but it doesn't have any flow control other than sequencing, which means that it does not give us a way to look at assembly language generation with jumps and backpatching. On top of all that, I was bored with acdc; ten years is a long time to spend with one program.

This spring I stumbled on a possible replacement in The Fastest FizzBuzz in the West. It defines a simple source language for writing FizzBuzz programs declaratively. For example:

   1...150
   fizz=3
   buzz=5
   woof=7

produces the output of a much larger program in other languages. Imagine being able to pull this language during your next interview for a software dev position!

This language is really simple, which means that a compiler for it can be written in relatively few lines of code. However, it also requires generating code with a loop and if-statements, which requires thinking about branching patterns in assembly language.

The "Fastest FizzBuzz" article uses a Python parser generator to create its compiler. For my course, I want something that my students can read with only their knowledge coming into the course, and I want the program to be transparent enough so that they can see directly how each stage works and how it interacts with other parts of the compiler.

I was also itching to write a program, so I did.

I wrote my compiler in Python. It performs a simple scan of the source program, taking as much advantage of the small set of simple tokens as possible. The parser works by recursive descent, which also takes advantage of the language's simple structure. The type checker makes sure the numbers all make sense and that the words are unique. Finally, to make things even simpler, the code generator produces an executable Python 3.4 program.

I'm quite hopeful about this compiler's use as a class demo. It is simple enough to read in one sitting, even by students who enter the course with weaker programming skills. Even so, the language can also be used to demonstrate the more sophisticated techniques we learn throughout the course. Consider:

• Adding comments to the source language overwhelms the ad hoc approach I use in the scanner, motivating the use of a state machine.
• While the parser is easily handled by recursive descent, the language is quite amenable to a simple table-driven approach, too. The table-driven parser will be simple enough that students can get the hang of the technique with few unnecessary details.
• The type checker demonstrates walking an abstract syntax tree without worrying about too many type rules. We can focus our attention on type systems when dealing with the more interesting source language of their project.
• The code generator has to deal with flow of control, which enables us to learn assembly language generation on a smaller scale without fully implementing code to handle function calls.

So this compiler can be a demo in the first week of the course and also serve as a running example throughout.

We'll see how well this plays in class in a couple of months. In any case, I had great fun ending my days the last two weeks by firing up emacs or IDLE and writing code. As a bonus, I used this exercise to improve my git skills, taking them beyond the small set of commands I have used on my academic projects in the past. (git rebase -i is almost my friend now.) I also wrote more pyunit tests than I have written in a long, long time, which reminded me of some of the challenges students face when trying to test their code. That should serve me well in the fall, too.

I do like writing code.

The article Why Aren't American Teenagers Working Anymore? comments on a general trend I have observed locally over the last few years: most high school students don't have summer jobs any more. At first, you might think that rising college tuition would provide an incentive to work, but the effect is almost the opposite:

"Teen earnings are low and pay little toward the costs of college," the BLS noted this year. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Elite private universities charge tuition of more than $50,000.

Even in-state tuition at a public universities has grown large enough to put it out of the reach of the typical summer jobs. Eventually, there is almost no point in working a low-paying job; you'll have to borrow significant amount anyway.

These days, students have another alternative that might pay off better in the long run anyway. With a little gumption and free resources available on the web, many students can learn to program, build websites, and make mobile apps. Time spent not working a job but developing skills that are in high demand and which pay well might be time spent well.

Even as a computer scientist, though, I'm traditional enough to be a little uneasy with this idea. Don't young people benefit from summer jobs in ways other than a paycheck? The authors of this article offer the conventional thinking:

A summer job can help teenagers grow up as it expands their experience beyond school and home. Working teens learn how to manage money, deal with bosses, and get along with co-workers of all ages.

You know what, though... A student working on an open-source project can learn also how to deal with people in positions of relative authority and learn how to get along with collaborators of all ages. They might even get to interact with people from other cultures and make a lasting contribution to something important.

Maybe instead of worrying about teenagers getting summer jobs we should introduce them to programming and open-source software.

Last week I read a tweet that linked to an article by Paul Romer. He is an economist currently working at the World Bank, on leave from his chair at NYU. Romer writes well, so I found myself digging deeper and reading a couple of his blog articles. One of them, Writing, struck a chord with me both as a writer and as a computer scientist.

Consider:

The quality of written prose should be higher in documents that will have many readers.

This is true of code, too. If a piece of code will be read many times, whether by one person or several, then each minute spent making it shorter and clearer improves reading comprehension every single time. That's even more important in code than in text, because so often we read code in order to change it. We need to understand it at even deeper level to ensure that our changes have the intended effect. Time spent making code better repays itself many times over.

Romer caused a bit of a ruckus when he arrived at the World Bank by insisting, to some of his colleagues' displeasure, that everyone in his division writer clearer, more concise reports. His goal was admirable: He wanted more people to be able to read and understand these reports, because they deal with policies that matter to the public.

He also wanted people to trust what the World Bank was saying by being able more readily to see that a claim was true or false. His article looks at two different examples that make a claim about the relationship between education spending and GDP per capita. He concludes his analysis of the examples with:

In short, no one can say that the author of the second claim wrote something that is false because no one knows what the second claim means.

In science, writing clearly builds trust. This trust is essential for communicating results to the public, of course, because members of the public do not generally possess the scientific knowledge they need to assess the truth of claim directly. But it is also essential for communicating results to other scientists, who must understand the claims at a deeper level in order to support, falsify, and extend them.

In the second half of the article, Romer links to a study of the language used in World Bank's yearly reports. It looks at patterns such as the frequency of the word "and" in the reports and the ratio of nouns to verbs. (See this Financial Times article for a fun little counterargument on the use of "and".)

Romer wants this sort of analysis to be easier to do, so that it can be used more easily to check and improve the World Bank's reports. After looking at some other patterns of possible interest, he closes with this:

To experiment with something like this, researchers in the Bank should be able to spin up a server in the cloud, download some open-source software and start experimenting, all within minutes.

Wonderful: a call for storing data in easy-to-access forms and a call for using (and writing) programs to analyze text, all in the name not of advancing economics technically but of improving its ability to communicate its results. Computing becomes a tool integrated into the process of the World Bank doing its designated job. We need more leaders in more disciplines thinking this way. Fortunately, we hear reports of such folks more often these days.

Alas, data and programs were not used in this way when Romer arrived at the World Bank:

When I arrived, this was not possible because people in ITS did not trust people from DEC and, reading between the lines, were tired of dismissive arrogance that people from DEC displayed.

One way to create more trust is to communicate better. Not being dismissively arrogant is, too, though calling that sort of behavior out may be what got Romer in so much hot water with the administrators and economists at the World Bank in the first place.

In his commonplace book A Certain World, W.H. Auden quotes C.S. Lewis on the controversial nature of tramslation:

[T]ranslation, by its very nature, is a continuous implicit commentary. It can become less tendentious only by becoming less of a translation.

Lewis was merely acknowledging a truth about language: Translators must have a point of view, and often that point of view will be controversial.

I once saw Kurt Vonnegut speak with a foreign language class here many years ago. One of the students asked him what he thought about the quality of the translations done for his book. Vonnegut laughed and said that his books were so peculiar and so steeped in Americana that translating one was akin to writing a new book. He said that his translators deserved all the royalties from the books they created by translating him. They had to write brand new works.

These memories came to mind again recently while I was reading Tyler Cowen's conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri, especially when Lahiri said this:

At one point I was talking about this idea, in antiquity: in Latin, the word for "translator" is "interpreter". I teach translation now, and I talk a lot to my students about translation being the most intimate form of reading and how there was the time when translating and interpreting and analyzing were all one thing.

As my mind usually does, it began to think about computer programs.

Like many programmers, I often find myself porting a program from one language to another. This is clearly translation but, as Vonnegut and and Lahiri tell us, it is also a form of interpretation. To port a piece of code, I have to understand its meaning and express that meaning in a new language. That language has its own constructs, idioms, patterns, and set of community practices and expectations. To port a program, one must have a point of view, so the process can be, to use Lewis's word, tendentious.

I often refactor code, too, both my own programs and programs written by others. This, too, is a form of translation, even though it leaves the new code written in the same language as the original. Refactoring is necessarily an opinionated act, and thus tendentious.

Occasionally, I refactor a program in order to learn what it does and how it does it. In those cases, I'm not judging the original code as anything but ill-suited to my current state of knowledge. Even so, when I get done, I usually like my version better, if only a little bit. It expresses what I learned in the process of rewriting the code.

It has always been hard for me to port a program without refactoring it, and now I understand why. Both activities are a kind of translation, and translation is by its nature an activity that requires a point of view.

This fall, I will again teach our "Translation of Programming Languages" course. Writing a compiler requires one to become intimate not only with specific programs, the behavior of which the compiler must preserve, but also the language itself. At the end of the project, my students know the grammar, syntax, and semantics of our source language in a close, almost personal way. The target language, too. I don't mind if my students develop a strong point of view, even a controversial one, along the way. (I'm actually disappointed if the stronger students do not!) That's a part of writing new software, too.

A few years ago, someone asked MathOverflow, "Why do so many textbooks have so much technical detail and so little enlightenment?" Some CS textbooks suffer from this problem, too, though these days the more likely case is that the book tries to provide too much context. They try to motivate so much that they drown the reader in a lot of unhelpful words.

The top answer on MathOverflow (via Brian Marick) points out that the real problem does not usually lie in the lack of motivation or context provided by textbooks. The real goal is to learn how to do math, not "know" it. That is even more true of software developent. A textbook can't really teach to write programs; most of that is learned through doing itself. Perhaps the best purpose that the text can serve, says the answer, is to show the reader what he or she needs to learn. From there, the reader must go off and practice.

How does learning occur from there?

Based on my own experience as both a student and a teacher, I have come to the conclusion that the best way to learn is through "guided struggle". You have to do the work yourself, but you need someone else there to either help you over obstacles you can't get around despite a lot of effort or provide you with some critical knowledge (usually the right perspective but sometimes a clever trick) you are missing. Without the prior effort by the student, the knowledge supplied by a teacher has much less impact.

Some college CS students seem to understand this, or perhaps they simply get lucky because they are motivated to program for some other reason. They go off and try to do something using the knowledge they have. Then they come to class, or to the prof's office hours, to ask questions about what does not go smoothly. Students who skip the practice and hope that lectures will soak into them like a magic balm generally find that they don't know much when they attempt problems after class.

The MathOverflow answer matches up pretty well with my experience. Teachers and written material can have strong positive effect on learning, but they are most effective once the student has engaged with the material by trying to solve problems or write code. The teacher's job then has two parts: First, create conditions in which students can work productively. Second, pay close attention to what students are doing, diagnose misconceptions and mistakes, and help students get back onto a productive path by pointing out missing practices or bits of knowledge.

All of this reminds me of some of mymore effective class sessions teaching novice programmers, using design patterns. A typical session looks something like this:

• I give the students a problem to solve.
• Students work on a solution, using techniques that have worked in the past.
• They encounter problems, because the context around the problem has shifted in ways that they can't see given only what they know.
• We discuss the forces at play and tease out the underlying problem.
• I demonstrate the pattern's solution.
• Ahhhh.

This is a guided struggle in the small. Students then go off to write a larger program that lets them struggle a bit more, and we discuss whatever gets in their way.

A final note... One of the comments on the answer points out that a good lecture can "do" math (or CS), rather than "tell", and that such lectures can be quite effective. I agree, but in my experience this is one of the hardest skills for a professor to develop. Once I have solved a problem, it is quite difficult for me to make it look to my students as if I am solving it anew in class. The more ingrained the skill, the harder it is for me to lecture about it in a way that is more helpful than telling a story. Such stories are an essential tool in the teacher's toolbox, but their lies more in motivating students than in teaching them how to write programs. Students still have to go off and do the hard work themselves. The teacher's job is to guide them through their struggles.

Screenwriter Ken Levine answers one of his Friday Questions about how he and writing partner David Isaacs worked:

We always worked on the same script. And we always worked together in the room. Lots of teams will divide up scenes, write separately, then return to either polish it together or rewrite each other's scenes on their own. We wrote head-to-head. To us the value of a partnership is to get immediate feedback from someone you trust, and more importantly, have someone to go to lunch with.

It sounds like Levine and Isaacs (MASH, Cheers, Frasier, ...) discovered the benefits of pair programming in their own line of work.

I liked the second part of his answer, too, about whether they ever gave up on a script once they starting writing it:

Nothing gets done unless both team members are committed to it. Once we began to write a spec there was never any discussion of just junking or tabling it to work on something else. We would struggle at times with the story or certain jokes but we always fought our way through it. Wrestling scripts to the ground is excellent training for when you do go on staff.

Wrestling code to the ground is excellent training for what you have to do as a developer, too. On those occasions when what you thought was a good idea turns out to be a bad one, it is wise to pitch it and move on. But it's too easy to blame difficulty in the trenches on the idea. Often, the difficulty is a hint that you need to work harder or dig deeper. Pairing with another programmer often provides the support you need to stick with it.

In an essay in The Guardian, writer George Saunders reflects on having written his first novel after many years writing shorter fiction. To a first approximation, he found the two experiences to be quite similar. In particular,

What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she's already done.

I read this on a day when I had just graded thirty-plus programming assignments from my junior/senior-level Programming Languages courses, and this made me think of student programmers. My first thought was snarky, and only partly tongue-in-cheek: Students write and then submit. Who has the time or interest to tweak?

My conscience quickly got the better of me, and I admitted that this was unfair. In a weak moment at the end of a long day, it's easy to be dismissive and not think about students as people who face all sorts of pressures both in and out of the classroom. Never forget Hanlon's Razor, my favorite formulation of which is:

Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system of interactions.

Even allowing the snark, my first thought was inaccurate. The code students submit is often the end result of laborious tweaking. The thing is, most students tweak only while the code gives incorrect answers. In the worst case, some students tweak and tweak, employing an age-old but highly inefficient software development methodology: Make another change and see if it works.

This realization brought to mind Kent Beck's Rules of Simple Design:

1. passes the tests
2. reveals intention
3. has no duplication
4. has the fewest elements possible

Most students are under time pressures that make artistry a luxury good; they are happy to find time to make their code work at all. If the code passes the tests, it's probably good enough for now.

But there is more to the student's willingness to stop tinkering so soon than just external pressures. It takes a lot of programming experience and a fair amount of time to come to even appreciate Rules 2 through 4. Why does it matter if code reveals the programmer's intention, in terms of either art or engineering? What's the big deal about a little duplication? The fewest elements? -- making that happen takes time that could be spent on something much more interesting.

I am coming to think of Kent's rules as a sort of Bloom's taxonomy for the development of programming expertise. Students start at Level 1, happy to write code that achieves its stated purpose. As they grow, programmers move through the rules, mastering deeper levels of understanding of design, simplicity, and, yes, artistry. They don't move through the stages in a purely linear fashion, but they do tend to master the rules in roughly the order listed above.

Today is a day of empathy for my novice programmers. As I write this, they are writing the final exam in my course. I hope that in a few weeks, after the blur of a busy semester settles in their minds, they reflect a bit and see that they have made progress as programmers -- and that they can now ask better questions about the programming languages they use than they could at the beginning of the course.

Okay, so this is cool:

Neuroscientists stimulate the brain with brief pulses of energy and then record the echoes that bounce back. Dreamless sleep and general anaesthesia return simple echoes; brains in conscious states produce more complex patterns. Then comes a little inspiration from data compression:

Excitingly, we can now quantify the complexity of these echoes by working out how compressible they are, similar to how simple algorithms compress digital photos into JPEG files. The ability to do this represents a first step towards a "consciousness-meter" that is both practically useful and theoretically motivated.

This made me think of Chris Ford's StrangeLoop 2015 talk about using compression to understand music. Using compressibility as a proxy for complexity gives us a first opportunity to understand all sorts of phenomena about which we are collecting data. Kolmogorov complexity is a fun tool for programmers to wield.

The passage above is from an Aeon article on the study of consciousness. I found it an interesting read from beginning to end.

The last sentence of each of these passages reminds me of some of the students over the years.

First this, from Paul Callaghan's The Word Chain Kata:

One common way to split problems is via the "generate and test" pattern, where one component suggests results and the other one discards invalid ones. (In my experience, undergrad programmers are experts in this pattern, although they tend to use it as a [software development] methodology--but that's another story.)

When some students learn to program for the first time, they start out by producing code that looks like something they have seen before, trying it out, and then tinkering with it until it works or until they become exasperated. (I always hope that they act on their exasperation by asking me for help, rather than by giving up.) These students usually understand little bits of the code locally, but they don't really understand the program or function as a whole. Yet, somehow, they find a way to make it work.

It's surprising how far some students can get in a course of study by programming this way. (That's why Callaghan calling the approach a methodology made me smile.) It's unfortunate, too, because eventually the approach hits a wall when problems and domains become more challenging. Or when they run into a course where they program in Racket, in which one misplaced parenthesis can cause an otherwise perfect piece of code to implode. Lisp-like languages do not provide a supportive environment for this kind of "programming by wandering around".

And then there's this, from Andy Hertzfeld's fun little story about the writing of the classic manual Inside Macintosh:

Pretty soon, I figured out that if Caroline had trouble understanding something, it probably meant that the design was flawed. On a number of occasions, I told her to come back tomorrow after she asked a penetrating question, and revised the API to fix the flaw that she had pointed out. I began to imagine her questions when I was coding something new, which made me work harder to get things clearer before I went over them with her.

In this story, Caroline is not a student, but a young new writer assigned to the Mac documentation team. Still, she reminds me of students who are as delightful to work with as generate-and-test programmers can be frustrating. These students pay attention. They ask good questions, ones that often challenge the unstated assumptions underlying what we have explained before. At first, this can seem frustrating to us teachers, because we have to formulate answers for things that should be obvious. But that's the point: they aren't obvious, at least not to everyone, and us thinking they are obvious is inhibiting our teaching.

Last semester, I had one team of students in my compilers class that embodied this attitude. They asked questions no one had ever bothered to ask me before. At first, I thought, "How can these guys not understand such basic material?" Like Hertzfeld, though, pretty soon I figured out that their questions were exposing holes or weaknesses in my lectures, examples, and sample code. I began to anticipate their questions as I prepared for class. Their questions helped me see ways to make my course better.

As along so many other dimensions, part of the challenge in teaching CS is the wide variation in the way students study, learn, and approach their courses. It is also a part of the great fun of teaching, especially when you encounter the Carolines and Averys who push me to get better.

"This weekend I enjoyed Peter Hessler's interview of McPhee in The Paris Review, John McPhee, The Art of Nonfiction No. 3."

That's a direct quote from this blog. Don't remember it? I don't blame you; neither do I. I do remember blogging about McPhee back when, but as I read the same Paris Review piece again last Sunday and this, I had no recollection of reading it before, no sense of déjà vu at all.

Sometimes having a memory like mine is a blessing: I occasionally get to read something for the first time again. If you read my blog, then you get to read my first impressions for a second time.

I like this story that McPhee told about Bob Bingham, his editor at The New Yorker:

Bingham had been a writer-reporter at The Reporter magazine. So he comes to work at The New Yorker, to be a fact editor. Within the first two years there, he goes out to lunch with his old high-school friend Gore Vidal. And Gore says, What are you doing as an editor, Bobby? What happened to Bob Bingham the writer? And Bingham says, Well, I decided that I would rather be a first-rate editor than a second-rate writer. And Gore Vidal draws himself up and says, And what is wrong with a second-rate writer?

I can just hear the faux indignation in Vidal's voice.

McPhee talked a bit about his struggle over several years to write a series of books on geology, which had grown out of an idea for a one-shot "Talk of the Town" entry. The interviewer asked him if he ever thought about abandoning the topic and moving on to something he might enjoy more. McPhee said:

The funny thing is that you get to a certain point and you can't quit. Because I always worried: if you quit, you'll quit again. The only way out was to go forward, to learn your way and write your way out of it.

I know that feeling. Sometimes, I really do need to quit something and move on, but I always wonder whether quitting this time will make it easier to do next time. Because sometimes, I need to stick it out and, as McPhee says, learn my way out of the difficulty. I have no easy answers for knowing when quitting is the right thing to do.

Toward the end of the interview, the conversation turned to the course McPhee teaches at Princeton, once called "the literature of fact". The university first asked him to teach on short notice, over the Christmas break in 1974, and he accepted immediately. Not everyone thought it was a good idea:

One of my dear friends, an English teacher at Deerfield, told me: Do not do this. He said, Teachers are a dime a dozen -- writers aren't. But my guess is that I've been more productive as a writer since I started teaching than I would have been if I hadn't taught. In the overall crop rotation, it's a complementary job: I'm looking at other people's writing, and the pressure's not on me to do it myself. But then I go back quite fresh.

I know a lot of academics who feel this way. Then again, it's a lot easier to stay fresh in one's creative work if one has McPhee's teaching schedule, rather than a full load of courses:

My schedule is that I teach six months out of thirty-six, and good Lord, that leaves a lot of time for writing, right?

Indeed it does. Indeed it does.

On this reading of the interview, I marked only two passages that I wrote about last time. One came soon after the above response, on how interacting with students is its own reward. The other was a great line about the difference between mastering technique and having something to say: You demonstrated you know how to saddle a horse. Now go find the horse.

That said, I unconsciously channeled this line from McPhee just yesterday:

Writing teaches writing.

We had a recruitment event on campus, and I was meeting with a dozen or so prospective students and their entourages. We were talking about our curriculum, and I said a few words about our senior project courses. Students generally like these courses, even though they find them difficult. The students have never had to write a big program over the course of several months, and it's harder than it looks. The people who hire our graduates like these courses, too, because they know that these courses are places where students really begin to learn to program.

In the course of my remarks, I said something to the effect, "You can learn a lot about programming in classes where you study languages and techniques and theory, but ultimately you learn to write software by writing software. That's what the project courses are all about." There were a couple of experienced programmers in the audience, and they were all nodding their heads. They know McPhee is right.

As I got ready for class yesterday morning, I decided to refactor a piece of code. No big deal, right? It turned out to be a bigger deal than I expected. That's part of the fun of programming.

The function in question is a lexical addresser for a little language we use as a specimen in my Programming Languages course. My students had been working on a design, and it was time for us to build a solution as a group. Looking at my code from the previous semester, I thought that changing the order of two cases would make for a better story in class. The cases are independent, so I swapped them and ran my tests.

The change broke my code. It turns out that the old "else" clause had been serving as a convenient catch-all and was only working correctly due to an error in another function. Swapping the cases exposed the error.

Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a big deal, either. I would simply fix the code and give my students a correct solution. Unfortunately, I had less than an hour before class, so I now found myself in a scramble to find the bug, fix it, and make the changes to my lecture notes that had motivated the refactor in the first place. Making changes like this under time pressure is rarely a good idea... I was tempted to revert to the previous version, teach class, and make the change after class. But I am a programmer, dogged and often foolhardy, so I pressed on. With a few minutes to spare, I closed the editor on my lecture notes and synced the files to my teaching machine. I was tired and still had a little nervous energy coursing through me, but I felt great. That's part of the fun of programming.

I will say this: Boy, was I glad to have my test suite! It was incomplete, of course, because I found an error in my program. But the tests I did have helped me to know that my bug fix had not broken something else unexpectedly. The error I found led to several new tests that make the test suite stronger.

This experience was fresh in my mind this morning when I read "Physics Was Paradise", an interview with Melissa Franklin, a distinguished experimental particle physicist at Harvard. At one point, Franklin mentioned taking her first physics course in high school. The interviewer asked if physics immediately stood out as something she would dedicate her life to. Franklin responded:

Physics is interesting, but it didn't all of a sudden grab me because introductory physics doesn't automatically grab people. At that time, I was still interested in being a writer or a philosopher.

I took my first programming class in high school and, while I liked it very much, it did not cause me to change my longstanding intention to major in architecture. After starting in the architecture program, I began to sense that, while I liked architecture and had much to learn from it, computer science was where my future lay. Maybe somewhere deep in my mind was memory of an experience like the one I had yesterday, battling a piece of code and coming out with a sense of accomplishment and a desire to do battle again. I didn't feel the same way when working on problems in my architecture courses.

Intro CS, like intro physics, doesn't always snatch people away from their goals and dreams. But if you enjoy the fun of programming, eventually it sneaks up on you.

