Programming

A computer science degree doesn’t prepare you to be a programmer. Here’s an excerpt from a blog post I wrote comparing computer scientists and programmers:

I had a conversation yesterday with someone who said he needed to hire a computer scientist. I replied that actually he needed to hire someone who could program, and that not all computer scientists could program. He disagreed, but I stood by my statement. I’ve known too many people with computer science degrees, even advanced degrees, who were ineffective software developers. Of course I’ve also known people with computer science degrees, especially advanced degrees, that were terrific software developers. The most I’ll say is that programming ability is positively correlated with computer science achievement.

How do you bridge the gap between obtaining a computer science degree and becoming a professional programmer? For years I’ve recommended that CS grads read Code Complete. Now I’d also recommend New Programmer’s Survival Manual by Josh Carter. This new book has some similarly to Code Complete. However, Code Complete is about good programming technique, not programming as a profession.

The Survival Manual has four parts:

1. Professional Programming
2. People Skills
3. The Corporate World
4. Looking Forward

The first part has the most similarity to Code Complete, though even there the two books are complementary. The second part, people skills, has some great advice, though I imagine most CS graduates will skim over this part because they don’t realize it is important.

CS students may do well to read the Survival Manual, especially parts one and three, to find out whether they want to be programmers. Some who find abstract computer science fascinating will find a typical programming sorely disappointing. See Mike Taylor’s post Whatever happened to programming.

A few of these may be able to find refuge as computer science professors, but not many. If you want to become a professor and think you’ll be able to get an academic job, watch So you want to get a PhD in theoretical computer science and read No, you cannot be a professor.

The Survival Manual assumes the majority programmers will be working in cube farms on enterprise software, which is true. But there is a small middle ground between enterprise development and academia, jobs that will give you a chance to use advanced computer science without having to write papers about it.

One reservation I have about this book is that it may be overwhelming. If you have a friend who is starting a new career as a programmer, maybe you could buy a copy of the Survival Manual and rip it into chapters. Then mail your friend one chapter a week.

Another reservation I have is that new CS graduates may not benefit much from the book because they won’t believe it. They may deny that the real world is as Josh Carter describes.

The people who may benefit the most from reading the Survival Manual are programmers with some experience who want to improve their skills. They may have learned through hard knocks about some of the challenges Carter writes about. Also, Carter describes life in a software shop with fairly high standards. Those who are used to producing lower quality software will do well to read about life in an organization with higher standards.

Related posts:

Where does programming effort go?
Coming full circle
Writing software is harder than writing books

Rob Pike gave a presentation in 2001 entitled “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy.” His main point is that diversity has been bad for Unix. He opens his presentation with a couple of quotes to set this up.

‘‘The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected.’’ — The UNIX Programmer’s Manual, 2nd Edition, June, 1972.

The number of UNIX variants has grown to dozens, with more expected.

He discusses much more than diversity, and I believe the more interesting parts of his talk are on other topics, but he begins and ends with diversity. One of his last slides says

Microsoft succeeds not because it’s good, but because there’s only one of them. … Unixes of the World, Unite!

Joel Spolsky has a different take on the differences between the operating systems in his article Biculturalism. Spolsky says that Unix software is programmer-friendly but Windows software is user-friendly for the vast majority of users who are not programmers. But Spolsky does touch on the diversity issue that Pike raised.

For example, Unix has a value of separating policy from mechanism which, historically, came from the designers of X. This directly led to a schism in user interfaces; nobody has ever quite been able to agree on all the details of how the desktop UI should work, and they think this is OK, because their culture values this diversity, but for Aunt Marge it is very much not OK to have to use a different UI to cut and paste in one program than she uses in another.

Just to throw in my two cents worth, I’ll mention my blog post Where the Unix philosophy breaks down. The Unix philosophy is to write little programs that do one thing well, then sew these little programs together to do your work. The problem is that many people lack the desire or skill to do the sewing. They want to avoid the transaction costs of switching software applications. Pike alludes to this problem, dismissively saying that people want “hand-holding” rather than pipes.

I don’t think this desire for integrated applications is necessarily a problem for Unix, only for the Unix philosophy that Unix doesn’t follow too strictly. The emphasis on orthogonal programs is a laudable ideal. It just needs to be tempered a bit for the convenience of mortal users.

