Month: April 2017

The Power of Exponential Growth

Technological advancement is happening at an exponential rate. What does that mean from a practical standpoint? Take computer capability as an example. Computer capability can be boiled down, in a very simplistic sort of way, to the number of transistors that you can fit on a chip of a particular size. This is in part because every binary digit (or bit) takes at least one transistor to store a one or a zero.

Rather early in the development of microcomputers, Gordon Moore made the observation that the number of transistors in a given circuit doubles every eighteen months. This pattern has been observed for the past forty five years or so. It is no great feat to extrapolate from there to see how it will in all probability project on into the future for a good many more years.

Some observers have voiced fears that we will hit the wall beyond which we will not be able to fit any more transistors onto such a compact area. The laws of physics are going to draw a line beyond which we can’t continue to improve a circuit in a particular way. This has, in fact, already happened. We were able to discover new ways to increase the density of the circuits on the chip. One way was to organize them into smaller circuits or cores that had a small number of lines through which to communicate with each other and the outside world. Another,  largely unexplored tactic will be to build the circuits up vertically off the surface of the chip. This should also help solve the problem of removing heat from the chip.

Taken more generally, exponential advancements will mean that the number of and kinds of magical technological devices will double at a regular interval much like Moore’s law predicts for transistor densities. You might think that such rapid change would be mind boggling and might even cause adverse reactions in people. The fact is, the change is gradual enough that we mostly don’t even notice.

Think back ten years. In 2007 122 million cell phones were sold. In 2016 1495 million cell phones were sold. That is over 12 times growth in sales in less than ten years. There is a principle called Metcalfe’s law that the connectivity in a network increases proportionally to the square of the number of devices. So imagine how much more connected we are when there are twelve times more phones sold each year. That doesn’t even address the question of how many phones are already deployed and how many of the phones sold were to first time buyers of cell phones.

The same growth trends are happening across the board in scientific and technological fields. I have personal experience of at least two distinct eras in my field of computer programming in the forty years that my career spans. And when I think about it, it is probably more like four or five eras. And they keep coming closer together. I’m afraid I’ll get whiplash trying to keep up.

Just thought I’d try to get some of these ideas down so that I can think about them. I’ve been reading about exponential growth for a number of years now but it has only begun to truly boggle my mind the last couple of years.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Pie in the Sky is Certainly Sweet Watching

I discovered a British series that appeals to me today. It is called Pie in the Sky and it starred Richard Griffiths, the actor that played Harry Potter’s uncle in the Harry Potter movies. In the show, Griffiths plays Henry Crabbe, a policeman for 25 years who is looking forward to retirement so that he can realize his dream of opening a gourmet restaurant. Crabbe has a talent for cooking that does not go unappreciated by his colleagues on the force.

Crabbe’s boss joined the force at the same time as Henry but while Henry concentrated on doing outstanding police work, his boss concentrated on the political side of things and worked himself up in the ranks of the force often on the back of Henry’s hard work. When faced with the prospect of losing his star detective to retirement, his boss figures out a way to coerce Henry to continue to help him solve the hard cases.

Henry has the eye for details of all great detectives with an ample helping of stubbornness that is the hallmark of effective people in any profession. He may not be as flashy as Sherlock Holmes, or Poirot, but he is amazing in his quiet attention to the behavioral patterns that point to the solutions to his cases. He is not one to accept the first potential solution that arrises without vetting it completely. And it is his persistence in pursuing the truth that keeps us glued to our seats until the credits roll.

The acting is brilliant, the characters are well rounded, the writing is pitch perfect. It is as much a treat to watch as I imagine it must be to eat one of Henry Crabbe’s gourmet creations. Henry Crabbe is a character of great integrity and huge heart. Do yourself a favor and check him out if you get a chance (I watch him on Acorn TV, a bargain subscription for any Anglophile.)

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Choosing a Programming Language

I have come to a realization today. Actually it has been gradually dawning on me but it came clearly into focus today. I consider myself somewhat of a connoisseur of programming languages. It started when I was first learning about computers. I read every issue of Byte magazine. But my favorite issue of Byte was always the August issue.