A key passage from Peter Seibel's 2014 essay, Code Is Not Literature:

But then it hit me. Code is not literature and we are not readers. Rather, interesting pieces of code are specimens and we are naturalists. So instead of trying to pick out a piece of code and reading it and then discussing it like a bunch of Comp Lit. grad students, I think a better model is for one of us to play the role of a 19th century naturalist returning from a trip to some exotic island to present to the local scientific society a discussion of the crazy beetles they found: "Look at the antenna on this monster! They look incredibly ungainly but the male of the species can use these to kill small frogs in whose carcass the females lay their eggs."

The point of such a presentation is to take a piece of code that the presenter has understood deeply and for them to help the audience understand the core ideas by pointing them out amidst the layers of evolutionary detritus (a.k.a. kludges) that are also part of almost all code. One reasonable approach might be to show the real code and then to show a stripped down reimplementation of just the key bits, kind of like a biologist staining a specimen to make various features easier to discern.

My scientist friends often like to joke that CS isn't science, even as they admire the work that computer scientists and programmers do. I think Seibel's essay expresses nicely one way in which studying software really is like what natural scientists do. True, programs are created by people; they don't exist in the world as we find it. (At least programs in the sense of code written by humans to run on a computer.) But they are created under conditions that look a lot more like biological evolution than, say, civil engineering.

As Hal Abelson says in the essay, most real programs end up containing a lot of stuff just to make it work in the complex environments in which they operate. The extraneous stuff enables the program to connect to external APIs and plug into existing frameworks and function properly in various settings. But the extraneous stuff is not the core idea of the program.

When we study code, we have to slash our way through the brush to find this core. When dealing with complex programs, this is not easy. The evidence of adaptation and accretion obscures everything we see. Many people do what Seibel does when they approach a new, hairy piece of code: they refactor it, decoding the meaning of the program and re-coding it in a structure that communicates their understanding in terms that express how they understand it. Who knows; the original program may well have looked like this simple core once, before it evolved strange appendages in order to adapt to the condition in which it needed to live.

The folks who helped to build the software patterns community recognized this. They accepted that every big program "in the wild" is complex and full of cruft. But they also asserted that we can study such programs and identify the recurring structures that enable complex software both to function as intended and to be open to change and growth at the hands of programmers.

One of the holy grails of software engineering is to find a way to express the core of a system in a clear way, segregating the extraneous stuff into modules that capture the key roles that each piece of cruft plays. Alas, our programs usually end up more like the human body: a mass of kludges that intertwine to do some very cool stuff just well enough to succeed in a harsh world.

And so: when we read code, we really do need to bring the mindset and skills of a scientist to our task. It's not like reading People magazine.

Yesterday afternoon I listened to a story told by someone who had recently been a passenger in a small plane flown by a colleague. As they climbed to their cruising altitude, which was clear and beautiful, the plane passed through a couple thousand feet of heavy clouds. The pilot flew confidently, having both training and experience in instrument flight.

The passenger telling the story, however, was disoriented and a little scared by being in the clouds and not knowing where they were heading. The pilot kept him calm by explaining the process of "flying by instruments" and how he had learned it. Sometimes, learning something new can give us confidence. Other times, just listening to a story can distract us enough to get us through a period of fear.

This story reminded me of a session early in my programming languages course, when students are learning Racket and functional programming style. Racket is quite different from any other language they have learned. "Don't dip your toes in the water," I tell them. "Get wet."

For students who prefer their learning analogies not to involve potential drowning -- that is, after all, the sensation many of them report feeling as they learn to cope with all of Racket's parentheses for the first time -- I relate an Alan Kay story that talks about learning to fly an airplanes after already knowing how to drive a car. Imagine what the world be like if everyone refused to learn how to fly a plane because driving was so much more comfortable and didn't force them to bend their minds a bit? Sure, cars are great and serve us well, but planes completely change the world by bringing us all closer together.

I have lost track of where I had heard or read Kay telling that story, so when I wrote up the class notes, I went looking for a URL to cite. I never found one, but while searching I ran across a different use of airplanes in an analogy that I have since worked into my class. Here's the paragraph I use in my class notes, the paragraph I thought of while listening to the flying-by-instruments story yesterday:

The truth is that bicycles and motorcycles operate quite differently than wheeled vehicles that keep three or more wheels on the ground. For one thing, you steer by leaning, not with the handlebars or steering wheel. Learning to fly an airplane gives even stronger examples of having to learn that your instincts are wrong, and that you have to train yourself to "instinctively" know not only that you turn by banking rather than with the rudder, but that you control altitude primarily with the throttle, not the elevators, speed primarily with the elevators not the throttle, and so forth.

Learning to program in a new style, whether object-oriented, functional, or concatenative, usually requires us to overcome deeply-ingrained design instincts and to develop new instincts that feel uncomfortable while we are learning. Developing new instincts takes some getting used to, but it's worth the effort, even if we choose not to program much in the new style after we learn it.

Now I find myself thinking about what it means to "fly by instruments" when we program. Is our unit testing framework one of the instruments we come to rely on? What about a code smell detector such as Reek? If you have thoughts on this idea, or pointers to what others have already written, I would love to hear from you.

Postscript.   I originally found the passage quoted above in a long-ish article about Ruby and Smalltalk, but that link has been dead for a while. I see that the article was reposted in a Ruby Buzz Forum message called On Ceremony and Training Wheels.

Oh, and if you know where I can find the Alan Kay story I went looking for online, I will greatly appreciate any pointers you can offer!

Over the last couple of days, a thread on the SIGCSE mailing list has been revisiting the well-tilled ground of comments in code. As I told my students at the beginning of class this semester, some of my colleagues consider me a heretic for not preaching the Gospel of Comments in Code. Every context seems to have its own need for, and expectations of, comments. Wherever students end up working, both while in school and after graduation, their employers will set a standard and expect them to follow. They will figure it out.

In most of my courses, I define a few minimal standard, try to set a good example in the code I give my students, and otherwise don't worry much about comments. Part of my example is that different files I give them are commented differently, depending on the context. A demo of an idea, a library to be reused in the course, and an application are different enough that they call for different kinds of comments. In a course such as compiler development, I require more documentation, both in and out of the code. Students live with that code for a semester and come to value some of their own comments many weeks later.

Anyway, the SIGCSE thread included two ideas that I liked, though they came from competing sides of the argument. One asserted that comments are harmful, because:

They're something the human reader can see but the computer can't, and therefore are a source of misunderstanding.

I love the idea of thinking in terms of misunderstandings between humans and the computer.

The other responded to another poster's suggestion that students be encouraged to write comments with themselves in mind: What would you like to know if you open this code six months from now? The respondent pointed out that this is unreasonable: Answering that question requires...

... a skill that is at least on par with good programming skills. Certainly new CS students are unable to make this kind of decision.

The thread has been a lot of fun to read. I remain mostly of the view that:

• It's better to write code that says what it means and thus needs as few comments as possible. This is a skill students can and should work on all the time time.


• If the code is likely to conflict with the expectations of the people most likely to read your code, then add a comment. This part depends a lot on context and experience. Students are just now earning their experience, and the context in which they work changes from course to course and job to job.

Students who care about programming, or who come to care about it over time, will care (or come to care) about comments, too.

This comment at the close of a recent Dan Meyer post struck close to home:

I haven't found a way to generate these kinds of insights about math without surrounding myself with people learning math for the first time.

I've learned a lot about programming from teaching college students. Insights can come at all levels, from working with seniors who are writing compilers as their first big project, through midstream students who are learning OOP or functional programming as a second or third style, right down to beginners who are seeing variables and loops and functions for the first time.

Sometimes an insight comes when a student asks a new question, or an old question at the right time. I had a couple of students in my compiler course last fall who occasionally asked the most basic questions, especially about code generation. Listening to their questions and creating new examples to illustrate my answers helped me think differently about the run-time system.

Other times, they come while listening to students talk among themselves. One student's answer to another student's question can trigger an entirely new way for me to think about a concept I think I understand pretty well. I don't have any recent personal examples in mind, but this sort of experience seems to be part of what triggered Meyer's post.

People are always telling us to "be the least experienced person in the room", to surround ourselves with "smarter" or more experienced people and learn from them. But there is a lot to be learned from programmers who are just starting out. College profs have that opportunity all the time, if they are willing to listen and learn.

Howard Marks is an investor and co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management. He has a big following in the financial community for his views on markets and investing, which often stray from orthodoxy, and for his straightforward writing and speaking style. He's a lot like Warren Buffett, with less public notoriety.

This week I read Marks's latest memo [ PDF ] to Oak Tree's investors, which focuses on expert opinion and forecasting. This memo made me think a lot about software development. Whenever Marks talks about experts predicting how the market would change and how investors should act, I thought of programming. His comments sound like the wisdom of an agile software developer.

Consider what he learned from the events of 2016:

1. First, no one really knows what events are going to transpire.
2. And second, no one knows what the market's reaction to those events will be.

Investors who got out of the market for the last couple of months of 2016, based on predictions about what would happen, missed a great run-up in value.

If a programmer cannot predict what will happen in the future, or how stakeholders will respond to these changes, then planning in too much detail is at best an inefficient use of time and energy. At worst it is a way to lock yourself into code that you really need to change but can't.

Or consider these thoughts on surprises (the emphasis in the original):

It's the surprises no one can anticipate that would move markets most if they were to happen. But (a) most people can't imagine them and (b) most of the time they don't happen. That's why they're called surprises.

To Marks, this means that investors should not try to get cute, predict the future, and outsmart the market. The best they can do is solid technical analysis of individual companies and invest based on observable facts about value and value creation.

To me, this means that we programmers shouldn't try to prepare for surprises by designing them into our software. Usually, the best we can do is to implement simple, clean code that does just what it does and no more. The only prediction we can make about the future is that we may well have to change our code. Creating clean interfaces and hiding implementation choices enable us to write code that is as straightforward as possible to change when the unimaginable happens, or even the imaginable.

Marks closes this memo with five quotes about forecasting from a collection he has been building for forty years. I like this line from former GE executive Ian Wilson, which expresses the conundrum that every designer faces:

No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all of your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.

It isn't really all that strange that the wisdom of an investor like Marks might be of great value to a programmer. Investors and programmers both have to choose today how to use a finite resource in a way that maximizes value now and in the future. Both have to make these choices based on knowledge gleaned from the past. Both are generally most successful when the future looks like the past.

A big challenge for investors and programmers alike is to find ways to use their experience of the past in a way that maximizes value across a number of possible futures, both the ones we can anticipate and the ones we can't.

As I settle into a new semester of teaching students functional programming and programming languages, I find myself again in the role of grader of, and commenter, on code. This passage from Tobias Wolff in Paris Review interview serves as a guide for me:

Now, did [Pound] teach Eliot to write? No. But he did help him see that there were more notes to be played he was playing. That is the kind of thing I hope to do. And to counsel patience -- the beauty of patience, which is not a virtue of the young.

Students often think that learning to program is all about the correctness of their code. Correctness matters, but there's a lot more. Knowing what is possible and learning to be patient as they learn often matter more than mere correctness. For some students, it seems, those lessons must begin before more technical habits can take hold.

On the racket-users mailing list yesterday, Matthias Felleisen issued "a research challenge that is common in the Racket world":

If you are here and you see the blueprints for paradise over there, don't just build paradise. Also build the bridge from here to there.

This is one of the things I love about Racket. And I don't use even 1% of the goodness that is Racket and its ecosystem.

Over the last couple of years, I have been migrating my Programming Languages course from a Scheme subset of Racket to Racket itself. Sometimes, this is simply a matter of talking about Racket, not Scheme. Others, it means using some of the data structures, functions, and tools Racket provides rather than doing without or building our own. Occasionally, this shift requires changing something I do in class, because Racket is fussier than Scheme in some regards. That's usually a good thing, because the change makes Racket a better language for engineering big programs. In general, though, the shift goes smoothly.

Occasionally, the only challenge is a personal one. For example, I decided to use first and rest this semester when working with lists, instead of car and cdr. This should make some students' lives better. Learning a new language and a new style and new IDE all at once can be tough for students with only a couple of semesters' programming experience, and using words that mean what they say eliminates one unnecessary barrier. But, as I tweeted, I don't feel whole or entirely clean when I do so. As my college humanities prof taught me through Greek tragedies, old habits die hard, if at all.

One of my goals for the course this semester is to have the course serve as a better introduction to Racket for students who might be inclined to take advantage of its utility and power in later courses, or who simply want to enjoy working in a beautiful language. I always seem to have a few who do, but it might be nice if even more left the course thinking of Racket as a real alternative for their project work. We'll see how it goes.

Good advice in this paragraph, paraphrased lightly from Modern Garbage Collection:

Garbage collection is a hard problem, really hard, one that has been studied by an army of computer scientists for decades. Be very suspicious of supposed breakthroughs that everyone else missed. They are more likely to just be strange or unusual tradeoffs in disguise, avoided by others for reasons that may only become apparent later.

It's wise always to be on the lookout for "strange or unusual tradeoffs in disguise".

In the Paris Review's The Art of Fiction No. 183, the interviewer asks Tobias Wolff for some advice. Wolff demurs:

Writers often give advice they don't follow to the letter themselves. And so I tend to receive their commandments warily.

This was refreshing. I also tend to hear advice from successful people with caution.

Wolff is willing, however, to share stories about what has worked for him. He just doesn't think what works for him will necessarily work for anyone else. He doesn't even think that what works for him on one story will work for him on the next. Eventually, he sums up his advice with this:

There's no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.

Wolff follows a few core practices that keep him moving forward every day, but he isn't dogmatic about them. He does whatever he needs to do to get the current story written -- even if it means moving to Italy for several months.

Wolfe is taking about short stories and novels, but this sentiment applies to more than writing. It captures what is, for me, the fundamental attitude of agile software developers: There is no right way to write all programs, only a good way to write each particular program. We find that certain programming practices -- taking small steps, writing tests early, refactoring mercilessly, pairing -- apply to most tasks. These practices are so powerful precisely because they give us feedback frequently and help us adjust course quickly.

But when conditions change around us, we must be willing to adapt. (Even if that means moving to Italy for several months.) This is what it means to be agile.

Earlier this week, Rands tweeted:

Tinkering is a deceptively high value activity.

... to which I followed up:

Which is why a language that enables tinkering is a deceptively high value tool.

I thought about these ideas a couple of days later when I read The Running Conversation in Your Head and came across this paragraph:

The idea is not that you need language for thinking but that when language comes along, it sure is useful. It changes the way you think, it allows you to operate in different ways because you can use the words as tools.

This is how I think about programming in general and about new, and better, programming languages in particular. A programmer can think quite well in just about any language. Many of us cut our teeth in BASIC, and simply learning how to think computationally allowed us to think differently than we did before. But then we learn a radically different or more powerful language, and suddenly we are able to think new thoughts, thoughts we didn't even conceive of in quite the same way before.

It's not that we need the new language in order to think, but when it comes along, it allows us to operate in different ways. New concepts become new tools.

I am looking forward to introducing Racket and functional programming to a new group of students this spring semester. First-class functions and higher-order functions can change how students think about the most basic computations such as loops and about higher-level techniques such as OOP. I hope to do a better job this time around helping them see the ways in which it really is different.

To echo the Running Conversation article again, when we learn a new programming style or language, "Something really special is created. And the thing that is created might well be unique in the universe."

I'm reminded of a student I met with once who told me that he planned to go to law school, and then a few minutes later, when going over a draft of a lab report, said "Yeah... Grammar isn't really my thing." Explaining why I busted up laughing took a while.

When I ask prospective students why they decided not to pursue a CS degree, they often say things to the effect of "Computer science seemed cool, but I heard getting a degree in CS was a lot of work." or "A buddy of mine told me that programming is tedious." Sometimes, I meet these students as they return to the university to get a second degree -- in computer science. Their reasons for returning vary from the economic (a desire for better career opportunities) to personal (a desire to do something that they have always wanted to do, or to pursue a newfound creative interest).

After you've been in the working world a while, a little hard work and some occasional tedium don't seem like deal breakers any more.

Such conversations were on my mind as I read physicist Chad Orzel's recent Science Is Not THAT Special. In this article, Orzel responds to the conventional wisdom that becoming a scientist and doing science involve a lot of hard work that is unlike the exciting stuff that draws kids to science in the first place. Then, when kids encounter the drudgery and hard work, they turn away from science as a potential career.

Orzel's takedown of this idea is spot on. (The quoted passage above is one of the article's lighter moments in confronting the stereotype.) Sure, doing science involves a lot of tedium, but this problem is not unique to science. Getting good at anything requires a lot of hard work and tedious attention to detail. Every job, every area of expertise, has its moments of drudgery. Even the rare few who become professional athletes and artists, with careers generally thought of as dreams that enable people to earn a living doing the thing they love, spend endless hours engaged in the drudgery of practicing technique and automatizing physical actions that become their professional vocabulary.

Why do we act as if science is any different, or should be?

Computer science gets this rap, too. What could be worse than fighting with a compiler to accept a program while you are learning to code? Or plowing threw reams of poorly documented API descriptions to plug your code into someone's e-commerce system?

Personally, I can think of lots of things that are worse. I am under no illusion, however, that other professionals are somehow shielded from such negative experiences. I just prefer my pains to theirs.

Maybe some people don't like certain kinds of drudgery. That's fair. Sometimes we gravitate toward the things whose drudgery we don't mind, and sometimes we come to accept the drudgery of the things we love to do. I'm not sure which explains my fascination with programming. I certainly enjoy the drudgery of computer science more than that of most other activities -- or at least I suffer it more gladly.

I'm with Orzel. Let's be honest with ourselves and our students that getting good at anything takes a lot of hard work and, once you master something, you'll occasionally face some tedium in the trenches. Science, and computer science in particular, are not that much different from anything else.

Khoi Vinh wrote a short blog entry called The Underestimated Merits of Copying Someone Else's Work that reminds us how valuable copying others' work, a standard practice in the arts, can be. At the lowest level there is copying at the textual level. Sometimes, the value is mental or mechanical:

Hunter S. Thompson famously re-typed, word for word, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" just to learn how it was done.

This made me think back to the days when people typed up code they found in Byte magazine and other periodicals. Of course, typing a program gave you more than practice typing or a sense of what it was like to type that much; it also gave you a working program that you could use and tinker with. I don't know if anyone would ever copy a short story or novel by hand so that they could morph it into something new, but we can do that meaningfully with code.

I missed the "copy code from Byte" phase of computing. My family never had a home computer, and by the time I got to college and changed my major to CS, I had plenty of new programs to write. I pulled ideas about chess-playing programs and other programs I wanted to write from books and magazines, but I never typed up an entire program's source code. (I mention one of my first personal projects in an old OOPSLA workshop report.)

I don't hear much these days about people copying code keystroke for keystroke. Zed Shaw has championed this idea in a series of introductory programming books such as Learn Python The Hard Way. There is probably something to be learned by copying code Hunter Thompson-style, feeling the rhythm of syntax and format by repetition, and soaking up semantics along the way.

Vinh has a more interesting sort of copying in mind, though: copying the interface of a software product:

It's odd then to realize that copying product interfaces is such an uncommon learning technique in design. ... it's even easier to re-create designs than it is to re-create other forms of art. With a painting or sculpture, it's often difficult to get access to the historically accurate tools and materials that were used to create the original. With today's product design, the tools are readily available; most of us already own the exact same software employed to create any of the most prominent product designs you could name.

This idea generalizes beyond interfaces to any program for which we don't have source code. We often talk about reverse engineering a program, but in my experience this usually refers to creating a program that behaves "just like" the original. Copying an interface pixel by pixel, like copying a program or novel character by character, requires the artist to attend to the smallest details -- to create an exact replica, not a similar work.

We cannot reverse engineer a program and arrive at identical source code, of course, but we can try to replicate behavior and interface exactly. Doing so might help a person appreciate the details of code more. Such a practice might even help a programmer learn the craft of programming in a different way.

I am a regular reader of John Regehr's blog, which provides a steady diet of cool compiler conversation. One of Regehr's frequent topics is undefined behavior in programming languages, and what that means for implementing and testing compilers. A lot of those blog entries involve C and C++, which I don't use all that often any more, so reading them is more spectator sport than contact sport.

This week, I got see how capricious C++ compilers can feel up close.

My students are implementing a compiler for a simple subset of a Pascal-like language. We call the simplest program in this language print-one:

    $ cat print-one.flr
    program main();
      begin
        return 1
      end.

One of the teams is writing their compiler in C++. The team completed its most recent version, a parser that validates its input or reports an error that renders its input invalid. They were excited that it finally worked:

    $ g++ -std=c++14 compiler.cpp -o compiler
    $ compiler print-one.flr 
    Valid flair program

They had tested their compiler on two platforms:

• a laptop running OS X v10.11.5 and gcc v4.9.3
• a desktop running Ubuntu v14.04 and gcc v4.8.4

I sat down at my desktop computer to exercise their compiler.

    $ g++ compiler.cpp -o compiler
    In file included from compiler.cpp:7:
    In file included from ./parser.cpp:3:
    In file included from ./ast-utilities.cpp:4:
    ./ast-utilities.hpp:7:22: warning: in-class initialization of non-static data
          member is a C++11 extension [-Wc++11-extensions]
        std::string name = "Node";
                    ^
    [...]
    24 warnings generated.

Oops, I forgot the -std=c++14 flag. Still, it compiled, and all of the warnings come from a part of the code has no effect on program validation. So I tried the executable:

    $ compiler print-one.flr 
    ERROR at line #3 -- unexpected <invalid>  1
    Invalid flair program

Hmm. The warnings are unrelated to part of the executable that I am testing, but maybe they are creating a problem. So I recompile with the flag:

    $ g++ -std=c++14 compiler.cpp -o compiler
    error: invalid value 'c++14' in '-std=c++14'

What? I check my OS and compiler specs:

    $ sw_vers -productVersion
    10.9.5
    $ g++ --version
    Configured with: --prefix=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.2.1
    Apple LLVM version 6.0 (clang-600.0.57) (based on LLVM 3.5svn)
    [...]

Oh, right, Apple doesn't ship gcc any more; it ships clang and link gcc to the clang exe. I know my OS is a bit old, but it still seems odd that the -std=c++14 flag isn't supported. I google for an answer (thanks, StackOverflow!) and find that that I need to use -std=c++1y. Okay:

    $ g++ -std=c++1y compiler.cpp -o compiler
    $ compiler print-one.flr 
    ERROR at line #3 -- unexpected <invalid>  1
    Invalid flair program

Now the student compiler compiles but gives incorrect, or at least unintended, behavior. I'm surprised that both my clang and the students' gcc compile their compiler yet produce executables that give different answers. I know that gcc and clang aren't 100% compatible, but my students are using a relatively small part of C++. How can this be?

Maybe it has something to do with how clang processes the c++1y standard flag. So I backed up to the previous standard:

    $ g++ -std=c++0x compiler.cpp -o compiler
    $ compiler print-one.flr 
    ERROR at line #3 -- unexpected <invalid>  1
    Invalid flair program

Yes, that's c++0x, not c++0y. The student compiler still compiles and still gives incorrect or unintended behavior. Maybe it is a clang problem? I upload their code to our student server, which runs Linux and gcc:

    $ cat /etc/debian_version 
    8.1
    $ g++ --version
    [...]
    gcc version 4.7.2 (Debian 4.7.2-5)

This version of gcc doesn't support either c++14 or c++1?, so I fell back to c++0x:

    $ g++ -std=c++0x compiler.cpp -o compiler
    $ compiler print-one.flr 
    Valid flair program

Hurray! I can test their code.

I'm curious. I have a Macbook Pro running a newer version of OS X. Maybe...

    $ sw_vers -productVersion
    ProductName:Mac OS X
    ProductVersion:10.10.5
    BuildVersion:14F2009
    $ g++ --version
    Configured with: --prefix=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr --with-gxx-include-dir=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.11.sdk/usr/include/c++/4.2.1
    Apple LLVM version 7.0.2 (clang-700.1.81)
    [...]

    $ g++ -std=c++14 compiler.cpp -o compiler
    $ compiler print-one.flr 
    Valid flair program

Now, the c++14 flag works, and it produces a compiler that produces the correct behavior -- or at least the intended behavior.

I am curious about this anomaly, but not curious enough to research the differences between clang and gcc, the differences between the different versions of clang, or what Apple or Debian are doing. I'm also not curious enough to figure out which nook of C++ my students have stumbled into that could expose a rift in the behavior of these various C++ compilers, all of which are standard tools and pretty good.