Here’s an answer I gave on Stack Overflow to someone asking when it’s OK to use global variables.

In The Art of Readable Code, the authors call the following the “Fundamental Theorem of Readability”:

Code should be written to minimize the time it would take for someone else to understand it.

They go on to explain

And when we say “understand,” we have a very high bar … they should be able to make changes to it, spot bugs, and understand how it interacts with the rest of your code.

My friend Clift Norris has identified a fundamental constant that I call Norris’ number, the average amount of code an untrained programmer can write before he or she hits a wall. Clift estimates this as 1,500 lines. Beyond that the code becomes so tangled that the author cannot debug or modify it without herculean effort.

Related posts:

Writes large correct programs
Little programs versus big programs
Experienced programmers and lines of code

A few weeks ago, J. D. Long gave some interesting advice in a Google+ discussion. He starts out

Lunch today with an analyst 13 years my junior made me think about things I wish I had known about the technical analytical profession when I was 25. Here’s some things that popped into my head:

The entire list is worth reading, but I want to focus on two things he said about tools.

• Use tools you don’t have to ask permission to install (i.e. open source).
• Dependence on tools that are closed license and un-scriptable will limit the scope of problems you can solve. (i.e. Excel) Use them, but build your core skills on more portable & scalable technologies.

I would have disagreed a few years ago, but now I think this is good advice.

In the late 90’s I used mostly Microsoft tools. That was a good time to be a Microsoft developer. Windows was on the rise; Unix and Mac OS were on the ropes. Desktop applications were the norm and were easier to write on Windows. Open source software was hard to install and hard to use. People who used open source software often did so for ideological reasons, not because it made their work easier.

Of course times have changed. Mac recovered from its near death experience. Unix didn’t, but it has been resurrected as Linux. The web made it easier to write cross-platform software. And above all, open source software has matured. The open source community is more positive, focused on promoting good software rather than trying to give some corporation a stick in the eye.

Now the advantages of open source are clearer. There’s not the same hidden cost in frustration that there was a few years ago. Now I would say yes, it’s a great advantage to use tools you can install whenever and wherever you want, without having to go through a purchasing bureaucracy.

It’s interesting that JD equates open source with scriptability. Open source software often is scriptable, not because it’s open source, but because of the Unix aesthetic that pervades the open source community. Closed source software is often not scriptable, not because it’s closed source, but because it is often written for consumers who value usability over composability. Commercial server-side products may be scriptable. If I were to restate JD’s advice on this point, I’d say to keep composability in mind and don’t just think about usability.

I appreciate JD’s attitude toward applications such as Excel. He’s not saying you should never defile your conscience by opening Excel. Some tasks are incredibly easy in Excel. The danger comes from pushing the tool into territory where other tools are better. There are still some in the open source community who believe that opening Excel is a sin, but I’m much more in agreement with the people who say, for example, that Excel isn’t the best tool for statistical analysis.

Portability is funny. In the early days of computing, there were no dominant players, and portability was important (and difficult). Then for a while, portability didn’t matter if you were content with only running on the 95% of the world’s computers that ran Windows. Now portability is important again. Windows still has a huge market share on the desktop, but the desktop itself is losing market share.

And portability matters for more than consumer operating systems. JD mentions portability and scalability in one breath. You may want to move code between operating systems to scale up (e.g. to run on a cluster) or to scale down (e.g. to run on a mobile device).

There’s also the aspect of career portability. You want to master tools that you can take with you from job to job. I would be leery of building a career around a small company’s proprietary tools. If I were in that situation, I’d learn something else on the side that’s more portable.

In closing, I’ll give the rest of JD’s career advice without commentary. These points could make interesting fodder for future blog posts.

