CHAPTER 12

"Code Rush"

p. 238

The 10x legend produces strong reactions in my orbit: In the back of my mind is Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: The Story of Success, which aims to demolish the conventional notion of genius as numinous gift—"God-given" in the classic formulation—positing it instead as a secular product of reasonable facility tied to immense dedication and 10,000 hours' practice. Convincing as Gladwell is, the romantic notion of genius persists. The peculiar truth is that coding still seems so bizarre an activity to me that it's not hard to imagine it being an exception to the Gladwellian norm. Much as my rational self knows better.

the UK Government Digital Service, recognized as the best in the world at public software: On which they have effectively written the Agile manual. True. Jennifer Pahlka, who founded the USGDS, spent much time in London with "GDS", as it is known within UK government, and still regards it as the gold standard for developers of inclusive public software, even tears up a little as she talks about her time there—despite few Brits knowing it exists. In fact, the reality is worse, because most Brits know only of giant public sector software debacles like the failed overhaul of NHS software, which had to be abandoned in 2008 at a reported cost of £700m to taxpayers (see "Government loses £700m NHS IT legal battle with Fujitsu.") What they—and "they" included me until very recently—won't have known is that, not uncommonly, the NHS job had been handed to the private sector for doctrinaire reasons. And the private sector bollixed up (as it does no less often than government, it seems to me). In an interview on BBC Radio 4, Mike Bracken, founder of UK GDS, ridiculed government ministers' touting of "blockchain" as a solution to the Northern Ireland border problem after Brexit, noting that ministers often tout big tech solutions they don't understand, sold to them by interested private parties as solutions to social and political problems that require messy social and political action.

Like many governments in the world, in the UK we are really good at civic technology, we're good at developing social technologies. Like many governments, we're also still trapped in a decades-long era of 'big IT' where we think a big solution that takes many years to develop will be a panacea for problems that we have in society. He pointed out that wildly successful technologies like the NHS Couch to 5k app, which has helped millions of people to take up jogging and improve their health without recourse to medicine, were produced by small teams at relatively little expense.

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almost nothing of Web 1.0 was spared when the crash came: See my book Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and the Great Dotcom Swindle for a full telling of this barely believable story.

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permission from Apple arrives shortly thereafter: This sort of issue abounded in the early days of Big Open Source. In Freeing the Source: The Story of Mozilla, Jim Hamerly, Tom Paquin and Susan Walton describe three engineers being given the arduous task of excising all Java from the Mozilla code base, Java being a rare proprietary language, owned and licensed by Sun Microsystems.

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In common with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak [Hertzfeld] considered Jobs to be a great movie, but diverged in questioning its accuracy: For Woz and Hertz's respective views on Jobs see Deadline, "Steve Wozniak says Steve Jobs the movie gets it all correct."

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Famously he chose Software Wizard: For more detail see Gizmodo, "How Steve Jobs Caused the Funniest and Weirdest Business Card I've Ever Seen."

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he professes to find meaning in it only as part of a community: From van Rossum's King's Day speech, "I am happiest when I am part of a community."

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it wrote statements about "relics of white supremacy" into the language repo: for chapter and verse on the controversy see this thread.

"I have no problem with someone wanting to keep politics out of Python": Easier said than done. Van Rossum's prime responsibility as BDFL was to be perpetually scanning the language for flashpoints; dealing with them in advance where possible. Where not possible, core developers worked to distil debates down to binary yes/no choices and let the BDFL decide. A sense of how elusive consensus can be in a community of this size is the fact that even the adoption of "f-strings," which to me looks like a game-changing no-brainer, generated significant pushback. In the past, most Pythonistas would be willing to trust Guido's good faith and judgment. At some point this began to change, not because Guido did, but because the climate did. Guido himself didn't seem to be surprised or offended by this, but he was hurt when people, including core developers, took to social media to criticize him.

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Born within two years of each other, in The Hague (1956) and Los Angeles (1954): As a side note it's extraordinary how many pioneers of the modern computing era were born between these years, from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on down.