At least now I remember what it's like to program in a language with undefined behavior and can read Regehr's blog posts with a knowing nod of the head.

Last week some tweeted a link to Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend, an old blog entry by @tef from last February. When I read it yesterday, I was nodding my head so hard that I almost fell off of the elliptical machine. I have done that before. Trust me, you don't want to do it. You don't really fall; the machine throws you. If you are moving fast, it throws you hard.

I don't gush over articles in my blog as much these days as I once did, but this one is worthy. If you write code, go read this article. Nothing I write hear will replace reading the entire piece. For my own joy and benefit, though, I record a few of my favorite passages here -- along with comments, as I am wont to do.

... if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent".

This is actually a quote from EWD 1036, one of Dijkstra's famous notes. I don't always agree with EWD, but this line is gold and a perfect tagline for @tef's entry

Building reusable code is easier to do in hindsight with a couple of examples of use in the code base, than foresight of ones you might want later.

When OO frameworks first became popular, perhaps the biggest mistake that developers made was to try to write a framework up front. Refactoring from multiple programs is still the best way for most of us mortals to create a framework. This advice also applies to cohesive libraries of functions.

Aside: Make a util directory and keep different utilities in different files. A single util file will always grow until it is too big and yet too hard to split apart. Using a single util file is unhygienic.

Golf clap. I have this pattern. I am glad to know that others do, too.

Boiler plate is a lot like copy-pasting, but you change some of the code in a different place each time, rather than the same bit over and over.

For some reason, reading this made me think of copy-and-paste as a common outcome of programming language design, if not its intended effect.

Boilerplate works best when libraries are expected to cater to all tastes, but sometimes there is just too much duplication. It's time to wrap your flexible library with one that has opinions on policy, workflow, and state. Building simple-to-use APIs is about turning your boilerplate into a library.

Again, notice the role refactoring plays here. Build lots of code that works, then factor out boilerplate or wrap it. The API you design will be informed by real uses of the functions you define.

It is not so much that we are hiding detail when we wrap one library in another, but we are separating concerns: requests is about popular http adventures; urllib3 is about giving you the tools to choose your own adventure.

One of the things I like about this blog entry is its theme of separating concerns. Some libraries are perfect when you are building a common application; others enable you to build your own tools when you need something different.

A lot of programming is exploratory, and it's quicker to get it wrong a few times and iterate than think to get it right first time.

Agile Development 101. Even when I know a domain well, if the domain affords me a lot of latitude when building apps, I like explore and iterate as a way to help me choose the right path for the current implementation.

[O]ne large mistake is easier to deploy than 20 tightly coupled ones.

And even more, as @tef emphasizes throughout: It's easier to delete, too.

Becoming a professional software developer is accumulating a back-catalogue of regrets and mistakes.

When we teach students to design programs in their first couple of years of CS, we often tell them that good design comes from experience, and experience comes from bad design. An important step in becoming a better programmer is to start writing code, as much as you can. (That's how you build your catalog of mistakes.) Then think about the results. (That's how you turn mistakes into experience.)

We are not building modules around being able to re-use them, but being able to change them.

This is one of the central lessons of software development. One of the things I loved about OO programming was that it gave me another way to create modules that isolated different concerns from one another. So many folks make the mistake of thinking that objects, classes, and even frameworks are about reuse. But reuse is not the key; separation of concerns is. Design your objects that create shearing layers within your program, which make it easier to change the code.

It isn't so much that you're iterating, but you have a feedback loop.

As I blogged recently, competence is about creating conditions that minimize mistakes but also help you to recognize mistakes quickly and correct them. You don't iterate for the sake of iterating. You iterate because that's how you feed learning back into the work.

The strategies I've talked about [...] are not about writing good software, but how to build software that can change over time.

This blog entry isn't a recipe for writing good code. It's a recipe for creating conditions in which you can write good code. I do claim, though, that all other things being reasonably equal, in most domains, code that you can change is better code than code you can't change.

Good code isn't about getting it right the first time. Good code is just legacy code that doesn't get in the way.

That is a Kent Beck-caliber witticism: Good code is just legacy code that doesn't get in the way.

This blog entry made me happy.

I enjoyed this interview with Atul Gawande by Ezra Klein. When talking about making mistakes, Gawande notes that humans have enough knowledge to cut way down on errors in many disciplines, but we do not always use that knowledge effectively. Mistakes come naturally from the environments in which we work:

We're all set up for failure under the conditions of complexity.

Mistakes are often more a matter of discipline and attention to detail than a matter of knowledge or understanding. Klein captures the essence of Gawande's lesson in one of his questions:

We have this idea that competence is not making mistakes and getting everything right. [But really...] Competence is knowing you will make mistakes and setting up a context that will help reduce the possibility of error but also help deal with the aftermath of error.

In my experience, this is a hard lesson for computer science students to grok. It's okay to make mistakes, but create conditions where you make as few as possible and in which you can recognize and deal with the mistakes as quickly as possible. High-discipline practices such as test-first and pair programming, version control, and automated builds make a lot more sense when you see them from this perspective.

Thanks to Greg Wilson for a pointer to this paper, which reports the result of an empirical evaluation of the effects of test-driven development on software quality and programmer productivity. In a blog entry about the paper, Wilson writes:

This painstaking study is the latest in a long line to find that test-driven development (TDD) has little or no impact on development time or code quality.

He is surprised, because he feels more productive when he writes tests up-front.

I'd like to be able to say that these researchers and others must be measuring the wrong things, or measuring things the wrong way, but after so many years and so many different studies, those of us who believe might just have to accept that our self-assessment is wrong.

Never fear! Avdi Grimm points the way toward resolution. Section 3.3 of the research paper describes the task that was given to the programmers in the experiment:

The task was divided into 13 user stories of incremental difficulty, each building on the results of the previous one. An example, in terms of input and expected output, accompanied the description of each user story. An Eclipse project, containing a stub of the expected API signature, (51 Java SLOC); also an example JUnit test (9 Java SLOC) was provided together with the task description.

Notice what this says:

• Test subjects were given the user stories.
• The stories were sequenced to assist the subjects.
• Each story was accompanied by an example.
• Subjects were given code stubs with method signatures already defined.

The paper reports that previous studies of this sort have also set tasks before programmers with similar initial conditions. Grimm identifies a key feature of all these experiments: The problem given to the test subjects has already been defined in great detail.

Shocking news: test-driven design is not helpful when the design is already done!

As Grimm says, TDD helps the programmer think about how to start writing code and when to stop. For me, the most greatest value in doing TDD is that it helps me think about what I need to build, and why. That is design. If the problem is already defined to the point of implementation, most of the essential design thinking has been done. In that context, the results reported in this research paper are thoroughly unsurprising.

Like Grimm, I sympathize with the challenge of doing empirical research on the practices of programmers. I am glad that people such as the paper's authors are doing such research and that people such as Wilson discuss the results. But when we wonder why some research results conflict with the personal assessments of real programmers and our assessments of our own experiences, I think I know what one of the problems might be:

Evaluating the efficacy of a design methodology properly requires that we observe people doing, um, design.

In the Paris Review's The Art of Fiction No. 123, Tom Wolfe tells how he learned about writer's block. Wolfe was working at Esquire magazine, and his first editor, Byron Dobell, had assigned him to write an article about car customizers. After doing all his research, he was totally blocked.

I now know what writer's block is. It's the fear you cannot do what you've announced to someone else you can do, or else the fear that it isn't worth doing. That's a rarer form. In this case I suddenly realized I'd never written a magazine article before and I just felt I couldn't do it. Well, Dobell somehow shamed me into writing down the notes that I had taken in my reporting on the car customizers so that some competent writer could convert them into a magazine piece. I sat down one night and started writing a memorandum to him as fast as I could, just to get the ordeal over with. It became very much like a letter that you would write to a friend in which you're not thinking about style, you're just pouring it all out, and I churned it out all night long, forty typewritten, triple-spaced pages. I turned it in in the morning to Byron at Esquire, and then I went home to sleep.

Later that day, Dobell called him to say that they were deleting the "Dear Byron" at the top of the memo and running the piece.

Most of us need more editing than that after we write anything, but... No matter; first you have to write something. Even if it's the product of a rushed all-nighter, just to get an obligation off our table.

When I write, and especially when I program, my reluctance to start usually grows out of a different sort of fear: the fear that I won't be able to stop, or want to. Even simple programming tasks can become deep holes into which we fall. I like that feeling, but I don't have enough control of my work schedule most days to be able to risk disappearing like that. What I could use is an extra dose of audacity or impetuosity. Or maybe a boss like Byron Dobell.

Call me a crazy extreme programmer, but when I came across the Tolkien passage quoted in my previous post on commitment and ignorance again recently after many years, my first thought was that Elrond sounded like a wise old agile developer:

Look not too far ahead!

You aren't gonna need it, indeed.

This first thought cast Gimli in the role of a Big Design Up Front developer. Unfortunately, that analogy sells his contribution to the conversation short. Just as Gimli's deep commitment to the mission is balanced by Elrond's awareness, so, too, is Gimli's perspective applied to software balanced by Elrond's YAGNI. Perhaps then Gimli plays the role of Metaphor in this fantasy: the impulse that drives the team forward to the ultimate goal.

Just another one of those agile moments I have every now and then. I wonder if they will start happening with more frequency, and less reality, as I get older. They are a little like senior moments, only focused on programming.

Nils Pihl, CEO at Traintracks.io, writes about the benefits of launching the start-up in Beijing:

It took two years of hard work and late nights at the whiteboard to build a prototype of something we knew we could be proud of -- and what Silicon Valley investor would agree to fund something that would take two years to release? Not only that, but it would have cost us roughly 6 times as much money to develop it in Silicon Valley -- for no immediate benefit.

If moving to Beijing is not an option for you, fear not. You do not have to travel that far to find patient investors, great programmers, and low cost of living. Try Des Moines. Or St. Louis. Or Indianapolis. Or, if you must live in a Major World City, try Chicago. Even my small city can offer a good starting point, though programmers are not as plentiful as we might like.

The US Midwest has a lot of advantages for founders, but none of the smog you'll find in Beijing and much shorter commutes than you will find in all the places people tell you you have to go.

I recently came across an old entry on Jonathan Blow's blog called John Carmack on Inlined Code. The bulk of the entry consists an even older email message that Carmack, lead programmer on video games such as Doom and Quake, sent to a mailing list, encouraging developers to consider inlining function calls as a matter of style. This email message is the earliest explanation I've seen of Carmack's drift toward functional programming, seeking to as many of its benefits as possible even in the harshly real-time environment of game programming.

The article is a great read, with much advice borne in the trenches of writing and testing large programs whose run-time performance is key to their success. Some of the ideas involve programming language:

It would be kind of nice if C had a "functional" keyword to enforce no global references.

... while others are more about design style:

The function that is least likely to cause a problem is one that doesn't exist, which is the benefit of inlining it.

... and still others remind us to rely on good tools to help avoid inevitable human error:

I now strongly encourage explicit loops for everything, and hope the compiler unrolls it properly.

(This one may come in handy as I prepare to teach my compiler course again this fall.)

This message-within-a-blog-entry itself quotes another email message, by Henry Spencer, which contains the seeds of a programming challenge. Spencer described a piece of flight software written in a particularly limiting style:

It disallowed both subroutine calls and backward branches, except for the one at the bottom of the main loop. Control flow went forward only. Sometimes one piece of code had to leave a note for a later piece telling it what to do, but this worked out well for testing: all data was allocated statically, and monitoring those variables gave a clear picture of most everything the software was doing.

Wow: one big loop, within which all control flows forward. To me, this sounds like a devilish challenge to take on when writing even a moderately complex program like a scanner or parser, which generally contain many loops within loops. In this regard, it reminds me of the Polymorphism Challenge's prohibition of if-statements and other forms of selection in code. The goal of that challenge was to help programmers really grok how the use of substitutable objects can lead to an entirely different style of program than we tend to create with traditional procedural programming.

Even though Carmack knew that "a great deal of stuff that goes on in the aerospace industry should not be emulated by anyone, and is often self destructive", he thought that this idea might have practical value, so he tried it out. The experience helped him evolve his programming style in a promising direction. This is a great example of the power of the pedagogical pattern known as Three Bears: take an idea to its extreme in order to learn the boundaries of its utility. Sometimes, you will find that those boundaries lie beyond what you originally thought.

Carmack's whole article is worth a read. Thanks to Jonathan Blow for preserving it for us.

~~~~

The image above is an example of the cover art for the "Commander Keen" series of video games, courtesy of Wikipedia. John Carmack was also the lead programmer for this series. What a remarkable oeuvre he has produced.

Like many people, I am fond of analogies between software development and arts like writing and painting. It's easy to be seduced by similarities even when the daily experiences of programmers and artists are often so different.

For that reason, I was glad that this statement by sculptor Jacques Lipschutz stood out in such great relief from the text around it:

Teaching is death. If he teaches, the sculptor has to open up and reveal things that should be closed and sacred.

For me, teaching computer science has been just the opposite. Teaching forces me to open up my thinking processes. It encourages me to talk with professional developers about how they do what they do and what they think about along the way. Through these discussions, we do reveal things that sometimes feel almost sacred, but I think we all benefit from the examination. It not only helps me to teach novice developers more effectively; it also helps me to be a better programmer myself.

~~~~

(The Lipschutz passage comes from Conversations with Artists, which I quoted for the first time last week.)

I recently wrote about some experiences programming in Joy, in which I use Joy to solve five problems that make up a typical homework assignment early in my Programming Languages course. These problems introduce my students to writing simple functions in a functional style, using Racket. Here is my code, if you care to check it out. I'm just getting back to stack programming, so this code can surely be improved. Feel free to email me suggestions or tweet me at @wallingf!

What did these problems teach me about Joy?

• The language's documentation is sparse. Like my students, I had to find out which Joy primitives were available to me. It has a lot of the basic arithmetic operators you'd expect, but finding them meant searching through a plain-text file. I should write Racket-caliber documentation for the language to support my own work.


• The number and order of the arguments to a function matters a lot. A function that takes several arguments can become more complicated than the corresponding Racket function, especially if you need to use them multiple times. I encountered this on my first day back to the language. In Racket, this problem requires a compound expression, but it is relatively straightforward, because arguments have names. With all its arguments on the stack, a Joy function has to do more work simply to access values, let alone replicate them for multiple uses.


• A slight difference in task can lead to a large change in the code. For Problem 4, I implemented operators for modular addition, subtraction, and multiplication. +mod and *mod were elegant and straightforward. -mod was a different story. Joy has a rem operator that operates like Racket's remainder, but it has no equivalent to modulo. The fact that rem returns negative values means that I need a boolean expression and quoted programs and a new kind of thinking. This militates for a bigger shift in programming style right away.


• I miss the freedom of Racket naming style. This isn't a knock on Joy, because most every programming language restricts severely the set of characters you can use in identifiers. But after being able to name functions +mod, in-range?, and int->char in Racket, the restrictions feel even more onerous.


• As in most programming styles, the right answer in Joy is often to write the correct helpers. The difference in level of detail between +mod and *mod on the one hand and -mod on the other indicates that I am missing solution. A better approach is to implement a modulo operator and use it to write all three mod operators. This will hide lower-level details in a general-purpose operator. modulo would make a nice addition to a library of math operators.


• Even simple problems can excite me about the next step. Several of these solutions, especially the mod operators, cry out for higher-order operators. In Racket, we can factor out the duplication in these operators and create a function that generates these functions for us. In Joy, we can do it, too, using quoted programs of the sort you see in the code for -mod. I'll be moving on to quoted programs in more detail soon, and I can't wait... I know that they will push me farther along the transition to the unique style of stack programming.

It's neat for me to be reminded that even the simplest little functions raise interesting design questions. In Joy, use of a stack for all data values means that identifying the most natural order for the arguments we make available to an operators can have a big effect on the ability to read and write code. In what order will arguments generally appear "in the wild"?

In the course of experimenting and trying to debug my code (or, even more frustrating, trying to understand why the code I wrote worked), I even wrote my first general utility operator:

    DEFINE clear  == [] unstack.

It clears the stack so that I can see exactly what the code I'm about to run creates and consumes. It's the first entry in my own little user library, named utilities.joy.

Fun, fun, fun. Have I ever said that I like to write programs?

Oberon is a software stack created by Niklaus Wirth and his lab at ETH Zürich. Lukas Mathis describes some of what makes Oberon unusual, including the fact that its desktop is "an infinitely large two-dimensional space on which windows ... can be arranged":

It's incredibly easy to move around on this plane and zoom in and out of it. Instead of stacking windows, hiding them behind each other (which is possible in modern versions of Oberon), you simply arrange them next to each other and zoom out and in again to switch between them. When people held presentations using Oberon, they would arrange all slides next to each other, zoom in on the first one, and then simply slide the view one screen size to the right to go to the next slide.

This sounds like interacting with Google Maps, or any other modern map app. I wonder if anyone else is using this as a model for user interaction on the desktop?

Check out Mathis's article for more. The section "Everything is a Command Line" reminds me of workspaces in Smalltalk. I used to have several workspaces open, with useful snippets of code just waiting for me to do it. Each workspace window was like a custom text-based menu.

I've always liked the idea of Oberon and even considered using the programming language in my compilers course. (I ended up using a variant.) A version of Compiler Construction is now available free online, so everyone can see how Wirth's clear thinking lead to a sparse, complete, elegant whole. I may have to build the latest installment of Oberon and see what all they have working these days.

Yesterday, William Stein's talk about the origins of SageMath spread rapidly through certain neighborhoods of Twitter. It is a thorough and somewhat depressing discussion of how hard it is to develop open source software within an academic setting. Writing code is not part of the tenure reward system or the system for awarding grants. Stein has tenure at the University of Washington but has decided that he has to start a company, SageMath, work for it full-time in order to create a viable open source alternative to the "four 'Ma's": Mathematica, Matlab, Maple, and Magma.

Stein's talk reminded me of something I read earlier this year, from a talk by Matthew Butterick:

"Information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable ... On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower ... So you have these two fighting against each other."

This was said by a guy named Stewart Brand, way back in 1984.

So what's the message here? Information wants to be free? No, that's not the message. The message is that there are two forces in tension. And the challenge is how to balance the forces.

Proponents of open source software -- and I count myself one -- are often so glib with the mantra "information wants to be free" that we forget about the opposing force. Wolfram et al. have capitalized quite effectively on information's desire to be expensive. This force has an economic power that can overwhelm purely communitarian efforts in many contexts, to the detriment of open work. The challenge is figuring out how to balance the forces.

In my mind, Mozilla stands out as the modern paradigm of seeking a way to balance the forces between free and expensive, creating a non-profit shell on top of a commercial foundation. It also seeks ways to involve academics in process. It will be interesting to see whether this model is sustainable.

Oh, and Stewart Brand. He pointed out this tension thirty years ago. I recently recommended How Buildings Learn to my wife and thought I should look back at the copious notes I took when I read it twenty years ago. But I should read the book again myself; I hope I've changed enough since then that reading it anew brings new ideas to mind.

Brent Simmons has recently suggested that Swift would be better if it were more dynamic. Some readers have interpreted his comments as an unwillingness to learn new things. In Oldie Complains About the Old Old Ways, Simmons explains that new things don't bother him; he simply hopes that we don't lose access to what we learned in the previous generation of improvements. The entry is short and worth reading in its entirety, but the last sentence of this particular paragraph deserves to be etched in stone:

It seemed like magic, then. I later came to understand how it worked, and then it just seemed like brilliance. (Brilliance is better than magic, because you get to learn it.)

This gets to close to the heart of why I love being a computer scientist.

So many of the computer programs I use every day seem like magic. This might seem odd coming from a computer scientist, who has learned how to program and who knows many of the principles that make complex software possible. Yet that complexity takes many forms, and even a familiar program can seem like magic when I'm not thinking about the details under its hood.

As a computer scientist, I get to study the techniques that make these programs work. Sometimes, I even get to look inside the new program I am using, to see the algorithms and data structures that bring to life the experience that feels like magic.

Looking under the hood reminds me that it's not really magic. It isn't always brilliance either, though. Sometimes, it's a very cool idea I've never seen or thought about before. Other times, it's merely a bunch of regular ideas, competently executed, woven together in a way that give an illusion of magic. Regular ideas, competently executed, have their own kind of beauty.

After I study a program, I know the ideas and techniques that make it work. I can use them to make my own programs.

This fall, I will again teach a course in compiler construction. I will tell a group of juniors and seniors, in complete honesty, that every time I compile and execute a program, the compiler feels like magic to me. But I know it's not. By the end of the semester, they will know what I mean; it won't feel like magic to them any more, either. They will have learned how their compilers work. And that is even better than the magic, which will never go away completely.

After the course, they will be able to use the ideas and techniques they learn to write their own programs. Those programs will probably feel like magic to the people who use them, too.

In her 1942 book Philosophy in a New Key, philosopher Susanne Langer wrote:

A question is really an ambiguous proposition; the answer is its determination.

This sounds like something a Prolog programmer might say in a philosophical moment. Langer even understood how tough it can be to write effective Prolog queries:

The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it -- right or wrong -- may be given.

Try sticking a cut somewhere and see what happens...

It wouldn't be too surprising if a logical philosopher reminded me of Prolog, but Langer's specialties were consciousness and aesthetics. Now that I think about it, though, this connection makes sense, too.

Prolog can be a lot of fun, though logic programming always felt more limiting to me than most other styles. I've been fiddling again with Joy, a language created by a philosopher, but every so often I think I should earmark some time to revisit Prolog someday.

David Andersen offers a rather thorough list of ways that academics might adapt Google's coding practices to their research. It's a good read; check it out! I did want to comment on one small comment, because it relates to a common belief about pair programming:

But, of course, effective pair programming requires a lot of soft skills and compatible pairs. I'm not going to pretend that this solution works everywhere.

I don't pretend that pair programming works everywhere, either, or that everyone should adopt it, but I often wonder about statements like this one. Andersen seems to think that pair programming is a good thing and has helped him and members of his team's to produce high-quality code in the past. Why downplay the practice in a way he doesn't downplay other practices he recommends?

Throughout, the article encourages the use of new tools and techniques. These tools will alter the practice of his students. Some are complex enough that they will need to be taught, and practiced over some length of time, before they become an effective part of the team's workflow. To me, pair programming is another tool to be learned and practiced. It's certainly no harder than learning git...

Pair programming is a big cultural change for many programmers, and so it does require some coaching and extended practice. This isn't much different than the sort of "onboarding" that Andersen acknowledges will be necessary if he is to adopt some of Google's practices successfully in his lab upon upon his return. Pair programming takes practice and time, too, like most new skills.

I have seen the benefit of pair programming in an academic setting myself. Back when I used to teach our introductory course to freshmen, I had students pair every week in the closed lab sessions. We had thirty students in each section, but only fifteen computers in our lab. I paired students in a rotating fashion, so that over the course of fifteen weeks each student programmed with fifteen different classmates. We didn't use a full-on "pure" XP-style of pairing, but what we did was consistent with the way XP encourages pair programming.

This was a good first step for students. They got to know each other well and learned from one another. The better students often helped their partners in the way senior developers can help junior developers progress. In almost all cases, students helped each other find and fix errors. Even though later courses in the curriculum did not follow up with more pair programming, I saw benefits in later courses, in the way students interacted in the lab and in class.

I taught intro again a couple of falls ago after a long time away. Our lab has twenty-eight machines now, so I was not forced to use pair programming in my labs. I got lazy and let them work solo, with cross-talk. In the end, I regretted it. The students relied on me a lot more to help them find errors in their code, and they tended to work in the same insulated cliques throughout the semester. I don't think the group progressed as much as programmers, either, even though some individuals turned out fine.

A first-year intro lab is a very different setting than a research lab full of doctoral students. However, if freshmen can learn to pair program, I think grad students can, too.

Pair programming is more of a social change than a technical change, and that creates different issues than, say, automated testing and style checking. But it's not so different from the kind of change that capricious adherence to style guidelines or other kinds of code review impose on our individuality.

Are we computer scientists so maladjusted socially that we can't -- or can't be bothered -- to learn the new behaviors we need to program successfully in pairs? In my experience, no.

