Clarity of Expression

For software programs, there are three conflicting goals.

First, the programmer has to express their understanding of the problems they are trying to solve.

Next, the computer has to understand the programmer’s instructions and do the right thing.

Third, other programmers will have to read the code and figure out what was intended to verify, change, or extend it. Code is never finished.

Some languages add all sorts of syntactic sugar and implicit mechanics in order to make it faster for a programmers to express themselves.

Those features can trick the original programmer into not fully understanding why specific behaviors are occurring. Things seem to work, they don’t really know why.

It can lead to ambiguities in the way the code executes.

But more importantly, it convolutes the code so that other programmers can’t easily understand what was intended.

It moves the language closer to what is known as ‘write once, read never’ code. Where it is impossible to see the full scope of expression, so you pretty much have to just run it to see what it does then decide if you like that based on very limited experience.

As languages mature, people often add more and more syntactic sugar or magical implicit handling. They believe that are helping the programmers write code faster, but really they're just making it all too complicated and unreadable. They are negative value.

For a really simple language, it is often important to utilize all aspects of it.

For a mature language, the opposite is true, you just want to pick a reasonable subset that best expresses your intent. Overusing all of the later language features just impairs readability. It’s a balance, you need to use just enough to make your expression crystal clear.The thing you are doing is not trying to save your own time, but rather get the meaning and intent to shine through. Code that is never read tends to get replaced quickly.

The Value of Technology

It is pretty simple.

For an individual, technologies only have value when they somehow make life better.

For a society, the same is also true. A valuable technology improves society.

Using this as a baseline we can see that a technology that sometimes works well but fails very badly at other times is misleading. For some people, the technology works, they see it as valuable. However, for others, when technology fails them, they become frustrated. Some of those failures are catastrophic. It is a negative value.

To really evaluate a technology properly, we need to look at those failures. They define more of its value than the successes.

For example, someone builds an inventory system. Great, now people can quickly see what is on hand. But the digital information in that system drifts from the actual inventory. Sometimes it says stuff is there when it is not. Sometimes it is the opposite. The value for such a system is its reliability, which is its ability to not drift too far from reality. If the drift is significant, the system is unreliable, it has very little value then, in fact, it might be hugely negative. Just smoke and mirrors that misleads people.

We see that with other categories of systems, particularly communications. If a system delivers accurate information, it is valuable. But if it is susceptible to being subverted to deliver misinformation, spin, or propaganda, then its value is low, or even worse it can be a literal threat to a society. It can be controlled by people with a negative agenda.

If people mistakenly trust that system, yet it delivers information that causes them to make tragic mistakes, the value is extraordinarily negative. It is a bad system. Very bad. They blindly trust the information they are getting, but it is actually not correct and controlled by other people who do not have their best interests at heart. It is a tool for mass exploitation, not for enlightenment.

We can verify that a technology is negative by simply looking at it retroactively. If the trajectory of something within the sphere of influence has gone off in a bad direction, and some technology was instrumental in changing that course, then it clearly has negative value. So individual or collective negative acts taint the mediums that influenced them.

If a group of people do something so obviously self-destructive and were driven to do so by use of some questionable technology, it's clear that that technology is bad. Very bad. There is something seriously wrong with it, if it was effective at promoting bad choices.

What we need to do is get better at evaluating technologies and mitigating the effects of any negative technologies on our societies. If we don’t they will eventually be used to bring about our ruin. We went through this with machines too. Initially, they amplified our labor, but then also started to amplify destruction. We still have a lot of confusion about the difference.

Full Speed

I’ve never liked coding in a rush. You just don’t get enough time to put the right parts nicely into the right places, it really hurts the quality of the system. But as it gained in popularity, I often had no choice.

One of the keys to not letting it get totally out of control is to schedule the work dynamically.

When non-technical people interfere, they have a bad tendency to try to serialize the work and then arbitrarily schedule it. They like to dictate what gets done and when. That’s pretty bad, as the most optimal path is not intuitive.

The first point is to start every development cycle by cleaning up the mistakes of the past. If you were diligent in keeping a list as it was going wrong, it can be very constrained work. Essentially you pick a time period, a week or two, and then get as much done in it as you can. To keep the workload smooth, you don’t take a break after a release, you just switch immediately to cleanup mode and keep the pace steady. Steady is good.

Then I always want to tackle the hard or low-level stuff first. Hard stuff because it is tricky to estimate and prone to surprises; low-level stuff because so much is built on top, it needs to get there first.

But that type of work is often a lot of cognitive effort. Due to life and burnout, some days it is just too much cognitive effort. So the trick to rushing is to pace yourself; some days you wake up and want to do easy stuff. Some days you feel you can tackle that hard stuff. You don’t know until the day progresses. You alway keep the option to do both.

I usually keep two lists as I go, an easy and a hard one, so I can have off days where I just focus on mindless stuff. I switch erratically.

So long as I keep those two lists up to date, and the cleanup one as well, it is organized enough to now spin out of control.

This makes it hard to say what I’ll get done and when. It makes it harder to work with others. But it is me at full speed, cranking out as much as I can, as fast as I can, with the best quality achievable under the circumstances. It’s the price of speed.

I always say that we should never code like this, you’re never really going to get anything other than barely acceptable quality this way, but it has become so rare these days to get anything even close to enough time to do things reasonably.

I miss the early days in my career when we actually were allowed to take our time and were actively encouraged to get it right. The stuff we wrote then was way better than the stuff we grind out now. It really shows.