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his well-publicized financial support for Proposition 8: In 2014 Eich was forced to resign as CEO of the Mozilla organization, just two weeks into his reign, over this very issue.

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I could enumerate reasons for this: Well, seeing as you ask . . . In refusing to commit to (even contingent) absolutes or assessments of value as between things, postmodernism seems to me to be not just dull, but a charter for sloppy thought, with irony and whimsy its inevitable chief conveyors. It also seems to me that fans of PM tend to claim anything they like (the music of Talking Heads and Philip Glass, novels of Kurt Vonnegut, philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, buildings of Frank Gehry) as PM, without providing any clear criteria as to how this assessment is made. Significantly, generative "AI", in its present form, is the ultimate postmodern enforcer, in that it is confined to mixing things that already exist and are familiar, with no concern for the substance of what's being mixed, or of the end product. The great Christopher Hitchens, in his book, Why Orwell Matters, writes, in advocating for simple, clear and direct expression of ideas, "The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose." Shorn of specific context, the Postmodern architect flatters the viewer by offering something that looks different but is ultimately comforting and familiar, using allusive ornamentation not to reveal, but to obscure form and function in the way of a magician's sleight of hand. To be sure, in shunning the comforts of familiarity, bad Modernism will always be experienced as worse than bad Postmodernism. A Cold War Soviet embassy probably looks ugly, for instance, but that's okay by me because its essence was ugly. Its form and essence are the same, experienced simultaneously by a viewer. Using the example of a city I know well, to me the Palace of Westminster (better known as the Houses of Parliament) is ugly as sin, all surface decoration and curlicue; looking much older than it is, because it only dates to the mid-nineteenth century and was designed to awe and cowe the first non-aristocratic members of parliament after the Great Reform Act of 1848, which broadened the franchise. By contrast—and immediately opposite, on the south bank of the Thames—the National Theatre, built in the early sixties and first directed by Laurence Olivier, is (to me) stunningly beautiful, especially at night; all speared light and intriguing angles, borrowing the elements of the universe itself to invite the viewer in, promising new worlds for the imagination to explore (and more often than not, delivering on this promise.)

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Swiss Army chainsaw: The full quote from Eric Raymond runs, "In early Unix days, a well-known technical paper analogized the lexical analyzer generator lex(1) to a Swiss-army knife; this was a comment on the remarkable variety of more general uses discovered for a program originally designed as a special-purpose code generator for writing compilers. Two decades later, well-known hacker Henry Spencer described the Perl scripting language as a "Swiss-Army chainsaw", intending to convey his evaluation of the language as exceedingly powerful but ugly and noisy and prone to belch noxious fumes. This had two results: (1) Perl fans adopted the epithet as a badge of pride, and (2) it entered more general usage to describe software that is highly versatile but distressingly inelegant."

you won't find much Whitespace . . . at Facebook: A list of hundreds of so-called esolangs, the term a contraction of "esoteric language" are to be found at esolangs.org.

the most popular general-purpose programming language in the world: From 2021, the Stack Overflow Survey has the web-based languages JavaScript and HTML/CSS, plus the database language SQL above Python, but none of these can be used to defend a birdfeeder from squirrels or make a Shakespearean insult generator. Among general-purpose languages only Java comes close to Python.

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"Is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?": McMillen's paper is very funny and worth reading on his website. It turns out to have been sparked by a woman who tweeted "I don't want to teach my kid to code. I want him to splash in muddy puddles and smear paint on the walls and read novels under the covers way too late at night," to be answered rather brilliantly by a programmer asking "But is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?" I came across this when researching engineers who left Google over a series of scandals including the firing of an important AI researcher from the company—to be examined in due course.

And Rabble's pitch almost works: I got close to diving much deeper into Ruby, in excited hope that I could contribute to Scuttlebutt. This was when Rabble told me a little sheepishly that he'd decided to use Google's open sourcer Go language for this project instead!