Like Andersen, I'm not advocating that anyone require pair programming in a lab. But: If you think that the benefits of pair programming exceed the cost, then I encourage you to consider having your research students or even your undergrads use it. Don't shy away because someone else thinks it can't work. Why deprive your students of the benefits?

The bottom line is this. Pair programming is a skill to be learned, like many others we teach our students.

Michael Fogus, in the latest issue of Read-Eval-Print-λove, writes:

The book in question was Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie (Brodie 1987) and upon reading it I immediately put it into my own "personal pantheon" of influential programming books (along with SICP, AMOP, Object-Oriented Software Construction, Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, and Programmers Guide to the 1802).

Mr. Fogus has good taste. Programmers Guide to the 1802 is new to me. I guess I need to read it.

The other five books, though, are in my own pantheon influential programming books. Some readers may be unfamiliar with these books or the acronyms, or aware that so many of them are available free online. Here are a few links and details:

• Thinking Forth teaches us how to program in Forth, a concatenative language in which programs run against a global stack. As Fogus writes, though, Brodie teaches us so much more. He teaches a way to think about programs.


• SICP is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, hailed by many as the greatest book on computer programming ever written. I am sympathetic to this claim.


• AMOP is The Art of the Metaobject Protocol, a gem of a book that far too few programmers know about. It presents a very different and more general kind of OOP than most people learn, the kind possible in a language like Common Lisp. I don't know of an authorized online version of this book, but there is an HTML copy available.


• Object-Oriented Software Construction is Bertrand Meyer's opus on OOP. It did not affect me as deeply as the other books on this list, but it presents the most complete, internally consistent software engineering philosophy of OOP that I know of. Again, there seems to be an unauthorized version online.


• I love Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns and have mentioned it a couple of times over the years [ 1 | 2 ]. Ounce for ounce, it contains more practical wisdom for programming in the trenches than any book I've read. Don't let "Smalltalk" in the title fool you; this book will help you become a better programmer in almost any language and any style. I have a PDF of a pre-production draft of SBPP, and Stephane Ducasse has posted a free online copy, with Kent's blessing.

There is one book on my own list that Fogus did not mention: Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, by Peter Norvig. It holds perhaps the top position in my personal pantheon. Subtitled "Case Studies in Common Lisp", this book teaches Common Lisp, AI programming, software engineering, and a host of other topics in a classical case studies fashion. When you finish working through this book, you are not only a better programmer; you also have working versions of a dozen classic AI programs and a couple of language interpreters.

Reading Fogus's paragraph of λove for Thinking Forth brought to mind how I felt when I discovered PAIP as a young assistant professor. I once wrote a short blog entry praising it. May these paragraphs stand as a greater testimony of my affection.

I've learned a lot from other books over the years, both books that would fit well on this list (in particular, A Programming Language by Kenneth Iverson) and others that belong on a different list (say, Gödel, Escher, Bach -- an almost incomparable book). But I treasure certain programming books in a very personal way.

Dan Luu's blog is usually both entertaining and insightful. We Only Hire The Trendiest is no exception.

I did my undergrad at Wisconsin, which is one of the 25 schools that claims to be a top 10 cs/engineering school...

Even though he comes from one of the best CS schools, Luu recognizes that grads of many other schools are well prepared for careers in industry. Companies that bias their hiring toward the top schools miss out on a lot of "talent". Then again, they miss out on a lot of great talent in many other ways, too. For example:

A typical rejection reason was something like "we process millions of transactions per day here and we really need someone with more relevant experience who can handle these things without ramping up".

The people you don't hire won't have to ramp up. There is only one problem: You didn't hire anyone, so there's no way they can help you handle these things. Maybe you should hire people with strong foundations, a little curiosity, and a little drive. Those people can develop all the relevant experience you need.

As Luu says, "It's much easier to hire people who are underrated, especially if you're not paying market rates." That's where the Moneyball analogy comes in handy. I wonder if any company is doing sabermetric-like analysis of software developers? If so, they could develop a durable competitive advantage in hiring.

Software entrepreneurs and companies in my part of the world, the American Midwest, have always faced stiff challenges when it comes to hiring and retaining tech talent from the coasts. Luu reminds them that they also have an opportunity: find underrated people from non-elite schools who want to stay in the Midwest, and then develop a team of professionals who rival in performance anything you can find on the coasts.

In my town, Banno is a great example of a company that has accepted this challenge. It's not easy, but with patience and strong leadership, it seems to be working.

Somehow, I recently came across a link to Stay on the Bus, an excerpt from a commencement speech Arno Rafael Minkkinen gave at the New England School of Photography in June 2004. It is also titled "The Helsinki Bus Station Theory: Finding Your Own Vision in Photography". I almost always enjoy reading the thoughts of an artist on his or her own art, and this was no exception. I also usually hear echoes of what I feel about my own arts and avocations. Here are three.

What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera.

This is one of the great things about any art. What happens inside your mind can happen in a piano, on a canvas, or in a poem. When people find the art that channels their mind best, beautiful things -- and lives -- can happen.

One of the things I like about programming is that is really a meta-art. Whatever happens in your mind can happen inside a camera, inside a piano, on a canvas, or in a poem. Yet whatever happens inside a camera, inside a piano, or on a canvas can happen inside a computer, in the form of a program. Computing is a new medium for experimenting, simulating, and creating.

Teachers who say, "Oh, it's just student work," should maybe think twice about teaching.

Amen. There is no such thing as student work. It's the work our students are ready to make at a particular moment in time. My students are thinking interesting thoughts and doing their best to make something that reflects those thoughts. Each program, each course in their study is a step along a path.

All work is student work. It's just that some of us students are at a different point along our paths.

Georges Braque has said that out of limited means, new forms emerge. I say, we find out what we will do by knowing what we will not do.

This made me think of an entry I wrote many years ago, Patterns as a Source of Freedom. Artists understand better than programmers sometimes that subordinating to a form does not limit creativity; it unleashes it. I love Minkkinen's way of saying this: we find out what we will do by knowing what we will not do. In programming as in art, it is important to ask oneself, "What will I not do?" This is how we discover we will do, what we can do, and even what we must do.

Those are a few of the ideas that stood out to me as I read Minkkinen's address. The Helsinki Bus Station Theory is a useful story, too.

In Sledgehammers vs Nut Crackers, Thomas Guest talks about pulling awk of the shelf to solve a fun little string-processing problem. He then shows a solution in Python, one of his preferred general-purpose programming languages. Why bother with languages like awk when you have Python at the ready? Guest writes:

At the outset of this post I admitted I don't generally bother with awk. Sometimes, though, I encounter the language and need to read and possibly adapt an existing script. So that's one reason to bother. Another reason is that it's elegant and compact. Studying its operation and motivation may help us compose and factor our own programs -- programs far more substantial than the scripts presented here, and in which there will surely be places for mini-languages of our own.

As I watch some of my students struggle this semester to master Racket, recursive programming, and functional style, I offer them hope that learning a new language and a new style will make them better Python and Java programmers, even if they never write another Racket or Lisp program again. The more different ways we know how to think about problems and solutions, the more effective we can be as solvers of problems. Of course, Racket isn't a special purpose language, and a few students find they so like the new style that they stick with the language as their preferred tool.

Experienced programmers understand what Guest is saying, but in the trenches of learning, it can be hard to appreciate the value of knowing different languages and being able to think in different ways. My sledgehammer works fine, my students say; why am I learning to use a nutcracker? I have felt that sensation myself.

I try to keep this feeling in mind as my students work hard to master a new way of thinking. This helps me empathize with their struggle, all the while knowing that Racket will shape how some of them think about every program they write in the future.

As computer scientists get older, we all find ourselves reminiscing about the computers we knew in the past. I sometimes tell my students about using 5.25" floppies with capacities listed in kilobytes, a unit for which they have no frame of reference. It always gets a laugh.

In a recent blog entry, Daniel Lemire reminisces about the Cray 2, "the most powerful computer that money could buy" when he was in high school. It was took up more space than an office desk (see some photos here), had 1 GB of memory, and provided a peak performance of 1.9 gigaflops. In contrast, a modern iPhone fits in a pocket, has 1 GB of memory, too, and contains a graphics processing unit that provides more gigaflops than the Cray 2.

I saw Lemire's post a day after someone tweeted this image of a 64 GB memory card from 2016 next to a 2 GB Western Digital hard drive from 1996:

The youngest students in my class this semester were born right around 1996. Showing them a 1996 hard drive is like my college professors showing me magnetic cores: ancient history.

This sort of story is old news, of course. Even so, I occasionally remember to be amazed by how quickly our hardware gets smaller and faster. I only wish I could improve my ability to make software just as fast. Alas, we programmers must deal with the constraints of human minds and human organizations. Hardware engineers do battle only with the laws of the physical universe.

Lemire goes a step beyond reminiscing to close his entry:

And what if, today, I were to tell you that in 40 years, we will be able to fit all the computational power of your phone into a nanobot that can live in your blood stream?

Imagine the problems we can solve and the beauty we can make with such hardware. The citizens of 2056 are counting on us.

I learned this one summer while writing and deleting the same program several times:

The instinct to discard is finally a kind of faith. It tells me there's a better way to do this page even though the evidence is not accessible at the present time.

The engineer in me always whispered that evidence supported the desire to delete the program and start over: a recognition that I understood encapsulation of behavior more clearly, or messages as a means of decoupling subsystems. Yet in the end there is also small bit of faith. "Surely some of the code I'm deleting is good enough to survive to the next generation..." The programmer, like the writer, must be willing to believe in such situations that "nature will restore itself".

(The above passage is a quote of Don DeLillo from The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 135.)

A newcomer to the Racket users mailing list asked which was the better way to promote the language: start a discussion on the mailing list, or ask questions on Stack Overflow. After explaining that neither was likely to promote Racket, Matthew Butterick gave some excellent advice:

Here's one good way to promote the language:

1. Make something impressive with Racket.
2. When someone asks "how did you make that?", give Racket all the credit.

Don't cut corners in Step 1.

This technique applies to all programming languages.

Butterick has made something impressive with Racket: Practical Typography, an online book. He wrote the book using a publishing system named Pollen, which he created in Racket. It's a great book and a joy to read, even if typography is only a passing interest. Check it out. And he gives Racket and the Racket team a lot of credit.

StrangeLoop is long in the books for most people, but I'm still thinking about some of the things I learned there. This is the first of what I hope to be a few more posts on talks and ideas still on my mind.

The conference opened with a keynote address by Peter Alvaro, who does research at the intersection of distributed systems and programming languages. The talk was titled "I See What You Mean", but I was drawn in more by his alternate title: "What a Tiny Language Can Teach Us About Gigantic Systems". Going in, I had no idea what to expect from this talk and so, in an attitude whose pessimism surprised me, I expected very little. Coming out, I had been surprised in the most delightful way.

Alvaro opened with the confounding trade-off of all abstractions: Hiding the distracting details of a system can illuminate the critical details (yay!), but the boundaries of an abstraction lock out the people who want to work with the system in a different way (boo!). He illustrated the frustration felt by those who are locked out with a tweet from @pxlplz:

SELECT bs FROM table WHERE sql="arrgh" ORDER BY hate

From this base, Alvaro moved on to his personal interests: query languages, semantics, and distributed systems. When modeling distributed systems, we want a language that is resilient to failure and tolerant of a loose ordering on the execution of operations. But we also need a way to model what programs written in the language mean. The common semantic models express a common split in computing:

• operational semantics: a program means what it does
• model-theoretic semantics: a program means the set of facts that makes it true

With query languages, we usually think of programs in terms of the databases of facts that makes them true. In many ways, the streaming data of a distributed system is a dual to the database query model. In the latter, program control flows down to fixed data. In distributed systems, data flows down to fixed control units. If I understood Alvaro correctly, his work seeks to find a sweet spot amid the tension between these two models.

Alvaro walked through three approaches to applicative programming. In the simplest form, we have three operators: select (σ), project (Π), and join (⋈). The database language SQL adds to this set negation (¬). The Prolog subset Datalog makes computation of the least fixed point a basic operation. Datalog is awesome, says Alvaro, but not if you add ¬! That creates a language with too much power to allow the kind of reasoning we want to do about a program.

Declarative programs don't have assignment statements, because they introduce time into a model. An assignment statement effectively partitions the past (in which an old value holds) from the present (characterized by the current value). In a program with state, there is an hidden clock inside the program.

We all know the difficulty of managing state in a standard system. Distributed systems create a new challenge. They need to deal with time, but a relativistic time in which different programs seem to be working on their own timelines. Alvaro gave a couple of common examples:

• a sender crashes, then restarts and begins to replay a set of transaction
• a receiver enters garbage collection, then comes back to life and begins to respond to queued messages

A language that helps us write better distributed systems must give us a way to model relativistic time without a hidden universal clock. The rest of the talk looked at some of Alvaro's experiments aimed at finding such languages for distributed systems, building on the ideas he had introduced earlier.

The first was Dedalus, billed as "Datalog in time and space". In Dedalus, knowledge is local and ephemeral. It adds two temporal operators to the set found in SQL: @next, for making assertions about the future, and @async, for making assertions of independence between operations. Computation in Dedalus is rendezvous between data and control. Program state is a deduction.

But what of semantics? Alas, a Dedalus program has an infinite number of models, each model itself infinite. The best we can do is to pull at all of the various potential truths and hope for quiescence. That's not comforting news if you want to know what your program will mean while operating out in the world.

Dedalus as the set of operations {σ, Π, ⋈, ¬, @next, @async} takes us back to the beginning of the story: too much power for effective reasoning about programs.

However, Dedalus minus ¬ seems to be a sweet spot. As an abstraction, it hides state representation and control flow and illuminates data, change, and uncertainty. This is the direction Alvaro and his team are moving in now. One result is Bloom, a small new language founded on the Dedalus experiment. Another is Blazes, a program analysis framework that identifies potential inconsistencies in a distributed program and generates the code needed to ensure coordination among the components in question. Very interesting stuff.

Alvaro closed by returning to the idea of abstraction and the role of programming language. He is often asked why he creates new programming languages rather than working in existing languages. In either approach, he points out, he would be creating abstractions, whether with an API or a new syntax. And he would have to address the same challenges:

• Respect users. We are they.
• Abstractions leak. Accept that and deal with it.
• It is better to mean well than to feel good. Programs have to do what we need them to do.

Creating a language is an act of abstraction. But then, so is all of programming. Creating a language specific to distributed systems is a way to make very clear what matters in the domain and to provide both helpful syntax and clear, reliable semantics.

Alvaro admits that this answer hides the real reason that he creates new languages:

Inventing languages is dope.

At the end of this talk, I understood its title, "I See What You Mean", better than I did before it started. The unintended double entendre made me smile. This talk showed how language interacts with problems in all areas of computing, the power language gives us as well as the limits it imposes. Alvaro delivered a most excellent keynote address and opened StrangeLoop on a high note.

Check out the full talk to learn about all of this in much greater detail, with the many flourishes of Alvaro's story-telling.

This morning, I wanted to send Michael Feathers a link to Marick's Law. The only link I could find to it was a tweet of Brian's. This law is too important to be left vulnerable to the vagaries of an internet service, so let's give it a permanent home:

In software, anything of the form "X's Law" is better understood by replacing the word "Law" with "Fervent Desire".

