"The dumbing-down of programming"
> The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of the computing machine. Under Windows was DOS; under DOS, BASIC; and under them both the date of its origins recorded like a birth memory. Here was the very opposite of the authoritative, all-knowing system with its pretty screenful of icons. Here was the antidote to Microsoft's many protections. The mere impulse toward Linux had led me into an act of desktop archaeology. And down under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.
I repeat the last sentence to my students all the time ("We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.")
There's no way to understand why our computers work the way they do without understanding the human, social, and economic factors involved in their production. And foregrounding the human element often makes it easier to explain what's going on and why.
I imagine a wanderer silently plumbing their way through the streets of Manhattan on their makeshift catamaran. They're mostly in search of useful resources but they can't help but be intrigued by these little, grey squares with faded little pictures on them. What are they? What were they used for?
Perhaps they know something about electronics. They have opened a few of these mysterious squares. There is that tell-tale green circuit board inside. But how does one turn it on and use it? What does it do?
The people of medieval Britain could see the ruins of Roman architecture dotting their landscape. They hadn't seen those people in a long while and had no means to repair the aqueducts or high ways. Yet they built on them and around them none the less. A building is a building and a wall is a wall.
But computers? And the hardware we use to build these artifacts of the mind? Vastly more complicated and difficult to reproduce from first principles.
Fundamentally, if there is a collapse, future societies have a VERY tough row to hoe ... we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons and moved the bulk of our science and technology to storage that requires that level of science and technology to access. And encrypted most of it. They'll be trying to climb the technology ladder without coal, oil or natural gas and without any technology documentation from about 2000 onwards.
It's set at a monastery in the desert post nuclear apocalypse, where scribes copy wiring diagrams and store artifacts like partially destroyed circuit boards without understanding what they are / how they work. And it builds from there.
For example how many people in the world actually know how to build an EUV machine like ASML's one? How many people understand the absolute forefront of integrated circuit design? Maybe like, 1-2 dozen people at most?
It's a pretty crazy thought. And I bet none of those guys are making as much bank as the suited executives above them.
They'll probably think it's some sort of coming-of-age fertility totem, and our datacenters will be structures built to pay homage to the gods.
I'd be inclined to think The Wonderer has no use for a computer. Their life is mostly about survival, food, shelter...
But when society is again ready to automate calculations... it's only a hundred years before computing is back.
A copper dodecahedron with knobs on the corners is, er ...
But yeah, it's a bit of a hand waving generalization.
> The emergence of microcomputers in the mid-1970s led to the development of multiple BASIC dialects, including Microsoft BASIC in 1975. Due to the tiny main memory available on these machines, often 4 KB, a variety of Tiny BASIC dialects were also created. BASIC was available for almost any system of the era, and became the de facto programming language for home computer systems that emerged in the late 1970s. These PCs almost always had a BASIC interpreter installed by default, often in the machine's firmware or sometimes on a ROM cartridge.
> BASIC was one of the few languages that was both high-level enough to be usable by those without training and small enough to fit into the microcomputers of the day, making it the de facto standard programming language on early microcomputers.
> The first microcomputer version of BASIC was co-written by Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff for their newly formed company, Micro-Soft.[21] This was released by MITS in punch tape format for the Altair 8800 shortly after the machine itself,[22] immediately cementing BASIC as the primary language of early microcomputers. Members of the Homebrew Computer Club began circulating copies of the program, causing Gates to write his Open Letter to Hobbyists, complaining about this early example of software piracy.
> Partially in response to Gates's letter, and partially to make an even smaller BASIC that would run usefully on 4 KB machines,[e] Bob Albrecht urged Dennis Allison to write their own variation of the language. How to design and implement a stripped-down version of an interpreter for the BASIC language was covered in articles by Allison in the first three quarterly issues of the People's Computer Company newsletter published in 1975 and implementations with source code published in Dr. Dobb's Journal of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics & Orthodontia: Running Light Without Overbyte. This led to a wide variety of Tiny BASICs with added features or other improvements, with versions from Tom Pittman and Li-Chen Wang becoming particularly well known.[23]
> Micro-Soft, by this time Microsoft, ported their interpreter for the MOS 6502, which quickly become one of the most popular microprocessors of the 8-bit era. When new microcomputers began to appear, notably the "1977 trinity" of the TRS-80, Commodore PET and Apple II, they either included a version of the MS code, or quickly introduced new models with it. Ohio Scientific's personal computers also joined ...