Every August Byte featured a different computer language. This is how I first learned about Lisp, Smalltalk, APL, Forth, C, and several others. The language issue always featured several articles that illustrated the breadth of each language and described the innovations that it brought to the table. Byte magazine eventually faded into the sunset but my hunger for new languages only grew.

I was on a quest to find the most eloquent computing language so that I could write beautiful programs. On my journey I learned a lot about design, organization, communication, methodologies, and process. I also learned to program. I slowly began to realize that although some languages were more eloquent and expressive than others there were other factors that were more important in choosing a programming language.

First, you want to pick a language that is widely used and has a strong community. This is important so that other people will be able to read your code and maintain it. It also ensures that there are a lot of community developed libraries to leverage when you are coding your application. It also means that there will be people around to help you figure out what you are doing wrong when you are at wits end.

Second, you want to pick a language that has a clear understanding of its philosophy. This usually happens when a language is shepherded by a “benevolent dictator for life” as Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, calls himself. Another example of this is Ruby’s Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto. This kind of strong vision helps keep the language focused on solving problems in a particular fashion. The consistent flavor of a language is often more important than any other measure of technical quality.

Finally, pick a language that you like. If you are going to spend large chunks of time reading and writing code in a language, don’t choose one that frustrates you or causes you to have to struggle with it to solve your problem. There are way too many choices of language out there to spend any time at all being miserable.

When you find a language that is good enough, quit looking, at least for the time being. There will always be a newer, better language. These languages will take years, even decades to develop a community and the resultant libraries and infrastructure that make a language ecosystem great. Revisit your choice periodically. Don’t discount the investment that you make in the language that you have been using.

Of course you will often be told what language you must use, especially if you are working on a large project. In that case, cheer up. There are always ways you can improve the experience of using a language, if no other way than using a disciplined approach that lets you capitalize on your successes and minimize your struggling. And there is always the ultimate consolation of learning features to avoid in choosing future languages.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

The Future’s So Bright We’ll Have to Wear Shades

We live in exciting times. Earlier tonight I was sitting on the couch with my iPhone laying on the tray in front of me. I was watching a YouTube video. I was listening to the audio through a pair of Bluetooth headphones so that I wouldn’t disturb my wife. All of a sudden I remembered the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where Frank Poole and Dave Bowman were eating and they each had a pad that was displaying video.

We are living the science fiction stories of our youth. And it’s happening because engineers are taking them not as fantasies but as specifications. They are using them to fuel the engines of creation that our modern consumer society has become.

One person that is working these miracles of engineering is Elon Musk. He has figured out how to take a vision for a future product and distill it into steps that can be achieved with technology just beyond our grasp. As he pulls together the team of innovative entrepreneurs to realize his vision he uses the returns from the initial product to fund the evolution of it into the original product he envisioned.

He has done that with Tesla and SpaceX and is embarking on a new venture to do the same type of thing with a company called Neuralink. Neuralink is out to develop the brain machine interface that will turn us all into omnipotent geniuses.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m ready to sign up tomorrow if he had the product built and ready to go. Unfortunately, there is a long development road ahead. The first beneficiaries of Neuralink’s technology will be people profoundly handicapped by such conditions as a stroke or a spinal chord injury. This will start a positive feedback loop where the more we are able to enhance the mind machine interface, the better we will understand how the brain really works and the better we understand how the brain works, the better we’ll be able to make the interface.

Eventually we will merge, first with the machines that will have become our mental appliances, and eventually with each other. When there is no room for misunderstanding in the interface, we will have a practically infallible channel for communication.

No, I’m not that naive. We will figure out some way to have misunderstandings. Or perhaps they will be disagreements more than misunderstandings. The important thing is that they will be on a much higher level of shared understanding than our mere verbal and body language can communicate.