This is a beautiful observation, lovingly and consciously self-referential. I think of it almost daily. Use it well.

~~~~~

Historical note.    When I searched for Marick's Law, I did find reference to another law going by the same name. Uncle Bob calls this Marick's Law: "When it comes to code, it never pays to rush." This is a useful aphorism as well, and perhaps Brian once called it Marick's Law, too. Uncle Bob's post is dated November 2008. Brian's coining tweet is dated April 2009. I'm going to stick with the first-person post as definitive and observe that Brian, like Whitman, is large and contains multitudes.

I cannot help but notice that we can and should apply the definitive Marick's Law to the secondhand quote given by Uncle Bob. Many of us fervently desire it to be true that, when it comes to code, it never pays to rush. If it's not, then many of our best practices need an overhaul. Besides, we fear deep in our hearts that sometimes it probably does pay to rush.

Mike Feathers draws an analogy I'd never thought of before in The Universality of Postel's Law: what we think of as "good character" can be thought of as an application of Postel's Law to ordinary human relations.

Societies often have the notion of 'good character'. We can attempt all sorts of definitions but at its core, isn't good character just having tolerance for the foibles of others and being a person people can count on? Accepting wider variation at input and producing less variation at output? In systems terms that puts more work on the people who have that quality -- they have to have enough control to avoid 'going off' on people when others 'go off on them', but they get the benefit of being someone people want to connect with. I argue that those same dynamics occur in physical systems and software systems that have the Postel property.

These days, most people talk about Postel's Law as a social law, and criticisms of it even in software design refer to it as creating moral hazards for designers. But Postel coined this "principle of robustness" as a way to talk about implementing TCP, and most references I see to it now relate to HTML and web browsers. I think it's pretty cool when a software design principle applies more broadly in the design world, or can even be useful for understanding human behavior far removed from computing. That's the sign of a valuable pattern -- or anti-pattern.

In What Is the Business of Literature?, Richard Nash tells a story about how the ideas underlying writing, books, and publishing have evolved over the centuries, shaped by the desires of both creators and merchants. One of the key points is that technological innovation has generally had a far greater effect on the ability to consume literature than on the ability to create it.

But books are just one example of this phenomenon. It is, in fact, a pattern:

For the most part, however, the technical and business-model innovations in literature were one-sided, far better at supplying the means to read a book than to write one. ...

... This was by no means unique to books. The world has also become better at allowing people to buy a desk than to make a desk. In fact, from medieval to modern times, it has become easier to buy food than to make it; to buy clothes than to make them; to obtain legal advice than to know the law; to receive medical care than to actually stitch a wound.

One of the neat things about the last twenty years has been the relatively rapid increase in the ability for ordinary people to to write and disseminate creative works. But an imbalance remains.

Over a shorter time scale, this one-sidedness has been true of software as well. The fifty or sixty years of the Software Era have given us seismic changes in the availability, ubiquity, and backgrounding of software. People often overuse the word 'revolution', but these changes really have had an immense effect in how and when almost everyone uses software in their lives.

Yet creating software remains relatively difficult. The evolution of our tools for writing programs hasn't kept pace with the evolution in platforms for using them. Neither has the growth in our knowledge of how make great software.

There is, of course, a movement these days to teach more people how to program and to support other people who want to learn on their own. I think it's wonderful to open doors so that more people have the opportunity to make things. I'm curious to see if the current momentum bears fruit or is merely a fad in a world that goes through fashions faster than we can comprehend them. It's easier still to toss out a fashion that turns out to require a fair bit of work.

Writing software is still a challenge. Our technologies have not changed that fact. But this is also true, as Nash reminds us, of writing books, making furniture, and a host of other creative activities. He also reminds us that there is hope:

What we see again and again in our society is that people do not need to be encouraged to create, only that businesses want methods by which they can minimize the risk of investing in the creation.

The urge to make things is there. Give people the resources they need -- tools, knowledge, and, most of all, time -- and they will create. Maybe one of the new programmers can help us make better tools for making software, or lead us to new knowledge.

Net Prophet, aka Scott Turner, is porting the Pain Machine, his college hoops prediction system, from Common Lisp to Python. The new program is getting different values than the old one in one portion of the code, though they don't seem to affect model's overall performance. Which program is right?

I suspect the Python version is probably "more correct" than the Common Lisp version, because this is a matrix-manipulation heavy part of the code, and it is expressed much more succinctly and clearly in Python.

Scott's a darn good programmer and someone with a lot of Lisp experience, so don't go there. This isn't a language testimonial. It's a testament to how programmers' confidence in their code goes up when they can see more clearly that it says what they intended to say. It is easier to trust something we understand. (But don't forget to run some tests, too!)

Among the reasons David Heinemeier Hansson gives in his advice to Fire the Workaholics is that working too much is a sign of bad judgment:

If all you do is work, your value judgements are unlikely to be sound. Making good calls on "is it worth it?" is absolutely critical to great work. Missing out on life in general to put more hours in at the office screams "misguided values".

I agree, in two ways. First, as DHH says, working too much is itself a general indicator that your judgment is out of whack. Second is the more specific case:

For workaholics, doing more work always looks like a reasonable option. As a result, when you are trying to decide, "Should I make this or not?", you never have to choose not to make the something in question -- even when not making it is the right thing to do. That sort of indifferent decision making can be death in any creative endeavor.

In the Paris Review's Garrison Keillor, The Art of Humor No. 2, Keillor thinks back to his decision to become a writer, which left him feeling uncertain about himself:

Someone once asked John Berryman, How do you know if something you've written is good? And John Berryman said, You don't. You never know, and if you need to know then you don't want to be a writer.

This doesn't mean that you don't care about getting better. It means that you aren't doing it to please someone else, or at least that your doing it is not predicated on what someone else thinks. You are doing it because that's what you think about. It means that you keep writing, whether it's good or not. That's how you get better.

It's always fun to watch our students wrestle with this sort of uncertainty and come out on the other side of the darkness. Last fall, I taught first-semester freshmen who were just beginning to find out if they wanted to be programmers or computer scientists, asking questions and learning a lot about themselves. This fall, I'm teaching our senior project course, with students who are nearing the end of their time at the university. Many of them think a lot about programming and programming languages, and they will drive the course with their questions and intensity. As a teacher, I enjoy both ends of the spectrum.

We all hear the common refrain these days that more people should learn to program, not just CS majors. I agree. If you know how to program, you can make things. Even if you don't write many programs yourself, you are better prepared to talk to the programmers who make things for you. And even if you don't need to talk to programmers, you have expanded your mind a bit to a way of thinking that is changing the world we live in.

But there are two sides to this equation, as Chris Crawford laments in his essay, Fundamentals of Interactivity:

Why is it that our entertainment software has such primitive algorithms in it? The answer lies in the people creating them. The majority are programmers. Programmers aren't really idea people; they're technical people. Yes, they use their brains a great deal in their jobs. But they don't live in the world of ideas. Scan a programmer's bookshelf and you'll find mostly technical manuals plus a handful of science fiction novels. That's about the extent of their reading habits. Ask a programmer about Rabelais, Vivaldi, Boethius, Mendel, Voltaire, Churchill, or Van Gogh, and you'll draw a blank. Gene pools? Grimm's Law? Gresham's Law? Negentropy? Fluxions? The mind-body problem? Most programmers cannot be troubled with such trivia. So how can we expect them to have interesting ideas to put into their algorithms? The result is unsurprising: the algorithms in most entertainment products are boring, predictable, uninformed, and pedestrian. They're about as interesting in conversation as the programmers themselves.

We do have some idea people working on interactive entertainment; more of them show up in multimedia than in games. Unfortunately, most of the idea people can't program. They refuse to learn the technology well enough to express themselves in the language of the medium. I don't understand this cruel joke that Fate has played upon the industry: programmers have no ideas and idea people can't program. Arg!

My office bookshelf occasionally elicits a comment or two from first-time visitors, because even here at work I have a complete works of Shakespeare, a thin volume of William Blake (I love me some Blake!), several philosophy books, and "The Brittanica Book of Usage". I really should have some Voltaire here, too. I do cover one of Crawford's bases: a recent blog entry made a software analogy to Gresham's Law.

In general, I think you're more likely to find a computer scientist who knows some literature than you are to find a literary professional who knows much CS. That's partly an artifact of our school system and partly a result of the wider range historically of literature and the humanities. It's fun to run into a colleague from across campus who has read deeply in some area of science or math, but rare.

However, we are all prone to fall into the chasm of our own specialties and miss out on the well-roundedness that makes us better at whatever specialty we practice. That's one reason that, when high school students and their parents ask me what students should take to prepare for a CS major, I tell them: four years of all the major subjects, including English, math, science, social science, and the arts; plus whatever else interests them, because that's often where they will learn the most. All of these topics help students to become better computer scientists, and better people.

And, not surprisingly, better game developers. I agree with Crawford that more programmers should be learn enough other stuff to be idea people, too. Even if they don't make games.

A conversation this morning with a student reminded me of a story one of our alumni, a local entrepreneur, told me about his usual practice whenever he has an idea for a new system or a new feature for an existing system.

The alum starts by jotting the idea down in Java, Scala, or some other programming language. He puts this sketch into a git repository and uses the readme.md file to document his thought process. He also records there links to related systems, links to papers on implementation techniques, and any other resources he thinks might be handy. The code itself can be at varying levels of completeness. He allows himself to work out some of the intermediate steps in enough detail to make code work, while leaving other parts as skeletons.

This approach helps him talk to technical customers about the idea. The sketch shows what the idea might look like at a high level, perhaps with some of the intermediate steps running in some useful way. The initial draft helps him identify key development issues and maybe even a reasonable first estimate for how long it would take to flesh out a complete implementation. By writing code and making some of it work, the entrepreneur in him begins to see where the opportunities for business value lie.

If he decides that the idea is worth a deeper look, he passes the idea onto members of his team in the form of his git repo. The readme.md file includes links to relevant reading and his initial thoughts about the system and its design. The code conveys ideas more clearly and compactly than a natural language description would. Even if his team decides to use none of the code -- and he expects they won't -- they start from something more expressive than a plain text document.

This isn't quite a prototype or a spike, but it has the same spirit. The code sketch is another variation on how programming is a medium for expressing ideas in a way that other media can't fully capture.

Adam Bosworth, in Say No:

Have you ever been busy for an entire week and felt like you got nothing meaningful done? Either your expectations are off or your priorities are.

Brent Simmons, in Love:

If there's a way out of despair, it's in changing our expectations.

Good advice from two people who have been in the trenches for a while.

I recently found myself reading a few of Gregor Hohpe's blog posts and came across Design Patterns: More Than Meets The Eye. In it, Hohpe repeats a message that needs to be repeated every so often even now, twenty years after the publication of the GoF book: software patterns are fundamentally about human communication:

The primary purpose of patterns is to help humans understand design problems. Solving design problems is generally much more difficult than typing in some code, so patterns have enormous value in themselves. Patterns owe their popularity to this value. A better hammer can help speed up the construction of a bed, but a pattern helps us place the bed in a way that makes us feel comfortable.

The last sentence of that paragraph is marvelous.

Hohpe published that piece five and a half years ago. People who write or teach software patterns will find themselves telling a similar story and answering questions like the ones that motivated his post all the time. Earlier this year, Avdi Grimm wrote a like-minded piece, Patterns are for People, in which he took his shot at dispelling misunderstandings from colleagues and friends:

There's a meme, originating from certain corners of the Functional side of programming, that "patterns are a language smell". The implication being that "good" languages either already encode the patterns as language features, or they provide the tools to extend the language such that modeling the pattern explicitly isn't needed.

This misses the point on rather a lot of levels.

Design patterns that are akin to hammers for making better code are plentiful and often quite helpful. But we need more software patterns that help us place our beds in ways that increase human comfort.

Let's call it Sustrik's Law, as its creator does:

Well-designed components are easy to replace. Eventually, they will be replaced by ones that are not so easy to replace.

This is a dandy observation of how software tends to get worse over time, in a natural process of bad components replacing good ones. It made me think of Gresham's Law, which I first encountered in my freshman macroeconomics course:

When a government overvalues one type of money and undervalues another, the undervalued money will leave the country or disappear from circulation into hoards, while the overvalued money will flood into circulation.

A more compact form of this law is, "Bad money drives good money out of circulation."

My memory of Gresham's Law focuses more on human behavior than government behavior. If people value gold more than a paper currency, even though the currency denominates a specific amount of gold, then they will use the paper money in transactions and hoard the gold. The government can redenominate the paper currency at any time, but the gold will always be gold. Bad money drives out the good.

In software, bad components drive good components out of a system for different reasons. Programmers don't hoard good components; they are of no particular value when not being using, even in the future. It's simply pragmatic. If a component is hard to replace, then we are less likely to replace it. It will remain a part of the system over time precisely because it's hard to take out. Conversely, a component that is easy to replace is one that we may replace.

We can also think of this in evolutionary terms, as Brian Foote and Joe Yoder did in The Selfish Class: A hard-to-replace component is better adapted for survival than one that is easy to replace. Designing components to be better for programmers may make them less likely to survive in the long term. How is that for the bad driving out the good?

When we look at this from the perspective of the software system itself, Sustrik's Law reminds us that software is subject to a particular kind of entropy, in which well-designed systems with clean interfaces devolve towards big balls of mud (another term coined by Foote and Yoder). Programmers do not yet have a simple formula to predict this entropy, such as Gibbs entropy law for thermodynamic systems, and may never. But then, computer science is still young. There is a lot we don't know.

Ideas about software have so many connections to other disciplines. I rely on many connections to help me think about them, too. Hat tips to Brian Rice for retweeting this tweet about Sustrik's Law, to Jeff Miller for reminding me about "The Selfish Class", and to Henrik Johansson for suggesting the connection to Gibb's formula.

I couldn't help thinking of big visible charts when I read this paragraph in The Paris Review's interview with Ernest Hemingway:

[Hemingway] keeps track of his daily progress -- "so as not to kid myself" -- on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head. The numbers on the chart showing the daily output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days [he] puts in extra work so he won't feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.

He uses the chart to keep himself honest. Even our greatest writers can delude themselves into thinking they are making enough progress when they aren't. All the more so for those of us who are still learning, whether how to run a marathon, how to write prose, or how to make software. When a group of people are working together, a chart can help the individuals maintain a common, and honest, understanding of how the team is doing.

Oh, and notice Hemingway's technology: the side of a cardboard packing case. No fancy dashboard for this writer who is known for his direct, unadorned style. If you think you need a digital dashboard with toggles, flashing lights, and subviews, you are doing it wrong. The point of the chart is to keep you honest, not give you another thing to do when you are not doing what you should be doing.

There is another lesson in this passage beyond the chart, about sustainable pace. Most of the numbers are in the ballpark of 500 (average: 499 3/4!), except for one day when he put in a double day. Perhaps 500 words a day is a pace that Hemingway finds productive over time. Yet he allows himself an occasional bit of overtime -- for something important, like time away from his writing desk, out on the water. Many of us programmers need to be reminded every so often that getting away from our work is valuable, and worth an occasional 0 on the big visible chart. It's also a more human motivation for overtime than the mad rush to a release date.

A few pages later in the interview, we read Hemingway repeating a common adage among writers that also echoes nicely against the agile practices:

You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there.

Hemingway stops each day at a point where the story will pull him forward the next morning. In this, XP devotees can recognize the habit of ending each day with a broken test. In the morning, or whenever we next fire up our editors, the broken test tells us exactly where to begin and gives us a concrete goal. By the time the test passes, our minds are ready to move on to something new.

Agility is useful when fighting bulls. Apparently, it helps when writing novels, too.

Yesterday, Sean Heber made a suggestion drawn, I imagine, from Apple's foray into the world of watchmaking:

I propose we adopt the watch term "complications" for all software features.

It turns out that, in the world of horology, complication is a technical term:

In horology, the study of clocks and watches, a complication refers to any feature in a timepiece beyond the simple display of hours and minutes. A timepiece indicating only hours and minutes is otherwise known as a simple movement.

I don't know if Heber was writing tongue in cheek, but "complication" is certainly a term that programmers can appreciate. In software, we value functions, classes, modules, and even whole systems that do only one thing but do it well. This is sometimes referred to as the single responsibility principle, which engenders a separation of concerns and leads to software that is easier to modify and maintain. Simple movement is one of the defining elements that make up of the the Unix philosophy:

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together.

In Unix, there is even a standard interface for simple movements, the text stream, which enables almost trivial little programs to be combined to solve any problem.

Horology's use of "complication" also reminds me of Rich Hickey's adoption of the word complect for talking about software systems. See, for example, his RailsConf 2012 talk, Simplicity Matters. Tools that interleave multiple strands of functionality are inherently less reliable, in addition to being harder to work with, so we should seek to create tools with a single strand.

In order to talk about timekeeping devices that perform several functions, watchmakers specialize their term. Informally, a grand complication is a device that contains at least three complications, with at least one timing complication, one astronomical complication, and one striking complications. It might be instructive to classify in a similar fashion the ways in which programmers typically "complect" their code.

The Wikipedia page for "complication" states explicitly that adding complications to a watch makes it more difficult to "design, create, assemble, and repair". That sounds a lot like how programmers feel about complexity. But the page also gives the sense that fine watchmakers revel in complications and see them as a sign of great achievement. Some watchmakers even glory in the complexity of their timepieces.

It seems that watchmakers have more in common with programmers than you might think. Perhaps Heber is on to something here.

I would rather have too little architecture
than too much because that might interfere
with the truth of what I say.
-- Ivan Turgenev

How can agile approaches to software development create coherent programs? Don't we need a plan, a well-thought-out design to follow closely? Without one, won't we end up with a mess?

Let's turn again to Italo Calvino for some perspective. He is known for novels with intricate structure and acknowledges that, for at least a decade, the "architecture" of his books occupied more of his mind than it should have. Yet his novels never seemed to follow closely any of his advance plans:

I spend a lot of time constructing a book, making outlines that eventually prove to be of no use to me whatsoever. I throw them away. What determines the book is the writing, the material that's actually on the page.

The ultimate architecture of a book comes to life alongside the book itself, hand-in-hand with the writing.

And so it can be with software. Programmers can and should think about what they are building but, in the end, what determines the program is the programming, the material that's actually on the page or in the browser.

Again, we must careful not to take the analogy too far. Programs are often created for external clients with specific technical requirements. Programmers are not usually free, as novelists are, to change the product they are creating. Even so, design is how we make the product, not what it does. Whether it evolves during the course of programming or is specified up-front, the client can receive the product they asked us to make.

Ward Cunningham once gave what is, for me, still the best definition of design:

Design is the thinking you do when you make something.

The most important product of that thinking is not a design document or an architecture. It is the mind that is prepared to make the thing you need to make.

In How Stephen King Teaches Writing, Jessica Lahey asks Stephen King why we should teach grammar:

Lahey: You write, "One either absorbs the grammatical principles of one's native language in conversation and in reading or one does not." If this is true, why teach grammar in school at all? Why bother to name the parts?

King: When we name the parts, we take away the mystery and turn writing into a problem that can be solved. I used to tell them that if you could put together a model car or assemble a piece of furniture from directions, you could write a sentence. Reading is the key, though. A kid who grows up hearing "It don't matter to me" can only learn doesn't if he/she reads it over and over again.

There are at least three nice ideas in King's answer.

• It is helpful to beginners when we can turn writing into a problem that can be solved. Making concrete things out of ideas in our head is hard. When we giving students tools and techniques that help them to create basic sentences, paragraphs, and stories, we make the process of creating a bit more concrete and a bit less scary.


• A first step in this direction is to give names to the things and ideas students need to think about when writing. We don't want students to memorize the names for their own sake; that's a step in the wrong direction. We simply need to have words for talking about the things we need to talk about -- and think about.


• Reading is, as the old slogan tells us, fundamental. It helps to build knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, usage, and style in a way that the brain absorbs naturally. It creates habits of thought that are hard to undo later.

All of these are true of teaching programmers, too, in their own way.

• We need ways to demystify the process and give students concrete steps they can take when they encounter a new problem. The design recipe used in the How to Design Programs approach is a great example. Naming recipes and their steps makes them a part of the vocabulary teachers and students can use to make programming a repeatable, reliable process.


• I've often had great success by giving names to design and implementation patterns, and having those patterns become part of the vocabulary we use to discuss problems and solutions. I have a category for posts about patterns, and a fair number of those relate to teaching beginners. I wish there were more.


• Finally, while it may not be practical to have students read a hundred programs before writing their first, we cannot underestimate the importance of students reading code in parallel with learning to write code. Reading lots of good examples is a great way for students to absorb ideas about how to write their own code. It also gives them the raw material they need to ask questions. I've long thought that Clancy's and Linn's work on case studies of programming deserves more attention.

Finding ways to integrate design recipes, patterns, and case studies is an area I'd like to explore more in my own teaching.

And you don't have to be in software. In Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple, Ian Parker describes how the process of developing products at Apple has changed during Ive's tenure.

... design had been "a vertical stripe in the chain of events" in a product's delivery; at Apple, it became "a long horizontal stripe, where design is part of every conversation." This cleared a path for other designers.

By the time the iPhone launched, Ive had become "the hub of the wheel".

The vertical stripe/horizontal stripe image brought to mind Kent Beck's reimagining of the software development cycle in XP. I was thinking the image in my head came from Extreme Programming Explained, but the closest thing to my memory I can find is in his IEEE Computer article, Embracing Change with Extreme Programming:

My mental image has time on the x-axis, though, which meshes better with the vertical/horizontal metaphor of Robert Brunner, the designer quoted in the passage above.

versus

If analysis is important, do it all the time. If design is important, do it all the time. If implementation is important, do it all the time. If testing is important, do it all the time.

Ive and his team have shown that there is value in making design an ongoing part of the process for developing hardware products, too, where "design is part of every conversation". This kind of thinking is not just for software any more.

After a long break from playing chess, I recently played a few games at the local club. Playing a couple of games twice in the last two weeks has reminded me that I am very rusty. I've only made two horrible blunders in four games, but I have made many small mistakes, the kind of errors that accumulate over time and make a position hard to defend, even untenable. Having played better in years past, these inaccuracies are irksome.

Still, I managed to win all four games. As I've watched games at the club, I've noticed that most games are won by the player who makes the second-to-last blunder. Most of the players are novices, and they trade mistakes: one player leaves his queen en prise; later, his opponent launches an underprepared attack that loses a rook; then the first player trades pieces and leaves himself with a terrible pawn structure -- and so on, the players trading weak or bad moves until the position is lost for one of them.

My secret thus far has been one part luck, one part simple strategy: winning by not losing.

This experience reminded me of a paper called The Loser's Game, which in 1975 suggested that it was no longer possible for a fund manager to beat market averages over time because most of the information needed to do well was available to everyone. To outperform the market average, a fund manager has to profit from mistakes made by other managers, sufficiently often and by a sufficient margin to sustain a long-term advantage. Charles Ellis, the author, contrasts this with the bull markets of the 1960s. Then, managers made profits based on the specific winning investments they made; in the future, though, the best a manager could hope for was not to make the mistakes that other investors would profit from. Fund management had transformed from being a Winner's Game to a Loser's Game.

Ellis drew his inspiration from another world, too. Simon Ramo had pointed out the differences between a Winner's Game and a Loser's Game in Extraordinary Tennis for the Ordinary Tennis Player. Professional tennis players, Ramo said, win based on the positive actions they take: unreturnable shots down the baseline, passing shots out of the reach of a player at the net, service aces, and so on. We duffers try to emulate our heroes and fail... We hit our deep shots just beyond the baseline, our passing shots just wide of the sideline, and our killer serves into the net. It turns out that mediocre players win based on the errors they don't make. They keep the ball in play, and eventually their opponents make a mistake and lose the point.

Ramo saw that tennis pros are playing a Winner's Game, and average players are playing a Loser's Game. These are fundamentally different games, which reward different mindsets and different strategies. Ellis saw the same thing in the investing world, but as part of a structural shift: what had once been a Winner's Game was now a Loser's Game, to the consternation of fund managers whose mindset is finding the stocks that will earn them big returns. The safer play now, Ellis says, is to minimize mistakes. (This is good news for us amateurs investors!)

This is the same phenomenon I've been seeing at the chess club recently. The novices there are still playing a Loser's Game, where the greatest reward comes to those who make the fewest and smallest mistakes. That's not very exciting, especially for someone who fancies herself to be Adolf Anderssen or Mikhail Tal in search of an immortal game. The best way to win is to stay alive, making moves that are as sound as possible, and wait for the swashbuckler across the board from you to lose the game.

What does this have to do with learning to program? I think that, in many respects, learning to program is a Loser's Game. Even a seemingly beginner-friendly programming language such as Python has an exacting syntax compared to what beginners are used to. The semantics seem foreign, even opaque. It is easy to make a small mistake that chokes the compiler, which then spews an error message that overwhelms the new programmer. The student struggles to fix the error, only to find another error waiting somewhere else in the code. Or he introduces a new error while eliminating the old one, which makes even debugging seem scary. Over time, this can dishearten even the heartiest beginner.

What is the best way to succeed? As in all Loser's Games, the key is to make fewer mistakes: follow examples closely, pay careful attention to syntactic details, and otherwise not stray too far from what you are reading about and using in class. Another path to success is to make the mistakes smaller and less intimidating: take small steps, test the code frequently, and grow solutions rather than write them all at once. It is no accident that the latter sounds like XP and other agile methods; they help to guard us from the Loser's Game and enable us to make better moves.

Just as playing the Loser's Game in tennis or investing calls for a different mindset, so, too does learning to program. Some beginners seem to grok programming quickly and move on to designing and coding brilliantly, but most of us have to settle in for a period of discipline and growth. It may not be exciting to follow examples closely when we want to forge ahead quickly to big ideas, but the alternative is to take big shots and let the compiler win all the battles.

Unlike tennis and Ellis's view of stock investing, programming offers us hope: Nearly all of us can make the transition from the Loser's Game to the Winner's Game. We are not destined to forever play it safe. With practice and time, we can develop the discipline and skills necessary to making bold, winning moves. We just have to be patient and put time and energy into the process of becoming less mistake-prone. By adopting the mindset needed to succeed in a Loser's Game, we can eventually play the Winner's Game.

I'm not too sure about the phrases "Loser's Game" and "Winner's Game", but I think that this analogy can help novice programmers. I'm thinking of ways that I can use it to help my students survive until they can succeed.

With an expressive type system for its teaching
languages, HtDP could avoid this problem to some
extent, but adding such rich types would also take
the fun out of programming.

As we approach the midpoint of the semester, Matthias Felleisen's Turing Is Useless strikes a chord in me. My students have spent the last two months learning a little Racket, a little functional programming, and a little about how to write data-driven recursive programs. Yet bad habits learned in their previous courses, or at least unchecked by what they learned there, have made the task harder for many of them than it needed to be.

The essay's title plays off the Church-Turing thesis, which asserts that all programming languages have the same expressive power. This powerful claim is not good news for students who are learning to program, though:

Pragmatically speaking, the thesis is completely useless at best -- because it provides no guideline whatsoever as to how to construct programs -- and misleading at worst -- because it suggests any program is a good program.

With a Turing-universal language, a clever student can find a way to solve any problem with some program. Even uninspired but persistent students can tinker their way to a program that produces the right answers. Unfortunately, they don't understand that the right answers aren't the point; the right program is. Trolling StackOverflow will get them a program, but too often the students don't understand whether it is a good or bad program in their current situation. It just works.

I have not been as faithful to the HtDP approach this semester as I probably should have been, but I share its desire to help students to design programs systematically. We have looked at design patterns that implement specific strategies, not language features. Each strategy focuses on the definition of the data being processed and the definition of the value being produced. This has great value for me as the instructor, because I can usually see right away why a function isn't working for the student the way he or she intended: they have strayed from the data as defined by the problem.

This is also of great value to some of my students. They want to learn how to program in a reliable way, and having tools that guide their thinking is more important than finding yet another primitive Racket procedure to try. For others, though "garage programming" is good enough; they just want get the job done right now, regardless of which muscles they use. Design is not part of their attitude, and that's a hard habit to break. How use doth breed a habit in a student!

Last semester, I taught intro CS from what Felleisen calls a traditional text. Coupled that experience with my experience so far this semester, I'm thinking a lot these days about how we can help students develop a design-centered attitude at the outset of their undergrad courses. I have several blog entries in draft form about last semester, but one thing that stands out is the extent to which every step in the instruction is driven by the next cool programming construct. Put them all on the table, fiddle around for a while, and you'll make something that works. One conclusion we can draw from the Church-Turing thesis is that this isn't surprising. Unfortunately, odds are any program created this way is not a very good program.

~~~~~

(The sentence near the end that sounds like Shakespeare is. It's from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, with a suitable change in noun.)

I love this answer from Matthias Felleisen on the Racket users mailing list today:

The book emphasizes systematic design. You can solve this specific problem with brute force regular-expression matching in a few lines of code. The question is whether you want to learn to solve problems or copy code from mailing lists and StackOverflow without understanding what's really going on.

Students today aren't much different from the students in the good old days. But the tools and information so readily available to them make it a lot easier for them to indulge their baser urges. In the good old days, we had to work hard to get good grades and not understand what we were doing.

Anyone interested in thinking about how programmers can design software without mapping its structure out in advance should read Ted Gioia's Jazz: The Aesthetics of Imperfection, which appeared in the Winter 1987 issue of The Hudson Review (Volume 39, Number 4, pages 585-600). It explores in some depth the ways in which jazz, which relies heavily on spur-of-the-moment improvisation and thus embraces imperfection, can still produce musical structure worthy of the term "art".

Gioia's contrast of producing musical form via the blueprint method and the retrospective method will resonate with anyone who has grown a large software system via small additions to, and refactorings of, an evolving code base. This paragraph brings to mind the idea of selecting a first test to pass at random:

Some may feel that the blueprint method is the only method by which an artist can adhere to form. But I believe this judgment to be quite wrong. We can imagine the artist beginning his work with an almost random maneuver, and then adapting his later moves to this initial gambit. For example, the musical improviser may begin his solo with a descending five-note phrase and then see, as he proceeds, that he can use this same five-note phrase in other contexts in the course of his improvisation.

Software is different from jazz performance in at least one way that makes the notion of retrospective form even more compelling. In jazz, the most valuable currency is live performance, and each performance is a new creation. We see something similar in the code kata, where each implementation starts from scratch. But unlike jazz, software can evolve over time. When we nurture the same code base over time, we can both incorporate new features and eliminate imperfections from previous iterations. In this way, software developers can create retrospective designs that both benefit from improvisation and reach stable architectures.

Another interesting connection crossed my mind as I read about the role the recording technology played in the development of jazz. With the invention of the phonograph:

... for the first time sounds could be recorded with the same precision that books achieved in recording words. Few realize how important the existence of the phonograph was to the development of improvised music. Hitherto, the only method of preserving musical ideas was through notation, and here the cumbersome task of writing down parts made any significant preservation of improvisations unfeasible. But with the development of the phonograph, improvised music could take root and develop; improvising musicians who lived thousands of miles apart could keep track of each other's development, and even influence each other without ever having met.

Software has long been a written form, but in the last two decades we have seen an explosion of ways in which programs could be recorded and shared with others. The internet and the web enabled tools such as SourceForge and GitHub, which in turn enabled the growth of communities dedicated to the creation and nurturing of open source software. The software so nurtured has often been the product of many people, created through thousands of improvisations by programmers living in all corners of the world. New programmers come to these repositories, the record stores of our world, and are able to learn from masters by studying their moves and their creations. They are then able to make their own contributions to existing projects, and to create new projects of their own.

As Gioia says of jazz, this is not to make the absurd claim that agile software did not exist before it was recorded and shared in this way, but the web and the public repository have had profound impacts on the way software is created. The retrospective form espoused by agile software design methods, the jazz of our industry, has been one valuable result.

Check out Gioia's article. It repaid my investment with worthy connections. If nothing else, it taught me a lot about jazz and music criticism.

Exceptions signal something outside the expected bounds of behavior of the code in question. But if you're running some checks on outside input, this is because you expect some messages to fail -- and if a failure is expected behavior, then you shouldn't be using exceptions.

That is a snippet from Replacing Throwing Exceptions with Notification in Validations, a refactoring Martin Fowler published earlier this month. The refactoring is based on an extraordinarily useful piece of software design advice: exceptions should be unexpected. If something is expected, it's not exceptional. Make your software say so. A notification mechanism can carry as much information about system behavior as exceptions and generally provides superior cohesion and division of labor.

Over the last few years, I've come to see that is really a tenet of good system design more generally. A couple of examples from my university experience:

• If your curriculum depends on frequent student requests to enable programs of study that faculty accept as reasonable, then you should probably modify the curriculum to allow what is reasonable. Not only are you gumming up the larger system with unnecessary paperwork, you are likely disadvantaging students who aren't savvy or cheeky enough to disregard the rules.


• If the way you pay for instruction and equipment doesn't match the stated budget, then you should change the budget to reflect reality. If you don't control the writing of the budget, then you should find ways to communicate reality to the budget writers whenever possible. Sometimes, you can work around the given budget to accomplish what you really need for a long time. But over time the system will evolve in response to other external forces, and you reach a point where the budget in no way reflects reality. A sudden change in funding can put you in a state of real crisis. Few people will be able to understand why.

People sometimes tell me that I am naive to think complex systems like a university or even a curriculum should reflect reality closely. Programming has taught me that we almost always benefit from keeping our design as clean, as understandable, and as truthful as we can. I am pragmatic enough to understand that there are exceptions even to this tenet, in life and in software. But exceptions should be exceptional.

