They're Winning

Bill Moyers:

They win only if we let them; only if we become like them: vengeful, imperious, intolerant, paranoid, invoking a God of wrath. Having lost faith in themselves, they have nothing left but a holy cause. They win, if we become holy warriors, too; if in trying to save democracy, we destroy it; if we strike first, murdering innocent people as they did; if we show contempt for how others see us; exploit patriotism to increase privilege; confuse power for the law, secrecy for security; and if we permit our leaders to use our fear of terrorism to make us afraid of the truth. [NOW/Moyers]

In the article in which he wrote that, a year after 9-11, he saw reason to hope. Today, things seem quite different. Today it seems like they're winning.

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Sloppy Coder Talk

Edsger Dijkstra:

A programmer that talks sloppily is just a disaster. [Why is software so expensive, p.6]

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Joel's Lament

I read recently an excellent essay by Joel Spolsky on the leakiness of software abstractions. [*] The piece has been making the rounds on the net this week. In it, Spolsky observed that as hard as we try to package our work into crisp packages with slick interfaces wrapped around them, the innards still show thru.

To illustrate his point, he constructed a demonstration of how the Internet works (how TCP works) by appealing to an intuitive metaphor of people driving across country. It was quite effective.

Sadly, however, Spolsky seemed to be bemoaning this state of affairs instead of recognizing it as an inevitability. "Abstractions fail," he said. "Things go wrong." And in doing so, he missed the true profundity of his Law of Leaky Abstractions. It ought not to have been a lament.

The fact is, that the world is leaky. All of us have opened the hood of our cars several times, even those of us who probably shouldn't. Sometimes a hard drive starts working when you simply slap the box. Sometimes you just need some chewing gum and baling wire.

Slick interfaces and abstract simplifications are but starting points. They allow us to build mental models of the world around us without grappling with the immensity of the whole. Bundling things together into groups, categories, equivalence classes, is not a statement of absolute truths; it is a mere device to help us make sense of the incomprehensible chaos around us. And having made better sense of one part, we can move on.

Life is leaky. As long as we don't sink, why should it be any different with software?

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[*] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/leakyabstractions.html
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