That, in a nutshell, is my hope for the future of the technology that Neuralink is working on even as I write this. I hope they get it right. The future is bright if they do, and a nightmare if they stumble. I am the eternal optimist. I have faith that they will get it right. Mostly.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Getting to the Point, Finally

When I started writing about my experiences in the sixties I didn’t plan to go into quite as much depth. The point that I was out to make was that at the beginning of the sixties I was a child and by the end of the sixties I was an adolescent. Adolescence is a strange time in a persons life. We suddenly have the body of an adult with a mind that hasn’t quite caught up. We are feeling emotions and thinking thoughts that we have no experience with.

What’s worse is that in our society there is profound discomfort on the part of many parents when it comes to the task of talking with their children about sensitive topics like sex and career choices and how to choose a life partner. And, to add to the problem, the discomfort is passed down from generation to generation.

I find myself at sixty one, just beginning to appreciate what I want to do with my life, how I should have raised my children, what is important and what is not. This could have happened forty or fifty years ago if my parents had been taught how help me with these issues. What’s worse, my children and grandchildren face similar delayed epiphanies.

I look at the generation that is just getting out of college and I see how so many parents have failed their children. We have taught them that they should get a trophy for just participating. We have taught them that they can live at home as long as they like. It was made clear to me that when I got married, I was on my own.

The world is different. College costs more. College or some other form of post secondary education is expected of anyone who wants to pursue a good job that pays a living wage with benefits like health insurance and a retirement plan. And modern retirement plans aren’t the pensions that were common when we started working. They are typically deals where the employer matches employee contributions to a 401K up to a certain percentage of their salary.

We’re faced with the fear of many more jobs being done by machines in the very near future. This should be good news. We should all be reaping the benefit of a more productive society. After all, in order to make money selling goods and services you have to have customers to buy them. And those customers have to have income available to spend on those goods and services.

Is it any wonder that the world is in such chaos? The fundamental economic model is being invalidated and no one knows what we are going to replace it with. But in spite of all this uncertainty I’m convinced that the only way through this is to face our fears and love one another. I’m not sure of much but I am sure that love is the answer. Pure, unconditional, brotherly love. Namaste.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

A Star is Born

Before second grade, we moved to Paducah, Kentucky where I would spend the rest of the sixties. I went to Andrew Jackson elementary. It has since been renamed in memory of the woman who was principle when I attended there, Dove Anna McNabb. I remember my second grade teacher. She had black hair and brown eyes. Every morning as soon as class started she would write the news and weather on the board. We would copy it onto our tablet. She taught us conversational Spanish. All the boys had a crush on her. All the girls loved her too. I’ve tried to remember her name for several years now to no avail.

My dad taught Speech and English at the High School. He also did the plays. Tilghman High School was huge. It had a large theater and a football stadium. I suspect it wouldn’t seem quite as big to me now as it did when I was growing up in Paducah but even so, I’m still impressed by it.

One of the high points of my life growing up was getting to attend rehearsals for my dad’s plays. Tilghman was a large enough high school that there were lots of talented actors to pick from. He did productions as diverse as Macbeth, Mr Roberts, The Rainmaker, The Miracle Worker, Ondine, and Lady in the Dark. All were mounted with consummate stagecraft.

The spring of my second grade year my mother and father and I auditioned for a production of a play called Stars In My Crown. It was being produced during the summer at Kentucky Dam. It told the story of the development of the TVA and its role in taming the rivers of Western Kentucky. My mother was cast as the school teacher and I was cast as an extra. I played a student in the school scene and a young Indian in the scene about the Trail of Tears. My dad was hired as property master.

That summer and the next were magical. We got up around 11 am and ate lunch. We got ready and took my little brother to the baby sitters. We drove to the theater. Mom would usually pack a picnic dinner. We would eat and get ready for the show. I would play with the other children in the show.

The curtain went up at eight. The show had two acts and a twenty minute intermission. It was done outdoors in an amphitheater. After the show, the director or the stage manager would give us notes about things we needed to do to improve the show the next night. Sometimes we would rehearse a scene if we were getting too sloppy about it. Then we would drive home.