Perhaps amid the daily tribulations of a software project, Steven Baker writes

Oy. A moving goal line, with a skeleton crew, on a shoestring budget. Technical problems are the easy ones.

And here we all sit complaining about monads and Java web frameworks...

My big project this semester has not been developing software but teaching beginners to develop software, in our intro course. There is more to Intro than programming, but for many students the tasks of learning a language and trying to write programs comes to dominate most everything else. More on that soon.

Yet even with this different sort of project, I feel much as Baker does. Freshmen have a lot of habits to learn and un-learn, habits that go well beyond how they do Python. My course competes with several others for the students' attention, not to mention with their jobs and their lives outside of school. They come to class with a lifetime of experience and knowledge, as well some surprising gaps in what they know. A few are a little scared by college, and many worry that CS won't be a good fit for them.

The technical problems really are the easy ones.

The Codist told the story of DeltaGraph last week. It must be quite a feeling to have code you wrote twenty-five years ago still running in a commercial product today. Of course, such longevity creates challenges for the maintainers. The longer a program lives, the more likely that a feature that you thought you'd never need becomes desirable, even necessary.

Like a Windows version, circa 1989:

When I started the UI code I asked two questions of Deltapoint (1) will this code ever be ported to Windows (2) do you want to support multiple documents open at a time. The answer to both was no. Windows was still too primitive to care about and multiple open documents was fairly uncommon.

Within a few years, "You Aren't Gonna Need It" turned into "Now We Need It":

With 3.0 they actually began to port it to Windows 3.1, and it was an immense pain to do. I had spent no time trying to worry about cross platform issues as I had asked up front and been told no. Of course Windows was now becoming important. The port was never very stable as a result and I think it actually became a separate code base, making new features hard to do.

This is one of the balancing essential acts of writing software. Operating with a YAGNI mindset is generally a prudent way to ensure we don't write code that is unnecessarily complex and hard to work with. Yet we have to make our programs open to the changes that will inevitably follow. And some changes are easier to make if we have built hooks and fulcrums into the code.

So, we strive for ways not to build the things we don't need now, but make it possible to accommodate them later. For me, this has always been the great promise of object-oriented programming. I try to think that way even when I'm working in languages that don't support the style directly, but I'm not good enough yet. That only helps me admire the accomplishments of teams like the one that created DeltaGraph even more.

I procrastinated one day with my intro students in mind. This is the bedtime story I told them as a result. Yes, I know that I can write shorter Python code to do this. They are intro students, after all.

~~~~~

Once upon a time, a buddy of mine, Chad, sent out a tweet. Chad is a physics prof, and he was procrastinating. How many people would I need to have in class, he wondered, to have a 50-50 chance that my class roster will contain people whose last names start with every letter of the alphabet?

    Adams
    Brown
    Connor
    ...
    Young
    Zielinski

This is a lot like the old trivia about how we only need to have 23 people in the room to have a 50-50 chance that two people share a birthday. The math for calculating that is straightforward enough, once you know it. But last names are much more unevenly distributed across the alphabet than birthdays are across the days of the year. To do this right, we need to know rough percentages for each letter of the alphabet.

I can procrastinate, too. So I surfed over to the US Census Bureau, rummaged around for a while, and finally found a page on Frequently Occurring Surnames from the Census 2000. It provides a little summary information and then links to a couple of data files, including a spreadsheet of data on all surnames that occurred at least 100 times in the 2000 census. This should, I figure, cover enough of the US population to give us a reasonable picture of how peoples' last names are distributed across the alphabet. So I grabbed it.

(We live in a wonderful time. Between open government, open research, and open source projects, we have access to so much cool data!)

The spreadsheet has columns with these headers:

    name,rank,count,prop100k,cum_prop100k,      \
                    pctwhite,pctblack,pctapi,   \
                    pctaian,pct2prace,pcthispanic

The first and third columns are what we want. After thirteen weeks, we know how to do compute the percentages we need: Use the running total pattern to count the number of people whose name starts with 'a', 'b', ..., 'z', as well as how many people there are altogether. Then loop through our collection of letter counts and compute the percentages.

Now, how should we represent the data in our program? We need twenty-six counters for the letter counts, and one more for the overall total. We could make twenty-seven unique variables, but then our program would be so-o-o-o-o-o long, and tedious to write. We can do better.

For the letter counts, we might use a list, where slot 0 holds a's count, slot 1 holds b's count, and so one, through slot 25, which holds z's count. But then we would have to translate letters into slots, and back, which would make our code harder to write. It would also make our data harder to inspect directly.

    ----  ----  ----  ...  ----  ----  ----    slots in the list

       0     1     2  ...    23    24    25    indices into the list

The downside of this approach is that lists are indexed by integer values, while we are working with letters. Python has another kind of data structure that solves just this problem, the dictionary. A dictionary maps keys onto values. The keys and values can be of just about any data type. What we want to do is map letters (characters) onto numbers of people (integers):

    ----  ----  ----  ...  ----  ----  ----    slots in the dictionary

     'a'   'b'   'c'  ...   'x'   'y'   'z'    indices into the dictionary

With this new tool in hand, we are ready to solve our problem. First, we build a dictionary of counters, initialized to 0.

    count_all_names = 0
    total_names = {}
    for letter in 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz':
        total_names[letter] = 0

(Note two bits of syntax here. We use {} for dictionary literals, and we use the familiar [] for accessing entries in the dictionary.)

Next, we loop through the file and update the running total for corresponding letter, as well as the counter of all names.

    source = open('app_c.csv', 'r')
    for entry in source:
        field  = entry.split(',')        # split the line
        name   = field[0].lower()        # pull out lowercase name
        letter = name[0]                 # grab its first character
        count  = int( field[2] )         # pull out number of people
        total_names[letter] += count     # update letter counter
        count_all_names     += count     # update global counter
    source.close()

Finally, we print the letter → count pairs.

    for (letter, count_for_letter) in total_names.items():
        print(letter, '->', count_for_letter/count_all_names)

(Note the items method for dictionaries. It returns a collection of key/value tuples. Recall that tuples are simply immutable lists.)

We have converted the data file into the percentages we need.

    q -> 0.002206197888442366
    c -> 0.07694634659082318
    h -> 0.0726864447688946
    ...
    f -> 0.03450702533438715
    x -> 0.0002412718532764804
    k -> 0.03294646311104032

(The entries are not printed in alphabetical order. Can you find out why?)

I dumped the output to a text file and used Unix's built-in sort to create my final result. I tweet Chad, Here are your percentages. You do the math.

Hey, I'm a programmer. When I procrastinate, I write code.

In the lab, Student 1 asks a question about the loop variable on a Python for statement. My first thought is, "How can you not know that? We are in Week 11." I answer, he asks another question, and we talk some more. The conversation shows me that he has understood some ideas at a deeper level, but a little piece was missing. His question helped him build a more complete and accurate model of how programs work.

Before class, Student 2 asks a question about our current programming assignment. My first thought is, "Have you read the assignment? It answers your question." I answer, he asks another question, and we talk some more. The conversation shows me that he is thinking carefully about details of the assignment, but assignments at this level of detail are new to him. His question helped him learn a bit more about how to read a specification.

After class, Student 3 asks a question about our previous programming assignment. We had recently looked at my solution to the assignment and discussed design issues. "Your program is so clean and organized. My program is so ugly. How can I write better-looking programs?" He is already one of the better students in the course. We discuss the role of experience in writing clearly, and I explain that the best programs are often the result of revision and refactoring. They started out just good enough, and the author worked to make them better. The conversation shows me that he cares about the quality of his code, that elegance matters as much to him as correctness. His question keeps him moving along the path to becoming a good programmer.

Three students, three questions: all three are signs of good things to come. They also remind me that even questions which seem backward at first can point forward.

Many people in and out of the software world think of design and programming as separate activities, which is a natural result of analogies that compare software development to engineering disciplines. I've never been fond of separating these tasks in my mind. When I build software with other people, there is too much fluidity between designing software and writing code to make separate roles productive.

In The Myth of the Builder, Soroush Khanlou objects to the analogy for a different reason: designers and programmers are really doing the same sort of thing, only at different levels of detail:

... We know that the designer is not doing the building; if programmer is also not doing the building, how is software turning from idea into reality?

What is happening is that the designer presents the software as very high-level blueprints to the programmer. The programmer then takes those and creates a lower-level set of blueprints for the compiler.

Thinking in terms of blueprints at a higher or lower level helps make sense of how it feels to be:

• designing software, and thinking about how this will play out code, and
• writing code, and thinking about how this affects the design of the system.

We can think of design and programming as different tasks, but not really as different kinds of task.

Khanlou goes a step farther:

(Incidentally, the compiler is producing an even lower-level blueprint, called the Intermediate Representation, which is translated in to a final set of blueprints, the specific instructions for different CPUs. It's blueprints all the way down.)

That's a catchy phrase, with a nod to other parts of computing culture. (I first saw the phrase it's turtles all the way down in Gödel, Escher, Bach, though I think its use in computing goes back farther.) Fortunately for software developers and compiler writers, we eventually hit the bottom turtle. When we write most programs, we don't have to worry about that, though.

Khanlou's blog ends with a useful reminder, echoing "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs":

It's not valuable to think of software as a bridge; it's too weird for that.

Analogies from software development to various engineering disciplines can take us only so far. Software is different.

In The Wave in the Mind, a collection of talks and essays, Ursula Le Guin describes Ernest Hemingway as "someone who did Man right". She also gives us insight to Hemingway's preferences in programming languages. Anyone who has read Hemingway knows that he loved short sentences. Le Guin tells us more:

Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons.

So, Java and C are out. Python would fit. Or maybe Lisp. All the greats know Lisp.

... on how the world evolves.

On the evolution of education in the Age of the Web. Tyler Cowen, in Average Is Over, via The Atlantic:

It will become increasingly apparent how much of current education is driven by human weakness, namely the inability of most students to simply sit down and try to learn something on their own.

I'm curious whether we'll ever see a significant change in the number of students who can and do take the reins for themselves.

On the evolution of the Web. Jon Udell, in A Web of Agreements and Disagreements:

The web works as well as it does because we mostly agree on a set of tools and practices. But it evolves when we disagree, try different approaches, and test them against one another in a marketplace of ideas. Citizens of a web-literate planet should appreciate both the agreements and the disagreements.

Some disagreements are easier to appreciate after they fade into history.

On the evolution of software. Nat Pryce on the Twitter, via The Problematic Culture of "Worse is Better":

Eventually a software project becomes a small amount of useful logic hidden among code that copies data between incompatible JSON libraries

Not all citizens of a web-literate planet appreciate disagreements between JSON libraries. Or Ruby gems.

On the evolution of start-ups. Rands, in The Old Guard:

... when [the Old Guard] say, "It feels off..." what they are poorly articulating is, "This process that you're building does not support one (or more) of the key values of the company."

I suspect the presence of incompatible JSON libraries means that our software no longer supports the key values of our company.

I see this in the lab every week. One minute, my students sit peering at their monitors, their heads buried in their hands. They can't do anything right. The next minute, I hear shouts of exultation and turn to see them, arms thrust in the air, celebrating their latest victory over the Gods of Programming. Moments later I look up and see their heads again in their hands. They are despondent. "When will this madness end?"

Last week, I ran across a tweet from Christina Cacioppo that expresses nicely a feeling that has been vexing so many of my intro CS students this semester:

I still find programming odd, in part, because I'm either amazed by how brilliant or how idiotic I am. There's no normal-person feeling.

Christina is no beginner, and neither am I. Yet we know this feeling well. Most programmers do, because it's a natural part of tackling problems that challenge us. If we didn't bounce between feeling puzzlement and exultation, we wouldn't be tackling hard-enough problems.

What seems strange to my students, and even to programmers with years of experience, is that there doesn't seem to be a middle ground. It's up or down. The only time we feel like normal people is when we aren't programming at all. (Even then, I don't have many normal-person feelings, but that's probably just me.)

I've always been comfortable with this bipolarity, which is part of why I have always felt comfortable as a programmer. I don't know how much of this comfort is natural inclination -- a personality trait -- and how much of it is learned attitude. I am sure it's a mixture of both. I've always liked solving puzzles, which inspired me to struggle with them, which helped me get better struggling with them.

Part of the job in teaching beginners to program is to convince them that this is a habit they can learn. Whatever their natural inclination, persistence and practice will help them develop the stamina they need to stick with hard problems and the emotional balance they need to handle the oscillations between exultation and despondency.

I try to help my students see that persistence and practice are the answer to most questions involving missing skills or bad habits. A big part of helping them this is coaching and cheerleading, not teaching programming language syntax and computational concepts. Coaching and cheerleading are not always tasks that come naturally to computer science PhDs, who are often most comfortable with syntax and abstractions. As a result, many CS profs are uncomfortable performing them, even when that's what our students need most. How do we get better at performing them? Persistence and practice.

The "no normal-person feeling" feature of programming is an instance of a more general feature of doing science. Martin Schwartz, a microbiologist at the University of Virginia, wrote a marvelous one-page article called The importance of stupidity in scientific research that discusses this element of being a scientist. Here's a representative sentence:

One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.

Scientists get used to this feeling. My students can, too. I already see the resilience growing in many of them. After the moment of exultation passes following their latest conquest, they dive into the next task. I see a gleam in their eyes as they realize they have no idea what to do. It's time to bury their heads in their hands and think.

In A Fresh Look at Rust, Armin Ronacher tells us that some of what inspires him about Rust:

For me programming in Rust is pure joy. Yes I still don't agree with everything the language currently forces me to do but I can't say I have enjoyed programming that much in a long time. It gives me new ideas how to solve problems and I can't wait for the language to get stable.

Rust is inspiring for many reasons. The biggest reason I like it is because it's practical. I tried Haskell, I tried Erlang and neither of those languages spoke "I am a practical language" to me. I know there are many programmers that adore them, but they are not for me. Even if I could love those languages, other programmers would never do and that takes a lot of enjoyment away.

I enjoy reading personal blog entries from people excited by a new language, or newly excited by a language they are visiting again after a while away. I've only read Rust code, not written it, but I know just how Ronacher feels. These two paragraphs touch on several truths about how languages excite us:

• Programmers are often most inspired when a language shows them new ideas how to solve problems.
• Even if we love a language, we won't necessarily love every feature of the language.
• What inspires us is personal. Other people can be inspired by languages that do not excite us.
• Community matters.

Many programmers make a point of learning a new language periodically. When we do, we are often most struck by a language that teaches us new ways to think about problems and how to solve them. These are usually the languages that have the most teach us at the moment.

As Kevin Kelly says, progress sometimes demands that we let go of problems. We occasionally have to seek new problems, in order to be excited by new ways to answer them.

This all is very context-specific, other. How wonderful it is to live in a time with so many languages available to learn from. Let them all flourish, I say.

In a thread on motivating students on the SIGCSE mailing list, a longtime CS prof and textbook author wrote:

Over the years, I have come to believe that those of us who can become successful programmers have different internal wiring than most in the population. We know you need problem solving, mathematical, and intellectual skills but beyond that you need to be persistent, diligent, patient, and willing to deal with failure and learn from it.

These are necessary skills, indeed. Many of our students come to us without these skills and struggle to learn how to think like a computer scientist. And without persistence, diligence, patience, and a willingness to deal with failure and learn from it, anyone will likely have a difficult time learning to program.

Over time, it's natural to begin to think that these attributes are prerequisites -- things a person must have before he or she can learn to write programs. But I think that's wrong.

As someone else pointed out in the thread, too many people believe that to succeed in certain disciplines, one must be gifted, to possess an inherent talent for doing that kind of thing. Science, math, and computer science fit firmly in that set of disciplines for most people. Carol Dweck has shown that having such a "fixed" mindset of this sort prevents many people from sticking with these disciplines when they hit challenges, or even trying to learn them in the first place.

The attitude expressed in the quote above is counterproductive for teachers, whose job it is to help students learn things even when the students don't think they can.

When I talk to my students, I acknowledge that, to succeed in CS, you need to be persistent, diligent, patient, and willing to deal with failure and learn from it. But I approach these attributes from a growth mindset:

Persistence, diligence, patience, and willingness to learn from failure are habits anyone can develop with practice. Students can develop these habits regardless of their natural gifts or their previous education.

Aristotle said that excellence is not an act, but a habit. So are most of the attributes we need to succeed in CS. They are habits, not traits we are born with or actions we take.

Donald Knuth once said that only about 2 per cent of the population "resonates" with programming the way he does. That may be true. But even if most of us will never be part of Knuth's 2%, we can all develop the habits we need to program at a basic level. And a lot more than 2% are capable of building successful careers in the discipline.

The more you produce and the more needs you meet, the more freedom you earn.

As Seth Godin says, it's fun to be (only) a consumer, but in the long run, smart producers win. Knowing how to produce solutions for yourself and others is the first step to freedom. Actually making things is the second.

This morning, I tweeted:

Pretty sure I could build a git-based curriculum management system in two weeks that would be miles better than anything on the market now.

Yes, I know that it is easy to have ideas, and that carrying an idea through to a product is the real challenge. At least I don't just need a programmer...

My tweet was the result of temporary madness provoked by yet another round of listening to non-CS colleagues talk about one of the pieces of software we use on campus. It is a commercial product purchased for one task only, to help us manage the cycle of updating the university catalog. Alas, in its current state, it can handle only one catalog at a time. This is, of course, inconvenient. There are always at least two catalogs: the one in effect at this moment, and the one in progress of being updated. That doesn't even take into account all of the old catalogs still in effect for the students who entered the university when they were The Catalog.

Yes, we need version control. Either the current software does not provide it, or that feature is turned off.

The madness arises because of the deep internal conflict that occurs within me when I'm drawn into such conversations. Everyone assumes that programs "can't do this", or that the programmers who wrote our product were mean or incompetent. I could try to convince them otherwise by explaining the idea of version control. But their experience with commercial software is so uniformly bad that they have a hard time imagining I'm telling the truth. Either I misunderstand the problem, or I am telling them a white lie.

The alternative is to shake my head, agree with them implicitly, and keep thinking about how to teach my intro students how to design simple programs.

I'm convinced that a suitable web front-end to a git back end could do 98% of what we need, which is about 53% more than either of our last two commercial solutions has done for us.

Maybe it's time for me to take a leave of absence, put together a small team of programmers, and do this. Yes, I would need a team. I know my limitations, and besides working with a few friends would be a lot more fun. The current tools in this space leave a lot of room for improvement. Built well and marketed well, this product would make enough money from satisfaction-starved universities to reward everyone on the team well enough for all to retire comfortably.

Maybe not. But the idea is free the taking. All I ask is that if you build it, give me a shout-out on your website. Oh, and cut my university a good deal when we buy your software to replace whatever product we are grumbling about when you reach market.

I ran across this paragraph in an essay about things you really need to learn in college:

Indeed, you should view the study of mathematics, history, science, and mechanics as the study of archetypes, basic patterns that you will recognize over and over. But this means that, when you study these disciplines, you should be asking, "what is the pattern" (and not merely "what are the facts"). And asking this question will actually make these disciplines easier to learn.

Even in our intro course, I try to help students develop this habit. Rather than spending all of our time looking at syntax and a laundry list of language features, I am introducing them to some of the most basic code patterns, structures they will encounter repeatedly as they solve problems at this level. In week one came Input-Process-Output. Then after learning basic control structures, we encountered guarded actions, range tests, running totals, sentinel loops, and "loop and a half". We encounter these patterns in the process of solving problems.

While they are quite low-level, they are not merely idioms. They are patterns every bit as much as patterns at the level of the Gang of Four or PoSA. They solve common problems, recur in many forms, and are subject to trade-offs that depend on the specific problem instance.

They compose nicely to create larger programs. One of my goals for next week is to have students solve new problems that allow them to assemble programs from ideas they have already seen. No new syntax or language features, just new problems.

... I give unto you:

Our first reaction to any comrade, any other person passionate about and interested in building things with computers, any human crazy and masochistic enough to try to expand the capabilities of these absurd machines, should be empathy and love.

Courtesy of Britt Butler.

I hope to impart such empathy and love to my intro students this fall. Love to program, and be part of a community that loves and learns together.

Dorian Taylor, in Toward a Theory of Design as Computation:

You can scarcely compress the time it takes to do good design. The best you can do is arrange the process so that progress is conspicuous and the partially-completed result has its own intrinsic value.

Taylor's piece is about an idea much bigger than simply software methodology, but this passage leapt off the page at me. It seems to embody two of the highest goals of the various agile approaches to making software: progress that is conspicuous and partial results that have intrinsic value to the user.

If you like ambition attempts to create a philosophy of design, check out the whole essay. Taylor connects several disparate sources:

• Edwin Hutchins and Cognition in the Wild,
• Donald Norman and Things That Make Us Smart, and
• Douglas Hofstadter and Gödel, Escher, Bach

with the philosophy of Christopher Alexander, in particular Notes on the Synthesis of Form and The Nature of Order. Ambitious it is.

On Monday, my copy of Crista Lopes's new book, Exercises in Programming Style, arrived. After blogging about the book last year, Crista asked me to review some early chapters. After I did that, the publisher graciously offered me a courtesy copy. I'm glad it did! The book goes well beyond Crista's talk at StrangeLoop last fall, with thirty three styles grouped loosely into nine categories. Each chapter includes historical notes and a reading list for going deeper. Readers of this blog know that I often like to go deeper.

I haven't had a chance to study any of the chapters deeply yet, so I don't have a detailed review. For now, let me share the blurb I wrote for the back cover. It gives a sense of why I was so excited by the chapters I reviewed last summer and by Crista's talk last fall:

It is difficult to appreciate a programming style until you see it in action. Cristina's book does something amazing: it shows us dozens of styles in action on the same program. The program itself is simple. The result, though, is a deeper understanding of how thinking differently about a problem gives rise to very different programs. This book not only introduced me to several new styles of thinking; it also taught me something new about the styles I already know well and use every day.

The best way to appreciate a style is to use it yourself. I think Crista's book opens the door for many programmers to do just that with many styles most of us don't use very often.

As for the blurb itself: it sounds a little stilted as I read it now, but I stand by the sentiment. It is very cool to see my blurb and name along side blurbs from James Noble and Grady Booch, two people whose work I respect so much. Very cool. Leave it to James to sum up his thoughts in a sentence!

While you are waiting for your copy of Crista's book to arrive, check out her recent blog entry on the evolution of CS papers in publication over the last 50+ years. It presents a lot of great information, with some nice images of pages from a few classics. It's worth a read.

Q: What do you call a company that has staff members with "programmer" or "software developer" in their titles?

A: A company.

Back in 2012, Alex Payne wrote What Is and Is Not A Technology Company to address a variety of issues related to the confounding of companies that sell technology with companies that merely use technology to sell something else. Even then, developing technology in house was a potential source of competitive advantage for many businesses, whether that involved modifying existing software or writing new.

The competitive value in being able to adapt and create software is only larger and more significant in the last two years. Not having someone on staff with "programmer" in the title is almost a red flag even for non-tech companies these days.

Those programmers aren't likely to have been CS majors in college, though. We don't produce enough. So we need to find a way to convince more non-majors to learn a little programming.

As I mentioned recently, design skills were a limiting factor for some of the students in my May term course on agile software development. I saw similar issues for many in my spring Algorithms course as well. Implementing an algorithm from lecture or reading was straightforward enough, but organizing the code of the larger system in which the algorithm resided often created challenges for students.

I've been thinking about ways to improve how I teach design in the future, both in courses where design is a focus and in courses where it lives in the background of other material. Anything I come up with can be also part of conversation with colleagues as we talk about design in their courses.

I read Kent Beck's initial Responsive Design article when it first came out a few years ago and blogged about it then, because it had so many useful ideas for me and my students. I decided to re-read the article again last week, looking for a booster shot of inspiration.

First off, it was nice to remember how many of the techniques and ideas that Kent mentions already play a big role in my courses. Ones that stood out on this reading included:

• taking safe steps,
• isolating changes within modules,
• recognizing that design is a team sport, fundamentally a social activity, and
• playing with words and pictures.

My recent experiences in the classroom made two other items in Kent's list stand out as things I'll probably emphasize more, or at least differently, in upcoming courses.

Exploit Symmetries. Divide similar elements into identical parts and different parts.

As I noted in my first blog about this article, many programmers find it counterintuitive to use duplication as a tool in design. My students struggle with this, too. Soon after that blog entry, I described an example of increasing duplication in order to eliminate duplication in a course. A few years later, in a fit of deja vu, I wrote about another example, in which code duplication is a hint to think differently about a problem.

I am going to look for more opportunities to help students see ways in which they can make design better by isolating code into the identical and the different.

Inside or Outside. Change the interface or the implementation but not both at the same time.

This is one of the fundamental tenets of design, something students should learn as early as possible. I was surprised to see how normal it was for students in my agile development course not to follow this pattern, even when it quickly got them into trouble. When you try to refactor interface and implementation at the same time, things usually don't go well. That's not a safe step to take...

My students and I discussed writing unit tests before writing code a lot during the course. Only afterward did it occur to me that Inside or Outside is the basic element of test-first programming and TDD. First, we write the test; this is where we design the interface of our system. Then, we write code to pass the test; this is where we implement the system.

Again, in upcoming courses, I am going to look for opportunities to help students think more effectively about the distinction between the inside and the outside of their code.

Thus, I have a couple of ideas for the future. Hurray! Even so, I'm not sure how I feel about my blog entry of four years ago. I had the good sense to read Kent's article back then, draw some good ideas from it, and write a blog entry about them. That's good. But here I am four years later, and I still feel like I need to make the same sort of improvements to how I teach.

In the end, I am glad I wrote that blog entry four years ago. Reading it now reminds me of thoughts I forgot long ago, and reminds me to aim higher. My opening reference to getting a booster shot seems like a useful analogy for talking about this situation in my teaching.

Last time, I thought about the the role of forgiveness in selecting programming languages for instruction. I mentioned that BASIC had worked well for me as a first programming language, as it had worked for so many others. Yet I would probably would never choose it as a language for CS1, at least for more than a few weeks of instruction. It is missing a lot of the features that we want CS majors to learn about early. It's also a bit too free.

In that post, I did say that I still consider Pascal a good standard for first languages. It dominated CS1 for a couple of decades. What made it work so well as a first instructional language?

Pascal struck a nice balance for its time. It was small enough that students could master it all, and also provided constructs for structured programming. It had the sort of syntax that enabled a compiler to provide students guidance about errors, but its compilers did not seem overbearing. It had a few "gothchas", such as the ; as a statement separator, but not so many that students were constantly perplexed. (Hey to C++.) Students were able try things out and get programs to work without becoming demoralized by a seemingly endless stream of complaints.

(Aside: I have to admit that I liked Pascal's ; statement separator. I understood it conceptually and, in a strange way, appreciated it aesthetically. Most others seem to have disagreed with me...)

Python has attracted a lot of interest as a CS1 language in recent years. It's the first popular language in a long while that brings to mind Pascal's feel for me. However, Pascal had two things that supported the teaching of CS majors that Python does not: manifest types and pointers. I love dynamically-typed languages with managed memory and prefer them for my own work, but using that sort of language in CS1 creates some new challenges when preparing students for upper-division majors courses.

So, Pascal holds a special place for me as a CS1 language, though it was not the language I learned there. We used it to teach CS1 for many years and it served me and our students well. I think it balances a good level of forgiveness with a reasonable level of structure, all in a relatively small package.

In the last session of my May term course on agile software development, discussion eventually turned to tools and programming languages. We talked about whether some languages are more suited to agile development than others, and whether some languages are better tools for a given developer team at a given time. Students being students, we also discussed the courses used in CS courses, including the intro course.

Having recently thought some about choosing the right languages for early CS instruction, I was interested to hear what students thought. Haskell and Scala came up; they are the current pet languages of students in the course. So did Python, Java, and Ada, which are languages our students have seen in their first-year courses. I was the old guy in the room, so I mentioned Pascal, which I still consider a good standard for comparing CS1 languages, and classic Basic, which so many programmers of my generation and earlier learned as their first exposure to the magic of making computers do our bidding.

Somewhere in the conversation, an interesting idea came up regarding the first language that people learn: good first languages provide the right amount of forgiveness when programmers make mistakes.

A language that is too forgiving will allow the learner to be sloppy and fall into bad habits.

A language that is not forgiving enough can leave students dispirited under a barrage of not good enough, a barrage of type errors and syntax gotchas.

What we mean by 'forgiving' is hard to define. For this and other reasons, not everyone agrees with this claim.

Even when people agree in principle with this idea, they often have a hard time agreeing on where to draw the line between too forgiving and not forgiving enough. As with so many design decisions, the correct answer is likely a local maximum that balances the forces at play among the teachers, students, and desired applications involved.

I found Basic to be just right. It gave me freedom to play, to quickly make interesting programs run, and to learn from programs that didn't do what I expected. For many people's taste, though Basic is too forgiving and leads to diseased minds. (Hey to Edsger Dijkstra.) Maybe I was fortunate to learn how to use GOSUBs early and well.

Haskell seems like a language that would be too unforgiving for most learners. Then again, neither my students nor I have experience with it as a first-year language, so maybe we are wrong. We could imagine ways in which learning it first would lead to useful habits of thought about types and problem decomposition. We are aware of schools that use Haskell in CS1; perhaps they have made it work for them. Still, it feels a little too judgmental...

In the end, you can't overlook context and the value of good tools. Maybe these things shift the line of "just right" forgiveness for different audiences. In any case, finding the right level seems to be a useful consideration in choosing a language.

I suspect this is true when choosing languages to work in professionally, too.

The February 2014 issue of Math Horizons included A Conversation With Steven Strogatz, an interview conducted by Patrick Honner. The following passage came to mind this week:

PH: Math is collaborative?

SS: Yeah, math is social. ... The fact that math is social would come as a surprise to the people who think of it as antisocial.

PH: It might also come as a surprise to some math teachers!

SS: It's extremely social. Mathematicians constantly spend time talking to each other about places where they're stuck. They get insights from each other, new ways of looking at things. Sometimes it's just to commiserate.

Programming is social, too. Most people think it's not. With assistance from media portrayals of programmers and sloppy stereotypes of our own, they think most of us would prefer to work alone in the dark. Some do, of course, but even then most programmers I know like to talk shop with other programmers all the time. They like to talk about the places where they are stuck, as well as the places they used to be stuck. War stories are the currency of the programmer community.

I think a big chunk of the "programming solo" preference many programmers profess is learned habit. Most programming instruction and university course work encourages or requires students to work alone. What if we started students off with pair programming in their CS 1 course, and other courses nurtured that habit throughout the rest of their studies? Perhaps programmers would learn a different habit.

My agile software development students this semester are doing all of their project work via pair programming. Class time is full of discussion: about the problem they are solving, about the program they are evolving, and about the intricacies of Java. They've been learning something about all three, and a large part of that learning has been social.

They've only been trying out XP for a couple of weeks, so naturally the new style hasn't replaced their old habits. I see them fall out of pairing occasionally. One partner will switch off to another computer to look up the documentation for a Java class, and pretty soon both partners are quietly looking at their own screens. Out of deference to me or the course, though, they return after a couple of minutes and resume their conversation. (I'm trying to be a gentle coach, not a ruthless tyrant, when it comes to the practices.)

I suspect a couple members of the class would prefer to program on their own, even after noticing the benefits of pairing. Others really enjoy pair programming but may well fall back into solo programming after the class ends. Old habits die hard, if at all. That's too bad, because most of us are better programmers when pairing.

But even if they do choose, or fall back into, old habits, I'm sure that programming will remain a social activity for them, at some level. There are too many war stories to tell.

Jim Weirich on dealing with failure in Ruby, via Avdi Grimm's blog:

(An aside, because I use exceptions to indicate failures, I almost always use the "fail" keyword rather than the "raise" keyword in Ruby. Fail and raise are synonyms so there is no difference except that "fail" more clearly communicates that the method has failed. The only time I use "raise" is when I am catching an exception and re-raising it, because here I'm *not* failing, but explicitly and purposefully raising an exception. This is a stylistic issue I follow, but I doubt many other people do).

Words matter: the right words, used at the right times. Weirich always cared about words, and it showed both in his code and in his teaching and writing.

The students in my agile class got to see my obsession with word choice and phrasing in class yesterday, when we worked through the story cards they had written for their project. I asked questions about many of their stories, trying to help them express what they intended as clearly as possible. Occasionally, I asked, "How will you write the test for this?" In their proposed test we found what they really meant and were able to rephrase the story.

Writing stories is hard, even for experienced programmers. My students are doing this for the first time, and they seemed to appreciate the need to spend time thinking about their stories and looking for ways to make them better. Of course, we've already discussed the importance of good names, and they've already experienced that way in which words matter in their own code.

Whenever I hear someone say that oral and verbal communication skills aren't all that important for becoming a good programmer, I try to help them see that they are, and why. Almost always, I find that they are not programmers and are just assuming that we techies spend all our time living inside mathematical computer languages. If they had ever written much software, they'd already know.

After spending a couple of days becoming familiar with pair programming and unit tests, for Day 4 we moved on to the next step: refactoring. I had the students study the "before" code base from Martin Fowler's book, Refactoring, to identify several ways they thought we could improve it. Then they worked in pairs to implement their ideas. The code itself is pretty simple -- a small part of the information system for a movie rental store -- and let the students focus on practice with tools, running tests, and keeping the code base "green".

We all know Fowler's canonical definition of refactoring:

Refactoring is the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code yet improves its internal structure.

... but it's easy to forget that refactoring really is about design. Programmers with limited experience in Java or OOP can bring only so much to the conversation about improving an OO program written in Java. We can refactor confidently and well only if we have a target in mind, one we understand and can envision in our code. Further, creating a good software design requires taste, and taste generally comes from experience.

I noticed this lack of experience manifesting itself in the way my students tried to decompose the work of a refactoring into small, safe steps. When we struggle with decomposing a refactoring, we naturally struggle with choosing the next step to work on. Kent Beck calls this the challenge of succession. Ordering the steps of a refactoring is a more subtle challenge than many programmers realize at first.

This session reminded me why I like to teach design and refactoring in parallel: coming to appreciate new code smells and quickly learning how to refactor code into a better state. This way, programming skill grows along side the design skill.

On Day 5, we tried to put the skills from the three previous days all together, using an XP-style test-code-refactor-repeat cycle to implement a bit of code. Students worked on either the Checkout kata from Dave Thomas or a tic-tac-toe game based on a write-up by Gojko Adzic. No, these are not the most exciting programs to build, but as I told the class, this makes it possible for them to focus on the XP practices and habits of mind -- small steps, unit tests, and refactoring -- without having to work too hard to grok the domain.

My initial impression as the students worked was that the exercise wasn't going as well as I had hoped it would. The step size was too big, and the tests were too intrusive, and the refactoring was almost non-existent. Afterwards, though, I realized that programmers learning such foreign new habits must go through this phase. The best I can do is inject an occasional suggestion or question, hoping that it helps speed them along the curve.

This morning, I decided to have each student pair up with someone who had worked on the other task last time, flip a coin, and work on the one of the same two tasks. This way, each pair had someone working on the same problem again and someone working on a new problem. I instructed them to start from scratch -- new code, new thoughts -- and have the person new to the task write the first test.

The goal wass to create an asymmetry within each pair. Working on the same piece again would be valuable for the partner doing so, in the way playing finger exercises or etudes is valuable for a musician. At the same time, the other partner would see a new problem, bringing fresh eyes and thoughts to the exercise. This approach seems like a good one, as it varies the experience for both members of the pair. I know how important varying the environment can be for student learning, but I sometimes forget to do that often enough in class.

The results seemed so much better today. Students commented that they made better progress this time around, not because one of them had worked on the same problem last time, but because they were feeling more comfortable with the XP practices. One students something to the effect,

Last time, we were trying to work on the simplest or smallest piece of code we could write. This time, we were trying to work on the smallest piece of functionality we could add to the program.

That's a solid insight from an undergrad, even one with a couple of years programming experience.

I also liked the conversation I was hearing among the pairs. They asked each other, "Should we do this feature next, or this other?" and said, "I'm not sure how we can test this." -- and then talked it over before proceeding. One pair had a wider disparity in OO experience, so the more experienced programmer was thinking out loud as he drove, taking into account comments from his partner as he coded.

This is a good sign. I'm under no illusion that they have all suddenly mastered ordering features, writing unit tests, or refactoring. We'll hit bumps over the next three weeks. But they all seem to be pretty comfortable with working together and collaborating on code. That's an essential skill on an agile team.

Next up: the Planning Game for a project that we'll work on for the rest of the class. They chose their own system to build, a cool little Android game app. That will change the dynamic a bit for customer collaboration and story writing, but I think that the increased desire to see a finished product will increase their motivation to master the skills and practice. My job as part-time customer, part-time coach will require extra vigilance to keep them on track.

Days 2 and 3 of my Agile Software Development May term course are now in the books. This year, I decided to move as quickly as we could in the lab. Yesterday, the students did their first pair-programming session, working for a little over an hour on one of the industry standard exercises, Conway's Game of Life. Today, they did their first pair programming with unit tests, using Bill Wake's Test-First Challenge to implement the beginnings of a simple data model for spreadsheets.

I always enjoy watching students write code and interacting with them while they do it. The thing that jumped out to me yesterday was just how much code some students write before they ever think about compiling it, let alone testing it. Another was how some students manage to get through a year of programming-heavy CS courses without mastering their basic tools: text editor, compiler, and language. It's hard to work confidently when your tools feel uncomfortable in your hands.

There's not much I can do to help students develop greater facility with their tools than give them lots of practice, and we will do that. However, writing too much code before testing even its syntactic correctness is a matter of mindset and habit. So I opened today's session with a brief discussion, and then showed them what I meant in the form of a short bit of code I wrote yesterday while watching them. Then I turned them loose with Wake's spreadsheet tests and encouragement to help each other write simple code, compile frequently even with short snippets, and run the tests as often as their code compiles.

Today, we had an odd number of students in class, something that's likely to be our standard condition this term, so paired with one of the students on a spreadsheet. He wanted to work in Haskell, and I was game. I refreshed my Haskell memories a bit and even contributed some helpful bits of code, in addition to meta-contributions on XP style.

The student is relatively new to the language, so he's still developing the Haskell in his in his mind. There were times we struggled because we were thinking of the problem in a stateful way. As you surely know, that's not the best way to work in Haskell. Our solutions were not always elegant, but we did our best to get in the rhythm of writing tests, writing code, and running.

As the period was coming to an end, our code had just passed a test that had been challenging us. Almost simultaneously, a student in another thrust his arms in the air as his pair's code passed a challenging test, too, much deeper in the suite. We all decided to declare victory and move on. We'll all get better with practice.

Next up: refactoring, and tools to support it and automated testing.

May term started today, so my agile course is off the ground. We will meet for 130 minutes every morning through June 6, excepting only Memorial Day. That's a lot of time spent together in a short period of time.

As I told the students today, each class is almost a week's worth of class in a regular semester. This means committing a fair amount of time out of class every day, on the order of 5-7 hours. There isn't a lot of time for our brains to percolate on the course content. We'll be moving steadily for four weeks.

This makes May term unsuitable, in my mind at least, for a number of courses. I would never teach CS 1 in May term. Students are brand new to the discipline, to programming, and usually to their first programming language. They need time for the brains to percolate. I don't think I'd want to teach upper-division CS courses in May term if they have a lot of content, either. Our brains don't always absorb a lot of information quickly in a short amount of time, so letting it sink in more slowly, helped by practice and repetition, seems best.

My agile course is, on the other hand, almost custom made for a compressed semester. There isn't a lot of essential "content". The idea is straightforward. I don't expect students to memorize lists of practices, or the rules of tools. I expect them to do the practices. Doing them daily, in extended chunks of time, with immediate feedback, is much better than taking a day off between practice sessions.

Our goal is, in part, to learn new habits and then reflect on how well they fit, on where they might help us most and where they might get in the way. We'll have better success learning new habits in the compressed term than we would with breaks. And, as much as I want students to work daily during a fifteen-week semester to build habits, it usually just doesn't happen. Even when the students buy in and intend to work that way, life's other demands get in the way. Failing with good intentions is still failing, and sometimes feels worse than failing without them.

So we begin. Tomorrow we start working on our first practice, a new way of working with skills to be learned through repetition every day the rest of the semester. Wish us luck.

Spring semester ends today. May term begins Monday. I haven't taught during the summer since 2010, when I offered a course on agile software development. I'm reprising that course this month, with nine hardy souls signed on for the mission. That means no break for now, just a new start. I like those.

I'm sure I could blog for hours on the thoughts running through my head for the course. They go beyond the readings we did last time and the project we built, though all that is in the mix, too.

For now, though, three passages that made the highlights of my recent reading. All fit nicely with the theme of college days and transition.