> When IBM was designing the IBM PC, they followed the paradigm of existing home computers in having a built-in BASIC interpreter. They sourced this from Microsoft – IBM Cassette BASIC – but Microsoft also produced several other versions of BASIC for MS-DOS/PC DOS including IBM Disk BASIC (BASIC D), IBM BASICA (BASIC A), GW-BASIC (a BASICA-compatible version that did not need IBM's ROM)[28] and QBasic, all typically bundled with the machine. In addition they produced the Microsoft BASIC Compiler aimed at professional programmers. Turbo Pascal-publisher Borland published Turbo Basic 1.0 in 1985 (successor versions are still being marketed under the name PowerBASIC).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC
In some sense of the word, it is. Maybe not take everything completely literally, it'll make your life easier.
The modern software environment works, I think, just from the sheer quantity of useful building and patch materials. To run with the building metaphor, it's like having specialized supplies on-hand so you can throw up a passable shed in a weekend with just duct tape and a screwdriver.
The book was written before I was born, but I can still closely relate to most of the cultural points made. She does a great job defining the anxieties and frictions you experience working in the duality of the very formal computer systems and the subjective, messy working contexts, filled with deadlines, bureaucracy, "rockstars"...
Her takes on the internet are also super relevant today. A favorite extract of mine: "When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer. The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove — all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria — if only they could figure out how to use it. But they just sit and click, and look disconcertedly at the junk that comes back at them".
What other similar books would you recommend?
I believe this is a side-effect of the "creative" aspect of computer programming. Creative jobs tend to have impostor syndrome, because there is no piece of paper that you receive that says "this person is 100% certified to be a song writer" or whatever that creative job is. Since software engineering also has no paper certificate, apprenticeship, mastership, etc, there is no proof that you know what you are doing, and it's all a little too loosey-goosey "figure it out for that one job". There's no certainty that you're doing it right.
A Computer Science degree is about as much evidence of you knowing what you're doing as a warranty on a hammer and chisel is evidence that you know how to cut wood joints. Software engineering is a trade, completely distinct from Computer Science. That's why so many people in the industry don't need a degree. You learn the trade on the job.
It's just bizarre that we don't have apprenticeships or trade organizations to ratify someone as a Real Programmer(TM). I can hire someone with 3 years experience working as a programmer and they'll turn out to be almost incompetent. That shouldn't be possible, especially for a job that pays $140,000. But I guess it happens with construction contractors too, so maybe it's not surprising?
"We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."
And they do say cities are the greatest invention of humankind
Imho the "Keep It Simple, Stupid" (KISS) principle very much applies here.
Jorge Luis Borges
And it also defined the moral imperative for software to be malleable, for it to be soft and reshapeable. Needs change, and it's not just a brand new thing we slap on top, but something later to & extending the past. Whether we can do that, whether users have software that can be adapted to their contemporary needs, is a core liberty. https://malleable.systems
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."
It's ok, so-called "software development methodologies" solve this problem by making sure that the project begins in the programmer's mind in just as chaotic and irregular a state as it will eventually end up once the code has been written.
He does mention Ellen and says
> The book is a memoir about her life
but never explicitly connects the title of the article to the title of the book or explains this is a review of that specific book (though that section is titled "Review.")
So I understand your confusion. I put "Ellen Ullman" in google and that quickly got me to Goodreads.com and seeing a list of her books, including this title. A little mystery left for us to solve. But the author could've also chosen to do a better job of explaining what they were doing here!
If you read the article, the author clearly states this is a review of the book.
It doesn't really help, but I do think about it :)
Nothing will beat the Jargon File.
People deserve to stand on their own two legs, and if its "not in the shadow, shines by herself" I can get behind that. Or indeed "no, it's just a coincidence, the adoptive parent isn't Jeffrey and his partner"
(I too was raised in a computer science family, 3 generations now. In my own case, regression tended to the mean but I have high hopes of the next one.)
I was in my early teens during dot-com era, but without a PC yet and still an "internet virgin".