The Beauty of Technology

Long ago, when the book Beautiful Code was first published, I read a few blog posts where the authors stated that they had never seen beautiful code. Everything they worked on was always grungy, I felt sorry for them.

Technologies can be beautiful; it is rare in modern times, but still possible.

I’ll broadly define ‘technology’ as anything that allows humans to manipulate the world around us. It’s a very wide net.

Probably the first such occurrence was mastering fire. We learned to use it to purify food and for warmth and security. Clothes are another early example, they reduce the effect of the weather on us.

Everything we do to alter or control the natural world is technology. Farming, animal domestication, and tools. It has obviously had a great effect on us, we reached our highest-ever population, which would have not been possible before. We’ve spanned the globe, surviving in even its darkest corners. So, as far as we are concerned technology is good, it has helped us immensely.

But as well as making our lives easier, it is also the source of a lot of misery. We’ve become proficient at war for example. We have a long history of inventing ever-increasing weapons that kill more effectively. Without knives, swords, guns, canons, tanks, planes, ships, etc. wars would be far less lethal and have less collateral damage. Technologies make it easy to rain down destruction on large tracts of land killing all sorts of innocents.

So technologies are both good and bad. It depends on how we choose to use them.

Within that context, technologies can be refined or crude. You might have a finely crafted hammer with a clever design that makes it usable for all sorts of applications. Or a big stick that can be used to beat other people. We can build intricate machines like cars that transport wherever we want to go at speeds far better than walking, or planes that can carry hundreds of people quickly to the other side of the planet.

When we match the complexities of our solutions to the difficulties of the problems we want to solve, we get good fitting technologies. It might require a lot of effort to manufacture a good winter jacket for example, but it holds in the heat and lasts for a long time. All of the hundreds of years of effort in materials, textiles, and production can produce a high-quality coat that can last for decades. You can rely on your jacket for winter after winter, knowing that it will keep the cold at bay.

And it’s that trust and reliability along with its underlying sophistication that make it beautiful. You know that a lot of care went into the design and construction and that any unintentional side effects are negligible or at least mostly mitigated. You have some faith for example that the jacket is not lined with asbestos and that the price of warmth is a sizable risk of cancer.

You can trust that such obvious flaws were avoided out of concern and good craftsmanship. It doesn’t mean that there is a guarantee that the jacket is entirely not carcinogenic, just that it is not intentional or even likely accidental. Everyone involved in the production cared enough to make sure that it was the best it could be given all of the things we know about the world.

So, rather obviously if some accountant figured out how to save 0.1% of the costs as extra profit by substituting in a dangerous or inferior material, that new jacket is not beautiful, it is an abomination. A trick to pretend to be something it is not.

In that sense beautiful references not only its design and its construction but also that everybody along the way in its creation did their part with integrity and care. Beauty is not just how it looks, but is ingrained into every aspect of what it is.

We do have many beautiful technologies around us, although since the popularity of planned obsolescence, we are getting tricked far more often. Still, there are these technologies that we trust and that really do help make our lives better. They look good both externally and internally. You have to admire their conception. People cared about doing a good job and it shows.

Beauty is an artifact of craftsmanship. It is a manifestation of all of the skill, knowledge, patience, and understanding that went into it. It is the sum of its parts and all of its parts are beautiful. The way it was assembled was beautiful, everything in and around it was carefully labored over and done as best as it can be imagined to have been done. Beauty in that sense is holistic. All around.

Beauty is not more expensive, just rarer. If you were tricked into thinking something is beautiful when it is not, you have already priced it in, the difference is an increase in profit.

People always want easy money, so beauty is fleeting. The effort that went into something in the past is torn apart by those looking for money, thus negative tradeoffs get made. Things are a little cheaper in the hopes that people don’t notice. Little substitutions here and there that quietly devalue the technology in order to squeeze more money from it. Tarnished beauty, a sort of monument to the beauty of the past, but no longer present. Driven by greed and ambition, counter to the skilled craftsmanship of earlier times.

Technologies can be beautiful, but that comes from the care and skill of the people who create them. Too often in the modern world, this is discouraged, as if just profit all by itself is enough of a justification. It is not. Nobody wants to surround themselves with crap or cheap untrustworthy stuff. Somehow we have forgotten that.

Programming

Some programming is routine. You follow the general industry guidelines, get some libraries and a framework, and then whack out the code.

All you need to get it done correctly is a reasonably trained programmer and a bit of time. It is straightforward. Paint by numbers.

Some programming is close to impossible. The author has to be able to twist an incredible amount of details and complexity around in their head, in order to find one of the few tangible ways to implement it.

Difficult programming is a rare skill and takes a very long time to master. There is a lot of prerequisite knowledge needed and it takes a lot to hone those skills.

Some difficult programming is technical. It requires deep knowledge of computer science and mathematics.

Some difficult programming is domain-based, it requires deep knowledge of large parts of the given domain.

In either case, it requires both significant skill and lots of knowledge.

All application and system programming is a combination of the two: routine and difficult. The mix is different for every situation.

If you throw inexperienced programmers at a difficult task it will likely fail. They do not have the ability to succeed.

Mentorship is the best way that people learn to deal with difficult programming. Learning from failures takes too long, is too stressful, and requires humility. Lots of reading is important, too.

If it is difficult and you want it to work correctly, you need to get programmers who are used to coping with these types of difficulties. They are specialists.