~~~~

First, this reminder from John Graham, a "self-made merchant" circa 1900, in a letter to his son at college.

Adam invented all the different ways in which a young man can make a fool of himself, and the college yell at the end of them is just a frill that doesn't change essentials.

College is a place all its own, but it's just a place. In many ways, it's just the place where young people spend a few years while they are young.

~~~~

Next, a writer tells a story of studying with Annie Dillard in college. During their last session together, she told the class:

If I've done my job, you won't be happy with anything you write for the next 10 years. It's not because you won't be writing well, but because I've raised your standards for yourself.

Whatever we "content" teach our students, raising their standards and goals is sometimes the most important thing we do. "Don't compare yourselves to each other", she says. Compare yourselves to the best writers. "Shoot there." This advice works just as well for our students, whether they are becoming software developers or computer scientists. (Most of our students end up being a little bit of both.)

It's better to aim at the standard set by Ward Cunningham or Alan Kay than at the best we can imagine ourselves doing right now.

~~~~

Now that I think about it, this last one has nothing to do with college or transitions. But it made me laugh, and after a long academic year, with no break imminent, a good laugh is worth something.

What do you call a rigorous demonstration that a statement is true?

1. If "proof", then you're a mathematician.
2. If "experiment", then you're a physicist.
3. If you have no word for this concept, then you're an economist.

This is the first of several items in The Mathematical Dialect Quiz at Math with Bad Drawings. It adds a couple of new twists to the tongue-in-cheek differences among mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers. With bad drawings.

Back to work.

Several people have recommended Pat Brisbin's Thinking in Types for programmers with experience in dynamically-typed languages who are looking to grok Haskell-style typing. He wrote it after helping one of his colleagues of mine was get unstuck with a program that "seemed conceptually simple but resulted in a type error" in Haskell when implemented in a way similar to a solution in a language such as Python or Ruby.

This topic is of current interest to me at a somewhat higher level. Few of our undergrads have a chance to program in Haskell as a part of their coursework, though a good number of them learn Scala while working at a local financial tech company. However, about two-thirds of undergrads now start with a one or two semesters of Python, and types are something of a mystery to them. This affects their learning of Java and colors how they think about types if they take my course on programming languages.

So I read this paper. I have two comments.

First, let me say that I agree with my friends and colleagues who are recommending this paper. It is a clear, concise, and well-written description of how to use Haskell's types to think about a problem. It uses examples that are concrete enough that even our undergrads could implement with a little help. I may use this as a reading in my languages course next spring.

Second, I think think this paper does more than simply teach people about types in a Haskell-like language. It also gives a great example of how thinking about types can help programmers create better designs for their programs, even if they are working in an object-oriented language! Further, it hits right at the heart of the problem we face these days, with students who are used to working in scripting languages that provide high-level but very generic data structures.

The problem that Brisbin addresses happens after he helps his buddy create type classes and two instance classes, and they reach this code:

    renderAll [ball, playerOne, playerTwo]

renderAll takes a list of values that are Render-able. Unfortunately, in this case, the arguments come from two different classes... and Haskell does not allow heterogeneous lists. We could try to work around this feature of Haskell and "make it fit", but as Brisbin points out, doing so would cause you to lose the advantages of using Haskell in the first place. The compiler wouldn't be able to find errors in the code.

The Haskell way to solve the problem is to replace the generic list of stuff we pass to renderAll with a new type. With a new Game type that composes a ball with two players, we are able to achieve several advantages at once:

• create a polymorphic render method for Game that passes muster with the type checker
• allow the type checker to ensure that this element of our program is correct
• make the program easier to extend in a type-safe way
our program is correct
• and, perhaps most importantly, express the intent of the program more clearly

It's this last win that jumped off the page for me. Creating a Game class would give us a better object-oriented design in his colleague's native language, too!

Students who become accustomed to programming in languages like Python and Ruby often become accustomed to using untyped lists, arrays, hashes, and tuples as their go-to collections. They are oh, so, handy, often the quickest route to a program that works on the small examples at hand. But those very handy data structures promote sloppy design, or at least enable it; they make it easy not to see very basic objects living in the code.

Who needs a Game class when a Python list or Ruby array works out of the box? I'll tell you: you do, as soon as you try to almost anything else in your program. Otherwise, you begin working around the generality of the list or array, writing code to handle special cases really aren't special cases at all. They are simply unbundled objects running wild in the program.

Good design is good design. Most of the features of a good design transcend any particular programming style or language.

So: This paper is a great read! You can use it to learn better how to think like a Haskell programmer. And you can use it to learn even if thinking like a Haskell programmer is not your goal. I'm going to use it, or something like it, to help my students become better OO programmers.

As Corey Haines tells us, it really can be this simple:

def assert_equal(expected, actual, message)
  if expected != actual
    raise "Expected #{expected}, got #{actual}\n#{message}"
  end
end

Don't let the overhead of learning or using a test harness prevent you from starting. Write a test, then write some code. Or, if you prefer: Write some code, then write a test.

I haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of Avdi Grimm's new book, Confident Ruby, yet. I did buzz by the book's Pragmatic Programmers page, where I was able to pick up a sample chapter or two for elliptical reading.

The chapter "Represent special cases as objects" was my first look. This chapter and the "Represent do-nothing cases as null objects" chapter that follows deal with situations in which our program is missing a kind of object. The result is code that has too many responsibilities because there is no object charged with handling them.

The chapter on do-nothing cases is @avdi's re-telling of the Null Object pattern. Bobby Woolf workshopped his seminal write-up of this pattern at PLoP 1996 (the first patterns conference I attended) and later published an improved version in the fourth Pattern Languages of Program Design book. I had the great pleasure to correspond with Bobby as he wrote his original paper and to share a few ideas about the pattern.

@avdi's special cases chapter is a great addition to the literature. It shows several different ways in which our code can call out for a special case object in place of a null reference. It then shows how creating a new kind of object can make our code better in each case, giving concrete examples written in Ruby, in the context of processing input to a web app.

I was discussing the pattern and the chapter with a student, who asked a question about this example:

    if current_user
      render_logout_button
    else
      render_login_button
    end

This is the only example in which the if check is not eliminated after introducing the special case object, an instance of the new class, GuestUser. Instead, @avdi adds an authenticated? to the User and GuestUser classes, has them return true and false respectively, and then changes the original expression to:

    if current_user.authenticated?
      render_logout_button
    else
      render_login_button
    end

As the chapter tells us, using the authenticated? predicate makes the conditional statement express the programmer's intent more clearly. But it also says that "we can't get rid of the conditional". My student asked, "Why not?"

Of course we can. The question is whether we want to. (I have a hard time using words like "cannot", "never", and "always", because I can usually imagine an exception to the absolute...)

In this case, there is a lingering smell in the code that uses the special case object: authenticated? is a surrogate for type check. Indeed, it behaves just like a query to find the object's class so that we can tailor our behavior to receiver's type. That's just the sort of thing we don't have to do in an OO program.

The standard remedy for this code smell is to push the behavior into the classes and send the object, whatever its type, a message. Rather ask a user if it is authenticated so that we can render the correct button, we might ask it to render the correct button itself:

    current_user.render_button

    ...

    class User
      def render_button
        render_logout_button
      end
    end

    class GuestUser
      def render_button
        render_login_button
      end
    end

Unfortunately, it's not quite this simple. The render_logXXX_button methods don't live in the user classes, so the render_button methods need to send those messages to some other object. If the user object already knows to whom to send it, great. If not, then the send of the render_button message will need to send itself as an argument along with the message, so that the receiver can send the appropriate message back.

Either of these approaches requires us to let some knowledge from the original context leak into our User and GuestUser classes, and that creates a new form of coupling. Ideally, there will be a way to mitigate this coupling in the form of some other shared association. Ruby web developers know the answer to this better than I.

In any case, this may be what @avdi means when he says that we can't get rid of the if check. Doing so may create more downside than upside.