One question that really tickles my curiosity is how much the spoils of the dot-com era shaped the direction of the free software in the next decade?
When looking at (the aged) projects under Apache umbrella, it seems a lot of them kicked off around that time. Is that because of the dot-com money or because Java graduated to a different stage around that time?
Personally, I feel that this is one thing that worked out about as well as could reasonably be expected (it would be unreasonable to expect that the benefits of this could be reaped without effort...)
A generous interpretation is that users are expected to take the knowledge and do greater things with it, instead of sitting and clicking, but that obviously doesn't make sense after a few seconds' thought. I'm stumped.
In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a different crowd because the barrier to entry was pretty high and required a lot of dedication and problem-solving abilities. As the bar of entry came down, along with it came all of the things that come with football stadiums, shopping malls, and time-share condos.
A more recent, similar event was when Digg shut down and all the users from there flooded onto Reddit. That was the beginning of the end of the golden days of Reddit, imo.
The internet is useful when you need some specific knowledge. It is useless when you need nothing and are just browsing. Sitting there watching TikTok videos or reading hackernews is usually going to turn out to be a waste of time.
A passage early on that resonated with me is her report of a talk given by Whitfield Diffie:
> We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.
I think this is an asinine quote, to be honest. It comes across as elitist: "these idiots don't use computers how they should be using them, according to -me-".
The internet, the ability to communicate and access data instantly across the globe, has been one of humanity's greatest achievements to date. But because some people look at junk or don't use it efficiently, it's "the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer"? Really? People like this complain about "the unwashed masses", but fail to recognize that the internet would not nearly have been as useful if it were limited to an insular group of similar people until now.
It's an alluring tale and appeals to the technologist in all of us old enough to feel nostalgic about a lost time, especially as the internet and then the web has become used by a broader swath of the population. I have a successful uncle who tells us stories about how calculators and CAD dumbed down engineering and only his ilk of paper calculations and slide rule approximation can truly engineer.
"Close to the Machine" by Ellen Ullman and "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland occupy roughly the same space in my memory.
I’m young enough that I don’t have any personal knowledge of the time period to compare it with, so maybe I’m missing a nostalgia angle.
I don’t doubt that it is a great book, it just didn’t grab me for whatever reason.
- Soul of a new Machine, Tracy Kidder - Dawn of the New Everything, Jaron Lanier
Similar era at least: Po Bronson - The Nudist on the Late Shift ... and other tales of Silicon Valley (1999)
Oh my god I'm so fucking old.
I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89. I dropped out of high school in the late 90’s to program uh… high quality adult entertainment websites. I had a small e-commerce site for a while selling weird stuff. I eventually finished school and tried to move on but I got back into programming for a living to this day.
Twenty some odd years of doing it professionally. For fun. For curiosity. And looking at trying to keep at it for twenty more. Life’s a trip.
Other memoirs by people who worked in computing and became disillusioned or dissatisfied with it:
Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976)
Cliff Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil (1995)
Neither is all memoir like Ullman's book -- both are mostly exposition and argument. But both have some passages of memoir, and in both the author's personality shows through clearly throughout.
- Soul Of A New Machine: Tracy Kidder
It's clearly no replacement for a computer science degree, but I think there's a real benefit to spending time with people who have done the work professionally.
It's not like the framework churn is so important to remember. You can skip a lot of what happened between 10 and 5 years ago. So two things matter: the long term basics and the very recent specific permutations of it.
[0] https://wiki.cavesofqud.com/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Barathrum
Any interpreter for a Turing-complete language is an example.
It has been a useful tool for finding specific knowledge and skills, but I would say that there is no "treasure" on the internet.
Any treasure you find will be found through experiences in the real world.
That's romantic, but why would it be true, unless you just define treasure as something that you find in real life? Specific knowledge and skills are not treasure?
I'm curious if you lived before the days of having so much knowledge instantly accessible, practically for free.
Indeed. When you were typing in your first BASIC program, my younger daughter was two years old.
I created my first program on punch cards in '79. I can't even remember what the programming language was although I suspect FORTRAN. I wish I'd kept a listing.
Tangentially, my valued copy of The Lord of the Rings that I loved as a child has the date 'Christmas 1973' inside the front cover. I'm going to read it again this Christmas, 50 years later. I've been avoiding anything Tolkien-related since about 2017, when I last re-read it (and noticed the upcoming anniversary), to come to it as fresh as possible, accepting that I know the story backwards.