• Be a profit center, not a cost center.
• Use tools you don’t have to ask permission to install (i.e. open source).
• Dependence on tools that are closed license and un-scriptable will limit the scope of problems you can solve. (i.e. Excel) Use them, but build your core skills on more portable & scalable technologies.
• Learn basic database tools.
• Learn a programming language.
• Your internal job description may say, “Analyst” but get something else on your business cards. Analyst is so vague as to be meaningless. My external title is currently “Sr. Risk Economist.” I like the term “Data Scientist” for now. I expect that term will be meaningless in 5 years.
• Large organizations do not properly appreciate agile and smart analytic types. Time at large firms should be seen as subsidized learning. Learn lots, but get out.
• Ensure you can explain any of your projects to your wife or non-technical friends. It’s good practice for board meetings later in your career.
• Be sure you know the handful of things that you can do better than most anyone else. Add something to that list every year. Make sure you can explain these things to non techies.
• Be a profit center, not a cost center. At least be as close to the profit center as possible. The chief analyst for the sales SVP is closer to the profit center than an IT analyst supporting billing operations.
• Get really good at asking questions so you understand problems before you start solving them.
• Yes, that bit about being a profit center not a cost center is in there twice. It should probably be in there 5 times.

I called someone a plumber programmer the other day. The person I was speaking to didn’t realize that “plumber programmer” is a term of great respect. The plumber is often the most experienced programmer on a team.

As with literal plumbing, software plumbing connects things together. It deals with things other people don’t want to see or think about. And it’s crucial.

Thomas Guest made a couple diagrams that illustrate this. Managers draw software diagrams with big boxes and little arrows. The boxes represent software components and the arrows represent the code that connects them together.

This gives the impression that the boxes are the hard part and the arrows are easy. The opposite is probably true. Thomas says if we drew the diagram so that the size of the components is proportional to the effort, it might look like this:

Related posts:

Where does programming effort go?
Your job is trivial (but I couldn’t do it)

In the late ’90s I went to a fair number of Microsoft presentations. One presentation would say “The problem with Technology X is that it mixes presentation and content. We’ve introduced Technology Y to make your code cleaner, separating presentation and content.” A few months later I’d be at another presentation that would announce “The problem with Technology Y is that it mixes presentation and content. We’ve introduced Technology Z …” (Does this remind anyone else of The Cat in the Hat Comes Back?)

When I first learned LaTeX, I was told that one of its strengths is that it separates presentation and content. Then a few years later I hear complaints that the problem with LaTeX is that it mingles presentation and content, unlike XHTML. A few years later, guess what? XHTML mixes presentation and content, so we need something else.

I shut down when I hear someone announce that everything before their product was bad because it mixed presentation and content, and now with their solution, presentation and content will be completely separate.

Sometimes one technology really does make a cleaner separation of presentation and content. But at best the separation is relative. LaTeX separates presentation and content more than Word, though not as much as well-written HTML and CSS, maybe. But presentation and content cannot be entirely separated. Nor is their unanimous agreement on what exactly the dividing line is between the two.

Many people don’t want to separate their presentation and content. They don’t understand why this would be desirable, and they’ll fight against anything designed to encourage separation. Maybe they need to learn the advantages, or maybe they’re just doing the best they can to get their job done and they can’t be bothered with long term advantages that may not materialize.

The principle of separating presentation and content is admirable. It really does have advantages, but it’s easier said than done.

From C. S. Lewis:

It has always therefore been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but it usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

This quote comes from the essay On the Reading of Old Books, part of the collection God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Lewis says here that it is easier to read Plato or St. Paul, for example, than to read books about Plato or St. Paul.  Lewis says that the fear of reading great authors

… springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentators.

This does not only apply to literature. I see the same theme in math. Sometimes early math papers are easier to read because they are more concrete. When I was a postdoc at Vanderbilt I asked Richard Arenstorf about a theorem attributed to him in a book I was reading. He scoffed that he didn’t recognize it. He had done his work in a relatively concrete setting and did not approve of the fancy window dressing the author had placed around his theorem. I sat in on a few lectures by Arenstorf and found them amazingly clear.

The same theme appears in software development. Sometimes you can dive to the bottom of an abstraction hierarchy and find that things are simpler there than you would have supposed. The intervening layers obscure the substance of the program, making its core seem unduly mysterious. Like a mediocre mind commenting on the work of a great mind, developers who build layers of software around core functionality intend to make things easier but may do the opposite.