This turned into a great opportunity to discuss design with my student. Design is about trade-offs. Things never seem quite as simple in the trenches as they do when we learn the rules and heuristics of design. There is no perfect solution. Our goal as programmers should be to develop the ability to make informed decisions in these situations, taking into account the context in which we are working.

Patterns document design solutions and so must be used with care. One of the thing I love about the pattern form is that it encourages the writer to make as explicit as possible the context in which the solution applies and the forces that make its use more or less applicable. This helps the reader to face the possible trade-offs with his or her eyes wide open.

So, one minor improvement @avdi might make in this chapter is to elaborate on the reason underlying the assertion that we can't eliminate this particular if check. Otherwise, students of OOP are likely to ask the same question my student asked.

Of course, the answer may be obvious to Ruby web developers. In the end, working with patterns is like all other design: the more experience we have, the better.

This is a relatively minor issue, though. From what I've seen, "Confident Ruby" will be a valuable addition to most Ruby programmers' bookshelves.

A few weeks ago, Reginald Braithwaite wrote a short piece discouraging us from creating class hierarchies. His article uses Javascript examples, but I think he intends his advice to apply everywhere:

So if someone asks you to explain how to write a class hierarchy? Go ahead and tell them: "Don't do that!"

If you have done much object-oriented programming in a class-based language, you will recognize his concern with class hierarchies: A change to the implementation of a class high up in the hierarchy could break every class beneath it. This is often called the "fragile base class" problem. Fragile code can't be changed without a lot of pain, fixing all the code broken by the change.

I'm going to violate the premise of Braithwaite's advice and suggest a way that you can make your base classes less fragile and thus make small class hierarchies more attractive. If you would like to follow his advice, feel free to tell me "Don't do that!" and stop reading now.

The technique I suggest follows directly from a practice that OO programmers use to create good objects, one that Braithwaite advocates in his article: encapsulating data tightly within an object.

JavaScript does not enforce private state, but it's easy to write well-encapsulated programs: simply avoid having one object directly manipulate another object's properties. Forty years after Smalltalk was invented, this is a well-understood principle.

The article then shows a standard example of a bank account object written in this style, in which client code uses the object without depending on its implementation. So far, so good.

What about classes?

It turns out, the relationship between classes in a hierarchy is not encapsulated. This is because classes do not relate to each other through a well-defined interface of methods while "hiding" their internal state from each other.

Braithwaite then shows an example of a subclass method that illustrates the problem:

    ChequingAccount.prototype.process = function (cheque) {
      this._currentBalance = this._currentBalance - cheque.amount();
      return this;
    }

The ChequingAccount directly accesses its _currentBalance member, which it inherits from the Account prototype. If we now change the internal implementation of Account so that it does not provide a _currentBalance member, we will break ChequingAccount.

The problem, we are told, is that objects are encapsulated, but classes are not.

... this dependency is not limited in scope to a carefully curated interface of methods and behaviour. We have no encapsulation.

However, as the article pointed out earlier, JavaScript does not enforce private state for objects! Even so, it's easy to write well-encapsulated programs -- by not letting one object directly manipulate another object's properties. This is a design pattern that makes it possible to write OO programs even when the language does not enforce encapsulation.

The problem isn't that objects are encapsulated and classes are not. It's that we tend treat superclasses differently than we treat other classes.

When we write code for two independent objects, we think of their classes as black boxes, sealed off from external inspection. The data and methods defined in the one class belong to it and its objects. Objects of one class must interact with objects of another via a carefully curated interface of methods and behavior.

But when we write code for a subclass, we tend to think of the data and methods defined in the superclass as somehow "belonging to" instances of the subclass. We take the notion of inheritance too literally.

My suggestion is that you treat your classes like you treat objects: Don't let one class look into another class and access its state directly. Adopt this practice even when the other class is a superclass, and the state is an inherited member.

Many OO programs have this pattern. I usually call it the "Subclass as Client" pattern. Instances of a subclass act as clients of their superclass, treating it -- as much as possible -- as an independent object providing a set of well-defined behaviors.

When code follows this pattern, it takes Braithwaite's advice for designing objects up a level and follows it more faithfully. Even instance variables inherited from the superclass are encapsulated, accessible only through the behaviors of the superclass.

I don't program in Javascript, but I've written a lot of Java over the years, and I think the lessons are compatible. Here's my story.

~~~~~

When I teach OOP, one of the first things my students learn about creating objects is this:

All instance variables are private.

Like Javascript, Java doesn't require this. We can tell the compiler to enforce it, though, through use of the private modifier. Now, only methods defined in the same class can access the variable.

For the most part, students are fine with this idea -- until we learn about subclasses. If one class extends another, it cannot access the inherited data members. The natural thing to do is what they see in too many Java examples in their texts and on the web: change private variables in the superclass to protected. Now, all is right with the world again.

Except that they have stepped directly into the path of the fragile base class problem. Almost any change to the superclass risks breaking all of its subclasses. Even in a sophomore OO course, we quickly encounter the problem of fragile base classes in our programs. But other choice do we have?

Make each class a server to its subclasses. Keep the instance variables private, and (in Braithwaite's words) carefully curate an interface of methods for subclasses to use. The class may be willing to expose more of its identity to its subclasses than to arbitrary objects, so define protected methods that are accessible only to its subclasses.

This is an intentional extension of the class's interface for explicit interaction with subclasses. (Yes, I know that protected members in Java are accessible to every class in the package. Grrr.)

This is the same discipline we follow when we write well-behaved objects in any language: encapsulate data and define an interface for interaction. When applied to the class-subclass relationship, it helps us to avoid the dangers of fragile base classes.

Forty years after Smalltalk was invented, this principle should be better understood by more programmers. In Smalltalk, variables are encapsulated within their classes, which forces subclasses to access them through methods defined in the superclass. This language feature encourages the writer of the class to think explicitly about how instances of a subclass will interact with the class. (Unfortunately, those methods are public to the world, so programmers have to enforce their scope by convention.)

Of course, a lazy programmer can throw away this advantage. When I first learned OO in Smalltalk, I quickly figured out that I could simply define accessors with the same names as the instance variables. Hurray! My elation did not last long, though. Like my Java students, I quickly found myself with a maze of class-subclass entanglements that made programming unbearable. I had re-invented the Fragile Base Class problem.

Fortunately, I had the Smalltalk class library to study, as well as programs written by better programmers than I. Those programs taught me the Subclass as Client pattern, I learned that it was possible to use subclasses well, when classes were designed carefully. This is just one of the many ways that Smalltalk taught me OOP.

~~~~~

Yes, you should prefer composition to inheritance, and, yes, you should strive to keep your class hierarchies as small and shallow as possible. But if you apply basic principles of object design to your superclasses, you don't need to live in absolute fear of fragile base classes. You can "do that" if you are willing to carefully curate an interface of methods that define the behavior of a class as a superclass.

This advice works well only for the class hierarchies you build for yourself. If you need to work with a class from an external package you don't control, then you can't be control the quality of those class's interfaces. Think carefully before you subclass an external class and depend on its implementation.

One technique I find helpful in this regard is to build a wrapper class around the external class, carefully define an interface for subclasses, and then extend the wrapper class. This at least isolates the risk of changes in the library class to a single class in my program.

Of course, if you are programming in Javascript, you might want to look to the Self community for more suitable OO advice than to Smalltalk!

By Chris Granger of Light Table fame:

Programming is our way of encoding thought such that the computer can help us with it.

Read the whole piece, which recounts Granger's reflection after the Light Table project left him unsatisfied and he sought answers. He concludes that we need to re-center our idea of what programming is and how we can make it accessible to more people. Our current idea of programming doesn't scale because, well,

It turns out masochism is a hard sell.

Every teacher knows this. You can sell masochism to a few proud souls, but not to anyone else.

That is the advice I find myself giving to students again and again this semester: Sooner.

Review the material we cover in class sooner.

Ask questions sooner.

Think about the homework problems sooner.

Clarify the requirements sooner.

Write code sooner.

Test your code sooner.

Submit a working version of your homework sooner. You can submit a more complete version later.

A lot of this advice boils down to the more general Get feedback sooner. In many ways, it is a dual of the advice, Take small steps. If you take small steps, you can ask, clarify, write, and test sooner. One of the most reliable ways to do those things sooner is to take small steps.

If you are struggling to get things done, give sooner a try. Rather than fail in a familiar way, you might succeed in an unfamiliar way. When you do, you probably won't want to go back to the old way again.

In this interview prior to Monday's debut of FiveThirtyEight, Joe Coscarelli asked Nate Silver if the venture was ready to launch. Silver said that they they were probably 75-80% ready and that it was time to go live.

You're going to make some mistakes once you launch that you can't really deal with until you actually have a real product.

If they waited another month, they'd probably feel like they were ... 75-80% ready. There are some things you can't learn "unless your neck is on the line".

It ought not be surprising that Silver feels this way. His calling card is using data to make better decisions. Before you can have big data, or good data, you have to have data. It is usually better to start collecting it now than to start collecting it later.

Sass, Flexbox, Git, Grunt? Frank Chimero whispers:

(Look at that list, programmers. You need to get better at naming things. No wonder why people are skittish about development. It's like we're in a Dr. Seuss book.)

For new names, it's time to hunt.
I will not Git!
I will not Grunt!

Nevermore shall we let these pass.
No more Flexbox!
No more Sass!

In his recent article on the future of the news business, Marc Andreessen has a great passage in his section on ways for the journalism industry to move forward:

Experimentation: You may not have all the right answers up front, but running many experiments changes the battle for the right way forward from arguments to tests. You get data, which leads to correctness and ultimately finding the right answers.

I love that clause: "running many experiments changes the battle for the right way forward from arguments to tests".

While programming, it's easy to get caught up in what we know about the code we have just written and assume that this somehow empowers us to declare sweeping truths about what to do next.

When students are first learning to program, they often fall into this trap -- despite the fact that they don't know much at all. From other courses, though, they are used to thinking for a bit, drawing some conclusions, and then expressing strongly-held opinions. Why not do it with their code, too?

No matter who we are, whenever we do this, sometimes we are right, and sometimes, we are wrong. Why leave it to chance? Run a simple little experiment. Write a snippet of code that implements our idea, and run it. See what happens.

Programs let us test our ideas, even the ideas we have about the program we are writing. Why settle for abstract assertions when we can do better? In the end, even well-reasoned assertions are so much hot air. I learned this from Ward Cunningham: It's all talk until the tests run.

This week I saw a link to The Turing School of Software & Design, "a seven-month, full-time program for people who want to become professional developers". It reminded me of Neumont University, a ten-year-old school that offers a B.S. degree program in Computer science that students can complete in two and a half years.

While riding the bike, I occasionally fantasize about doing something like this. With the economics of universities changing so quickly [ 1 | 2 ], there is an opportunity for a new kind of higher education. And there's something appealing about being able to work closely with a cadre of motivated students on the full spectrum of computer science and software development.

This could be an accelerated form of traditional CS instruction, without the distractions of other things, or it could be something different. Traditional university courses are pretty confining. "This course is about algorithms. That one is about programming languages." It would be fun to run a studio in which students serve as apprentices making real stuff, all of us learning as we go along.

A few years ago, one of our ChiliPLoP hot topic groups conducted a greenfield thought experiment to design an undergrad CS program outside of the constraints of any existing university structure. Student advancement was based on demonstrating professional competencies, not completing packaged courses. It was such an appealing idea! Of course, there was a lot of hard work to be done working out the details.

My view of university is still romantic, though. I like the idea of students engaging the great ideas of humanity that lie outside their major. These days, I think it's conceivable to include the humanities and other disciplines in a new kind of CS education. In a recent blog entry, Hollis Robbins floats the idea of Home College for the first year of a liberal arts education. The premise is that there are "thousands of qualified, trained, energetic, and underemployed Ph.D.s [...] struggling to find stable teaching jobs". Hiring a well-rounded tutor could be a lot less expensive than a year at a private college, and more lucrative for the tutor than adjuncting.

Maybe a new educational venture could offer more than targeted professional development in computing or software. Include a couple of humanities profs, maybe some a social scientist, and it could offer a more complete undergraduate education -- one that is economical both in time and money.

But the core of my dream is going broad and deep in CS without the baggage of a university. Sometimes a fantasy is all you need. Other times...

If a CS major learns only one habit of professional practice in four years, it should be:

Take small steps.

A corollary:

If things aren't working, take smaller steps.

I once heard Kent Beck say something similar, in the context of TDD and XP. When my colleague Mark Jacobson works with students who are struggling, he uses a similar mantra: Solve a simpler problem. As Dr. Nick notes, students and professionals alike should scale the step size according to their level of knowledge or their confidence about the problem.

When I tweeted these thoughts yesterday, two pieces of related advice came in:

• Slow down. -- Big steps are usually a sign of trying to hurry. Beginners are especially prone to this.


• Lemma: Keep moving. -- Small steps keep us moving more reliably. We can always fool ourselves into believing that the next big step is all we need...

Of course, I've always been a fan of baby steps and unusual connections to agile software development. They apply quite nicely to learners in many settings.

I was looking over a couple of files of old notes and found several quotes that I still like, usually from articles I enjoyed as well. They haven't found their way into a blog entry yet, but they deserve to see the light of day.

Evidence, Please!

From a short note on the tendency even among scientists to believe unsubstantiated claims, both in and out of the professional context:

It's hard work, but I suspect the real challenge will lie in persuading working programmers to say "evidence, please" more often.

More programmers and computer scientists are trying to collect and understand data these days, but I'm not sure we've made much headway in getting programmers to ask for evidence.

Sometimes, Code Before Math

From a discussion of The Expectation Maximization Algorithm:

The code is a lot simpler to understand than the math, I think.

I often understand the language of code more quickly than the language of math. Reading, or even writing, a program sometimes helps me understand a new idea better than reading the math. Theory is, however, great for helping me to pin down what I have learned more formally.

Grin, Wave, Nod

From Iteration Inside and Out, a review of the many ways we loop over stuff in programs:

Right now, the Rubyists are grinning, the Smalltalkers are furiously waving their hands in the air to get the teacher's attention, and the Lispers are just nodding smugly in the back row (all as usual).

As a Big Fan of all three languages, I am occasionally conflicted. Grin? Wave? Nod? Look like the court jester by doing all three simultaneously?

You know what they say about good design coming from experience, and experience coming from bad design? That phenomenon is true of most things non-trivial. Here's an example from men's college basketball.

The University of Florida has a veteran team. The University of Kentucky has a young team. Florida's players are very good, but not generally considered to be in the same class as Kentucky's highly-regarded players. Yesterday, the two teams played a close game on Kentucky's home floor.

Once they fell behind by five with less than two minutes remaining, Kentucky players panicked. Florida players didn't. Why not? "Well, we have a veteran group here that's panicked before -- that's been in this situation and not handled it well," [Patric] Young said.

How did Florida's players maintain their composure at the end of a tight game on the road against another good team? They had been in that same situation three times before, and failed. They didn't panic this time in large part because they had panicked before and learned from those experiences.

Kentucky's starters have played a total of 124 college games. Florida's four seniors have combined to play 491. That's a lot of experience -- a lot of opportunities to panic, to guess wrong, to underestimate a situation, or otherwise to come up short. And a lot of opportunities to learn.

The young players at Kentucky hurt today. As the author of the linked game report notes, Florida's players have hurt like that before, for coming up short in much the same way, "and they used that pain to get better".

It turns out that composure comes from experience, and experience comes from lack of composure.

As a teacher, I try to convince students not to shy away from the error messages their compiler gives them, or from the convoluted code they eventually sneak past it. Those are the experiences they'll eventually look back to when they are capable, confident programmers. They just need the opportunity to learn.

My students and I debriefed a programming assignment in class yesterday. In the middle of class, I said, "Now for a big question: How do you know your code is correct?

There were a lot of knowing smiles and a lot of nervous laughter. Most of them don't.

Sure, they ran a few test cases, but after making additions and changes to the code, some were just happy that it still ran. The output looked reasonable, so it must be done. I suggested that they might want to think more about testing.

This morning I read a great quote from Nathan Marz that I will share with my students:

Feedback is everything. Most of the time you're wrong, and feedback is the only way to realize your mistakes and help you become less wrong. This applies to everything.

Most of the time you're wrong. Do things that help you become less wrong. Getting feedback, early and often, is one of the best ways to do this.

A comment by a student earlier in the period foreshadowed our discussion of testing, which made me feel even better. In response to the retrospective question, "What design or programming choices went well for you?", he answered unit tests.

That set me up quite nicely to segue from manual testing into automated testing. If you aren't testing your code early and often, then manual testing is a huge improvement. But you can do even better by pushing those test cases into a form that can be executed quickly and easily, with the code doing the tedious work of verifying the output.

My students are writing code in many different languages, so I showed them testing frameworks in Ruby, Java, and Python. The code looks simple, even with the boilerplate imposed by the frameworks.

The big challenges in getting students to write unit tests are the same as for getting professionals to write them: lack of time, and misplaced confidence. I hope that a few of my students will see that the real time sink is debugging bad code and that a fear of changing code is a lack of confidence. The best way to be confident is to have evidence.

The student who extolled unit tests works in Racket and so has test cases in RackUnit. He set me up nicely for a future discussion, too, when he admitted out loud that he wrote his tests first. This time, it was I who smiled knowingly.

When asked to design and implement a program, beginning programmers often aren't sure what data type or data structure to use for a particular value. Should they use an array or a list? Or they've decided to use a record but can't decide exactly what fields to include, or names to give them.

"What should it be?", they ask.

I often have a particular implementation in mind, based on what we've been studying or on my own experience as a programmer, but I prefer not to tell them what to do. This is a great opportunity for them to learn to think about design.

Instead, I ask questions. "What have you considered?" "Do you think one or the other is better?" "Why?"

We discuss how so often there is no "right" answer. There are merely trade-offs. They have to choose. This is a design decision.

But, in making this decision, there's another opportunity to learn something about design. They don't have to commit now and forever to an implementation before proceeding with the rest of their program. Because the rest of the program shouldn't know about their decision anyway!

They should make an object that encapsulates the choice. They are then able to start building the rest of the program without fear that it depends on the details of their design choice. The rest of the program will interact with the object in terms of what the object means in the program, not in terms of how it is implemented. Later, if they change their minds, they will be able to change the implementation details without disturbing the rest of the code.

Yes this is basic stuff, but beginners often struggle with basic stuff. They've learned about ADTs or OOP, and they can talk abstractly about abstraction. But when it comes time to write code, indecision descends upon them. They are afraid of messing up.

If I can help allay their fears of proceeding, then I've contributed something to their work that day. I even suggest that writing the rest of the program might even help them figure out which alternative is better. I like to listen to my code, even if that idea seems strange or absurd to them. Some day soon, it may not.

In any case, they have the beginnings of a program, and perhaps a better idea of what design is all about.

... with apologies to Annie Dillard.

A well-known programmer got collared by a university student who asked, "Do you think I could be a programmer?"

"Well," the programmer said, "I don't know... Do you like function calls?"

The programmer could see the student's amazement. Function calls? Do I like function calls? I am twenty years old and do I like function calls?

If the student had liked function calls, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, "I liked the smell of paint."

In The Exceptional Beauty of Doom 3's Source Code, Shawn McGrath first says this:

I've never really cared about source code before. I don't really consider myself a 'programmer'.

Then he says this:

Dyad has 193k lines of code, all C++.

193,000 lines of C++? Um, dude, you're a programmer.

Even so, the point is worth thinking about. For most people, programming is a means to an end: a way to create something. Many CS students start with a dream program in mind and only later, like McGrath, come to appreciate code for its own sake. Some of our graduates never really get there, and appreciate programming mostly for what they can do with it.

If the message we send from academic CS is "come to us only if you already care about code for its own sake", then we may want to fix our message.

In an article on the Moonpig billing system, Mark Dominus writes:

Sometimes I see other people [screw] up a project over and over, and I say "I could do that better", and then I get a chance to try, and I discover it was a lot harder than I thought, I realize that those people who tried before are not as stupid as as I believed.

That did not happen this time.

Sometimes, good design is pretty simple. Separate interface from implementation. Create simple abstraction layers to separate different levels of functionality. Encapsulate data and behavior in objects that circumscribe potential change.

I liked a few of the specific tactics described, too:

Don't use raw primitives from the language, even standard classes. "Instead of using raw DateTime [a standard Perl class], we wrapped it in a derived class called Moonpig::DateTime."

Define convenience functions that hide underlying data implementations. Moonpig does this in several places, most notably money and time.

Use mutable data sparingly, and never for values. One way Moonpig does this is to implement "values with history", an idea I first learned from Ralph Johnson in Smalltalk. Each new value for an entity is pushed onto an array. When a piece of code asks for the current value, it receives the top of the array.

Object-oriented programming is centered around objects. That means encapsulated behavior. Other concepts, such as classes and inheritance, are add-ons. Dominus is especially hard on inheritance, based on past experience. I agree that it must be used carefully and sparingly. I like how Moonpig uses roles to eliminate the need for classes entirely in the application.

This was a fun read.

Paraphrasing Kent Beck:

Whenever I write a new piece of code, I like to have at least two alternatives in mind. That way, I know I am not doing the worst thing possible.

I heard Kent say something like this at OOPSLA in the late 1990s. This is advice I give often to students and colleagues, but I've never had a URL that I could point them to.

It's tempting for programmers to start implementing the first good idea that comes to mind. It's especially tempting for novices, who sometimes seem surprised that they have even one good idea. Where would a second one come from?

More experienced students and programmers sometimes trust their skill and experience a little too easily. That first idea seems so good, and I'm a good programmer... Famous last words. Reality eventually catches up with us and helps us become more humble.

Some students are afraid: afraid they won't get done if they waste time considering alternatives, or afraid that they will choose wrong anyway. Such students need more confidence, the kind born out of small successes.

I think the most likely explanation for why beginners don't already seek alternatives is quite simple. They have not developed the design habit. Kent's advice can be a good start.

One pithy statement is often enough of a reminder for more experienced programmers. By itself, though, it probably isn't enough for beginners. But it can be an important first step for students -- and others -- who are in the habit of doing the first thing that pops into their heads.

Do note that this advice is consistent with XP's counsel to do the simplest thing that could possibly work. "Simplest" is a superlative. Grammatically, that suggests having at least three options from which to choose!

Recently someone I know retweeted this familiar sentiment:

If carpenters were hired like programmers:
"Must have at least 5 years experience with the Dewalt 18V 165mm Circular Saw"

This meme travels around the world in various forms all the time, and every so often it shows up in one of my inboxes. And every time I think, "There is more to the story."

In one sense, the meme reflects a real problem in the software world. Job ads often use lists of programming languages and technologies as requirements, when what the company presumably really wants is a competent developer. I may not know the particular technologies on your list, or be expert in them, but if I am an experienced developer I will be able to learn them and become an expert.

Understanding and skill run deeper than a surface list of tools.

But. A programming language is not just a tool. It is a building material, too.

Suppose that a carpenter uses a Dewalt 18V 165mm circular saw to add a room to your house. When he finishes the project and leaves your employ, you won't have any trace of the Dewalt in his work product. You will have a new room.

He might have used another brand of circular saw. He may not have used a power tool at all, preferring the fine craftsmanship of a handsaw. Maybe he used no saw of any kind. (What a magician!) You will still have the same new room regardless, and your life will proceed in the very same way.

Now suppose that a programmer uses the Java programming language to add a software module to your accounting system. When she finishes the project and leaves your employ, you will have the results of running her code, for sure. But you will have a trace of Java in her work product. You will have a new Java program.

If you intend to use the program again, to generate a new report from new input data, you will need an instance of the JVM to run it. If want to modify the program to work differently, then you will also need a Java compiler to create the byte codes that run in the JVM. If you want to extend the program to do more, then you again will need a Java compiler and interpreter.

Programs are themselves tools, and we use programming languages to build them. So, while the language itself is surely a tool at one level, at another level it is the raw material out of which we create other things.

To use a particular language is to introduce a slew of other dependencies to the overall process: compilers, interpreters, libraries, and sometimes even machine architectures. In the general case, to use a particular language is to commit at least some part of the company's future attention to both the language and its attendant tooling.

So, while I am sympathetic to sentiment behind our recurring meme, I think it's important to remember that a programming language is more than just a particular brand of power tool. It is the stuff programs are made of.