When you were typing in '89, I was on a mainframe in college.
Why?
> what is currently purported to be the 'golden age'
My guess is that we’re on it right now.
Once something is past this 'recency' window, we may want to start looking into additional examples more reflective of current times. That is not to say the Digg exodus is an insignificant event, but that there have been a fair few exodi since--StackExchange, Twitter's infosec sphere, streamers between YouTube/Twitch, Snap/Tiktok, failed SVOD services.
HN might be one of the lucky few around.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0474-5
[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/21/22447690/link-rot-researc...
I do not enjoy that one of the defining moments of my adult life -- 9/11, which happened when I was 31 -- is now long enough ago that there are adults who do not or literally COULD not remember it. Time marches on.
I think I missed the memo... that's surely still the single most common go-to when something stops working mysteriously? Or are you suggesting it's no longer "advice" because everyone already knows that by now?
It makes me want to schedule a nightly kill of slack.exe lest it become too attached to it’s worldview of my audio devices.
Anyway, unless we are talking about some really unprecedentedly disaster, we'll leave plenty of paper books to help them understand those things and bootstrap their society.
Because I don't know of any, they manage to destroy a text here or there, but there were always some compatible texts that survived. AFAIK, we really didn't lose useful knowledge to them.
(And let's not forget that today we made life much harder for the book burners.)
What really does destroy knowledge is it becoming useless for a long period of time. As in losing all of CS because nobody can make a computer yet. But we have an instinct to preserve knowledge, even when it's absolutely useless. This has already saved a lot of technology, and it's hard to imagine how some disaster would stop it.
Personally, I have a hard time imagining something that would throw us at the stone (or bronze, or iron) age, but still fail to destroy all the life on Earth.
We came to conclusions that the scenarios of rebuilding society back up are based on the type of collapse. The greater drop (destruction events) and greater time gap before rebuilding can start anew the harder it would get.
A dark age collapse - worst case scenario - where people slowly loose knowledge over generations - due to lack of institutions to protect the knowledge, sounds like a game over scenario. Small clusters of agrarian people would not have resources to support an engineering department tasked with preserving knowledge that is useless for time being.
Slowly the tech that could have been re-used or restarted would deteriorate beyond usability, and then beyond repeatability.
Its a scary scenario, probably good basis for a book series... there is probably plenty of novels written with that scenario already ;)
In a hard collapse, all of that would be lost trying to survive. Books would be burned for heat, electronics forgotten, and blacksmiths killed accidentally.
And basically every accessible ore deposits as well… You can't reach bronze age if there's no available copper nor tin, you just end up stuck in the stone age forever.
It's like as if people don't really care about technological society, they just do what they always do, expand and try to do stuff that is hard and impressive, and if the computers went away... they'd be just as happy as a blacksmith or something...
Or maybe even happier.
That's why I think we should all be trying to help keep society going. I try to do my bit. I just wish the preppers, survivalists, deniers would get involved in their community and try to save it too.
Before coal there was wood, before oil there was whaling - when the global population is under 1bln, energy isn't much of an issue.
The wars over it though - that would be the tough part.
(See: AFUtD).
...and put much of it back into the earth in highly processed form, i.e. plastics in landfill.
Here it's the capital owners pushing renewables because it's one of the easiest, cheapest, least objectionable (in case of solar) and least risky energy projects you can build on almost any useless piece of land (everywhere is near the grid in this country), but they just can't fulfill the demands of the state-owned energy company with their solar arrays and wind turbines. Hydro is out of the question, the water-environmentalists hate that - for good reasons I have to say.
There is a nearby country that "did" (legislated) the switch... In result, they are the most polluting ones in every metric (per capita, per kWh, per km^2) while having the most expensive electricity on the continent; all metrics are getting worse every year there. Not a good look for the switch, certainly doesn't make most voters in my country motivated to even try - and you'd need to convince half the country. Right now the support is around 5-10%.
In conclusion, given that both our worlds coexist at the same time - I think it's not that simple to switch and wouldn't be looking for the reason in either capitalists or states. Perhaps the technology is just not ready for a full-scale switch yet.
