Exploration Through Example

Prompted by Avdi Grimm’s post on underscores in program identifiers, I’ll publicly air my guess about why theBlightOfCamelCaseInfestsOurPrograms when_identifiers_with_underscores_are_obviously_more_readable. (Although Avdi is right that dashes are superior to both.)

As far as I can tell, the popularity of camel case came from Java, which got it from Smalltalk. But where did Smalltalk get it, and why did such smart people go so badly astray?

Flash back to 1979-1981. I was a computer operator for a PDP-10 mainframe at the University of Illinois Coordinated Science Lab. (I still have two pieces of that computer in my basement.) We had a bunch of VT-100 act-alike terminals. But off in a corner, where no one ever used it, we had a single terminal we called “the European terminal”. One interesting thing about the European terminal was that it had no underscore key. Instead, it had a back-arrow key. I have a faint recollection that if you viewed text with underscores on that terminal, it would show up with back arrows instead. (Or was it that the keyboard did have an underscore on it, but when you pressed it, it displayed a back arrow?)

It’s unlikely you’d write←identifiers←with←back←arrows←in←them and, in any case, some programming languages (such as Smalltalk) use back arrow to mean assignment (instead of, as was common before C took off, `:=`).

All of which makes me think—especially since Smalltalk came from Simula, and Simula came from Europe—was there no underscore available to the people who built Smalltalk back in its early days? Was that why they fell back on StudlyCaps?

(I even have a very dim memory of some language—I don’t think it was Smalltalk—where underscore, as well as a back arrow, could be used for assignment.)

Does anyone know?

Over the past few years, some people who I would have counted as “being Agile” are now counting themselves as members of the Software Craftsmanship movement. I’m interested in the reasons why.

I’m not saying that craft isn’t a part of Agile. I’m not saying that people who identify as Software Craftsmen think that Agile is bad. I’m not saying that they’ve abandoned anything. I’m not pointing and shouting “Look! A fight!”, nor am I trying to start a fight.

I’m saying that some people who had energy for, and put energy into, Agile are now doing it for Software Craftsmanship: they’re on one mailing list instead of another, they go to conferences with one label instead of the other, their company’s marketing material used to use the word “agile” and now uses the word “craftsmanship”.

So: this is a matter of the emotion and self-perception of actual people, not of the definitions of terms.

I’m not interested because I think these people are wrong, or need to be fixed, or anything judgmental like that. I’m interested because knowing why people do things is interesting.

If you feel like you’ve made such a move, why did you do it? Thanks.

I’m notoriously long-winded on Twitter. Here’s what I wrote earlier today:

What do I mean by that?

In my research into your species, I’ve noticed that humans are social animals. With the exception of ideologues and other damaged people, you work best when your work is oriented toward other people. Not “people” (in the abstract), but actual individuals. Because you’re quite good at personifying objects—look how many of you act like your boats are people—you can also do well when oriented toward improving those object’s “lives”. (That is, you treat your software the way you treat your pets, which is not that different from the way you treat [some of] your loved ones.)

When it comes to software development, I’ve seen teams that are extremely… nurturing toward the product owner. I’ve seen teams that treat the product itself as a person to be groomed and prepared for its entry into the world. I’ve seen teams that identify strongly with the prototypical, personified, or actual end user and want to make her life easier.

Quite often these teams, especially Agile teams, seem obsessively focused on “Business Value”, but that’s in the context of personal relationships. “Business Value” is a shorthand, a way of keeping conversations from going astray, of keeping people focused. It is a term that signals or reminds of other things—it is not a thing in itself.

Increasingly these days, when I hear people theorizing about Agile and Lean, they are treating “Business Value” as a thing in itself. It is treated as an end, rather than as a means. (This is in keeping with the decline of Agile as a bottom-up team-oriented insurgency.)

Who cares? The good thing about old-style Agile is that it tamped down teams’ tendency to be overbearing while still involving them in the conversation about what makes the product better. Code is generative, and programmers could—and did—suggest directions the business could take based on what the code “naturally” “wanted” to do. This could lead to wonderful and illuminating conversations.

When Business Value is determined from On High and is a discrete thing in itself—a product of expertise not accessible to the hoi polloi—this conversation is short-circuited. Analysis (the province of Business) populates swimlanes on the Kanban board or the product backlog. When Development takes an item from the Analysis backlog or swimlane, the signal it sends upstream is “I need a new chunk of work” not “Let’s talk about the next good idea.”

That is: your species has another skill. Just like you’re good at turning objects into people, you’re good at turning people into objects. It’s easy for you to subordinate actual humans to the beauty of a System. You’re terribly prone to slip into ideology, to elevate objects to totems-to-be-deferred-to. “Business Value” is, I fear, becoming one such totem.

To forestall the inevitable comment: I know (I know!) that in a well-functioning organization with Respect for People, the ugliness I describe wouldn’t happen because wise philosopher-kings wouldn’t let it. I just believe there is a shortage of such wise philosopher-kings and—in their absence—we should cut with the grain of human nature.

I got invited to a National Science Foundation workshop whose…

goal broadly speaking will be to reflect on software
engineering research and practice of the past, to determine some areas
in which “rethinking” is needed, and to engage in some rethinking.

I have a position (strongly held, of course). But when I look at the list of attendees and their affiliations, I worry that I may be the only person there representing, well, you: the kind of person who reads this blog or (especially) follows me on twitter. So I’d like to hear what you think needs rethinking. (Please include a tiny bit about what kind of person you are. Something like “rails developer in boutique shop”.) You can reply here, via email, or by responding to my tweet on the subject.

My basic position goes something like this:

Twenty years ago, the self-conception of the software engineering researcher went something like this, I think:

I am a scientist, though partly of the applied sort, discovering important principles which engineers will then put into practice when building systems. I aspire to be something like the Charles Darwin of The Origin

I think the world has moved on from that. What was once an intellectual structure that could be considered built has since exploded into something more like a genuine ecosystem. There are vast numbers of people, communicating in all kinds of strange ways, assembling practically innumerable pieces of software in scrapheap ways, collaborating—quite often across organizational boundaries—in a way more reminiscent of a rhizome than a command-and-control tree.

The appropriate response to that is to go back in time before The Origin to the Charles Darwin who spent eight years studying barnacles, grasping their differences, and publishing the definitive work on them. There is a lot to study in the software development ecosystem (which, note especially, will require collaboration with researchers who know more about people and groups than context-free grammars).

Time to switch from Alan Kay’s glamorous “the way to predict the future is to create it” to something more in keeping with Kuhn’s normal science: the world is out there; mine it for deep knowledge and extensive data (against, I hope, the background of the “paradigms” used by practitioners).

I saw a show on television, probably in the early seventies, that I think warped me forever. I’d like to see it again, but I remember only a few things about it.

I believe it involved a person who was inside a room that was made of glass panels. At some point, he/she had a conversation with a man who had a hammer. The man moved the hammer from one place to another and claimed it never occupied the space between. After that someone threw something - the hammer, I believe - through one of the panels, making a jagged hole. The man with the hammer looked up the shape of the hole in a book. It matched exactly one of the pages, and he said something like “Ah, hole 323″. I think he then got piece 323, and slipped it in to fix the hole.

If you know of this show, please contact me.

Another show that warped me at age 14 was Steambath, though I suspect it was much less weird.