Related posts:

Endless preparation
Opening black boxes
Why Shakespeare is hard to read
C. S. Lewis on reading old books

“Back when I was starting out in computer science I thought by today we’d be writing a few lines of code to accomplish much. Instead, we write hundreds of thousands of lines of code to accomplish little.” — Lispian

People who write Python choose to write Python.

I don’t hear people say “I use Python at work because I have to, but I’d rather be writing Java.” But often I do hear people say they’d like to use Python if their job would allow it. There must be someone out there writing Python who would rather not, but I think that’s more common with other languages.

My point isn’t that everyone loves Python, but rather that those who don’t care for Python simply don’t write it.

Since Python isn’t a common choice for enterprise software projects, it can resist the pressure to be all things to all people. Having a “Benevolent Dictator for Life” also helps Python maintain conceptual integrity. Python is popular enough to have a critical mass of users, but not so popular that it is under pressure to lose its uniqueness.

I don’t know much about the Ruby world, but I wonder whether the increasing popularity of Ruby for web development has created pressure for Ruby to compromise its original philosophy. And I wonder whether Ruby’s creator Yukihiro Matsumoto has “dictatorial” control over his language analogous to the control Guido van Rossum has over Python.

Related posts:

Plain Python
Ruby, Python, and science

As I write this, word has it that John McCarthy passed away yesterday. Tech Crunch is reporting this as fact, citing Hacker News, which in turn cites a single tweet as the ultimate source. So the only authority we have, for now, is one person on Twitter, and we don’t know what relation she has to McCarthy.

[Update: More recent comments on Hacker News corroborate the story. Also, the twitterer cited above, Wendy Grossman, said McCarthy's daughter called her.]

I also have an unsubstantiated story about John McCarthy. I believe I read the following some time ago, but I cannot remember where. If you know of a reference, please let me know. [Update 2: Thanks to Leandro Penz for leaving a link to this article by Paul Graham in the comments below.]

As I recall, McCarthy invented Lisp to be a purely theoretical language, something akin to lambda calculus. When his graduate student Steve Russell spoke of implementing Lisp, McCarthy objected that he didn’t intend Lisp to actually run on a physical computer. Russell then implemented a Lisp interpreter and showed it to McCarthy.

Steve Russell is an unsung hero who deserves some of the credit for Lisp being an actual programming language and not merely a theoretical construct. This does not diminish McCarthy’s achievement, but it does mean that someone else also deserves recognition.

Related posts:

Lisp and the anti-Lisp
Bumblebee software
The myth of the Lisp genius

The idea of software maintenance sounds absurd. Why do you have to maintain software? Do the bits try to sneak off the disk so that someone has to put them back?

Software doesn’t change, but the world changes out from under it.

• People discover bugs. This does not change the software but rather our knowledge of the software.
• As people use the software, they get new ideas regarding how they want to use it.
• The human environment around the software changes. Organizational priorities change. Laws change. Project sponsors and users turn over.
• The technological environment of the software changes. Operating systems, networks, and hardware all change.
• New possibilities emerge and make us less content with old possibilities.

People often perceive these changes as changes to the software, like someone standing on a dock, eyes fixed on a ship, who feels the dock is moving. We speak of software as if it were some mechanical think that physically wears out. Of course it isn’t, but the effect may be the same.

Related post:

Maintenance costs
Taking your code for a walk
Software sins of omission

In my experience, software knowledge has a longer useful shelf life in the Unix world than in the Microsoft world. (In this post Unix is a shorthand for Unix and Linux.)

A pro-Microsoft explanation would say that Microsoft is more progressive, always improving their APIs and tools, and that Unix is stagnant.

A pro-Unix explanation would say that Unix got a lot of things right the first time, that it is more stable, and that Microsoft’s technology turn-over is more churn than progress.

Pick your explanation. But for better or worse, change comes slower on the Unix side. And when it comes, it’s less disruptive.

At least that’s how it seems to me. Although I’ve used Windows and Unix, I’ve done different kinds of work on the two platforms. Maybe the pace of change relates more to the task than the operating system. Also, I have more experience with Windows and so perhaps I’m more aware of the changes there. But most of the things I knew about Unix 20 years ago are still useful, and most the things I knew about Windows 10 years ago are not.

Related posts:

Programmers without computers
Where the Unix philosophy breaks down
Software development and the myth of progress