In a post-apocalyptic world, survivors should really be rethinking the approach that brought that about. Avoiding the cheap hydrocarbon consumption phase might result in a much longer lasting civilazation next time around.
Early power could come from burning wood and windmills. That doesn’t have enough power for smelting iron, but there is more than lots of iron, Electricity could come from concentrated solar, wind, hydro, or geothermal. Nuclear would be the big jump.
Digital information seems especially likely to me to be lost over time because the recording nearly always requires an instrument to extract and these instruments do not have nearly the durability of books.
If you want to talk about early Christian texts, the Didache is instructive. It's orthodox and never was suppressed. It's earlier than much—if not all—of the canonical Greek scriptures. However, the canonical scriptures overshadowed it and it became obscure, to the point where the only known complete copy today is a single 11th century manuscript that was found behind a bookshelf in a monastery in the 19th century.
I can't speak to the reasons for the loss of Parmenides' poem, but scholars seem to think that the Nag Hammadi was indeed buried to prevent their destruction after Athanasius condemned non-canonical sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library.
Regardless, my point is that at least a written text has the chance of being discovered and understood in the future. The arctic code vault is actually interesting in this regard, but decoding it to find the jewels would likely be extremely challenging. There also is a lot of important technical information that isn't on github.
But they didn't do that because they were trying to destroy heretical thought. They did it because they didn't realize what they had, they were poor, and needed kindling to stay warm or cook food. That's an important difference. Many ancient texts have been lost this way not out of malice, but just because that's what happens throughout the ages.
> Because I don't know of any
Of course you haven't, by definition. We find out about the things that survive destruction, not the ones that don't.
edit:
As for the instinct to preserve knowledge, that's not all we have. We also have a profit-maximizing infection that spread to every organ, so to speak. Books printed today don't last very long. Heck, not even newspapers and tech companies give a crap about link rot! Archive.org is a team of volunteers. Wikipedia is very hit or miss, and the ego of some seems to override whatever "instinct" we might have real quick.
So, frankly, I'm not seeing it. Even computing is rotting from under our hands. The Amiga came with schematics of the machine as part of the manual, while nowadays repair shops have to hunt for info. If companies were allowed, they'd each have their own incompatible charger cable, you bet. And let's not even talk about about 100MB applications that do 100KB things, because it's easier for the developer to never care about anything close to the machine and just use the bloated tool chain they already know. Recently I asked for a good (as in, other than "Microsoft wants you to") reason to use Win 11, and just got downvoted. Ever since Win 11 was announced I haven't gotten one answer to that question, ever. There's people who turn their nose up at it, and people who use it who don't want to talk about why. I could go on.
> No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying to improve in its own way upon the mature deliberations of the thinkers. [..] An old and excellent book is frequently shelved for new and bad ones; which, written for the sake of money, wear a pretentious air and are much eulogised by the authors’ friends. In science, a man who wishes to distinguish himself brings something new to market; this frequently consists in his denouncing some principle that has been previously held as correct, so that he may establish a wrong one of his own. Sometimes his attempt is successful for a short time, when a return is made to the old and correct doctrine. These innovators are serious about nothing else in the world than their own priceless person, and it is this that they wish to make its mark.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
the maya codices and the khipu were lost in very nearly their entirety, and the more abundant maya hieroglyphs carved on stone have been only partly deciphered. the khipu are entirely undeciphered except for arithmetic
of carthaginian literature not one book remains
the khwarazmian empire is known from the accounts of its neighbors and destroyers
qin shi huang ordered the burning of the history books for every kingdom he conquered; consequently what we know of most of them today is little more than legend, except for what the histories of qin tell us
in countless smaller-scale examples we don't even know the names of the nations that perished along with their language and books
The point, though, is these texts were doomed when there ceased to be a scribal community that cared about them being copied. If you suppressed the heretics in antiquity, you suppressed the transmission of heretical texts except to the extent those texts were quoted in refutations that scribal communities did care about preserving. Actual destruction of manuscripts was unnecessary at that point, although it still sometimes happened like with the works of Arius and Nestorius. At least with Constantine's condemnation of Arius, it seemed to be more of a damnatio memoriae than an a practical act in furtherance of suppressing heresy.