Often we would stop at a little all night truck stop on the way home. Mom and dad would drink coffee and I would have milk or a soda. Sometimes I would get a hamburger. Then we would go pick up my brother at the baby sitters and go home to bed. We did this six nights a week, all summer long. I loved it.

When I turned eight at the end of June I had the entire cast of Stars In My Crown at my birthday party. It was held after the show on stage. I felt like a very special person indeed.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Some Early Memories

I grew up during the 6o’s. I was born in 1955 and by 1960 I was more or less aware of the world around me. I remember going to kindergarten in Springfield, Illinois. My father taught Junior High School English. My mother was a telephone operator. Every morning I was dropped off at day care. When it was time for school, the five year olds were marched across the street to the elementary school where we attended a half day of kindergarten.

The schools in Springfield were very progressive. I remember being taught basic mathematical concepts with Napier rods. Those were the square sticks that were painted bright primary colors indicative of their length. We learned that two unit rods were as long as one rod two units long. We learned that four rods that are three units long were the same length as three rods that are four units long. I loved math class.

We learned to read about Dick and Jane and Sally and Spot. I learned to read very fast. I was hungry to read. My house was full of books and I was tired of looking at pictures and guessing what the words said. My folks read to me but I was a very independent child, an only child.

The next year I went to first grade in Rochester, Illinois, the suburb outside of Springfield where we lived. I got up and had breakfast with mom and dad and then walked to school. In the afternoon I walked from school to a neighbors house where I stayed until my mom and dad got home from work. Around Christmas that year my mom quit working. In February she went to the hospital and brought home my baby brother. I was no longer an only child.

That year at school we watched on TV as Alan Sheppard rode his Mercury Redstone rocket into space. In the afternoons when I got home from school, I watched the Three Stooges on the local afternoon kid’s TV show. Right after my mom brought my brother home from the hospital I was in the studio audience of the show. When the host interviewed me I said hello to my mom and dad and my new little brother and Lucile. When the host asked if Lucile was my girlfriend I said, “No, she’s my grandmother’s housekeeper that’s come to stay with us and help my momma take care of the baby.”

My momma later told me that Lucile had said, “Bless that baby’s heart.” She was overwhelmed with emotion to have been acknowledged on television by her employer’s white grandson. It was the sixties and I was a member of a generation that grew up with less prejudice than our parents. We still grew up with the burden of white privilege but we saw people as people totally blind to the color of their skin. At least that was how it was in First grade.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Smalltalk Continues to Evolve

I have so many interests that I find myself rotating between them in order to give each some small share of my attention. I sometimes go for extended periods of time without spending any time at an activity. Then I rediscover it and am intensely engaged by it for a while. Then, as abruptly as I renewed my interest I am on to the next one.

This weekend I rediscovered my fascination for the Smalltalk language. There are a couple of popular free implementations of Smalltalk, Squeak and Pharo. Pharo announced a beta release of their new 64 bit implementation for Linux and MacOS. I downloaded it and had a look. I was impressed with the advances that have been made in the system utilities.

I am drawn to a language that uses a single paradigm throughout. In the case of small talk that paradigm is object orientation. The language is written in itself and although some of its primitives are often optimized to native implementations there are reference implementations in Smalltalk available for browsing.

Another attractive aspect of Smalltalk is the fact that the source code for the entire system is available for perusal in the built in code browser. This inspires developers to use existing implementations of features instead of reimplementing them. If there is a need to modify or extend their functionality it can easily be accomplished by subclassing the original implementation.

Smalltalk was the inspiration for the promise of code reusability that was associated with object orientation when it first became a popular programming paradigm. Other object oriented languages have fallen somewhat short of that promise. It is primarily because few other languages come with the source code for the entire system as an integral part of the delivery. Or if they do, the language is implemented in a different language other than itself. This places the burden of being conversant with two different languages to take understand the fundamental features of the language. Often the built in classes are closed so that if you want to modify or extend them you have to reimplement them yourself.

Often the benefits of a language go beyond just its syntactic structure. Fundamental issues of philosophy, community, central repository for libraries, and availability of free implementations with good documentation and lots of example code are often as important as the basic structure of the language.

Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, and PHP serve as examples of what I am talking about. Each have their strong points and weaknesses but all have received the widespread use that they have for reasons beyond any merits they might have as programming languages.

It is also true that the best of languages are often passed over if they are the proprietary vehicles of large corporations. Such languages are subject to the whim of their owners who have been known to change a language in a new release only to break existing code written by their customers. It doesn’t take more than once to learn that you are better off using an open source implementation of an industry standard language.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Keeping Your Focus on the Task at Hand

A friend of mine commented on the post about fiddling with formats that I wrote several days ago. He said that he just used HTML when he wanted to get a page to look the way he wanted. I understand that I always have that option but I view it kind of like I do writing a program.

When it comes right down to it, I can always write my programs in machine language. Then I can get the machine to do exactly what I want. Only I can’t really do that any more. The programs that I want to write have become too complicated for me to write them in machine language. It would make a task that I would spend an hour on in a high level language take days. And tasks that I might spend a week on in Python might take months to get right in machine language.

Not only is there the issue of sheer effort but there is also the fact that because it takes so long to solve a problem at all in machine language, I would be way less likely to spend the time on tweaking it and refining it than I would if it were written in a higher level language.

And finally, there is the heart of the matter. I’m not really looking for the most efficient solution, I’m looking for an adequate solution. I want to think about the problem domain not the intricacies of mapping the problem domain onto the bare metal of the computer. I like my abstractions, thank you.

What this means when it comes to the analogy with WordPress is concerned is that WordPress gives me a consistent layout and lets me concentrate on writing. I am as adept with HTML and CSS and jQuery and JavaScript and all the various mechanisms used to render the incredible web content that we have all come to take for granted. But developing web content that way is hard work. And when I sit down to write a blog post, I want to expend the bulk of my effort on writing.

Hence, I use WordPress. I could embed raw html to achieve my layout goals within WordPress. But then I would have to remember how I did it every time and I would, in all likeliness, not achieve the consistence of layout that I am striving for. I’d rather find a consistent solution that someone else has written that is 80% of what I’m looking for than to have to implement it myself.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

There’s No Such Thing as Done

I used to think there was a right way and a wrong way to write a program. I found myself on a quest for the elusive right way to implement whatever program I was attempting to write. I wrote and rewrote the code. I read articles and books on techniques and disciplines. Nothing seemed to make programming any easier.

Slowly I began to suspect that maybe there was a continuum from good to bad and most programs fell somewhere in the middle. I hadn’t given up on the idea that there was an absolutely right way to do things and an absolutely wrong way. I just had plenty of evidence at hand that there were lots of ways that were neither absolutely right or absolutely wrong.

I don’t know why it took me so long but I have finally figured out that there are no absolutes. There are only criteria against which any given solution can be judged. The key fact that I had been missing was that there is almost never a single criteria by which a program can be judged.

I have become a dyed in the wool pragmatist. If a program achieves its intended purpose, it is good. If you discover there is another attribute that you would like it to exhibit, you have added a criteria. Now the program may fall short of adequately achieving its purpose. This will require some thought and perhaps a rewrite of the original program.

This activity of rewriting became so common that it has been given a name. It is called refactoring. Refactoring is done by first implementing a test suite that exercises the features that are implemented in the program as it is. It is also good to check the program in to a source code management system such as Git or Mercurial or even Subversion. There are plenty of others but these three are popular right now. With your test suite and backup copy of your original program you can now confidently start refactoring your program.

There are a number of ways that a program can be refactored. Each one solves a particular problem with the code as it is at present. For instance, you may have output to a particular type of output device hard coded in your program. In order to continue to support your current favorite device while setting the application up for supporting different kinds of output devices you might refactor your program so that it calls a print method on an output abstraction class. Initially you would concentrate on implementing an output abstraction class that supports outputting to you current favorite device. You aren’t going to want to quit using it.

When you have written that code and tested it against your existing test suite to ensure that you haven’t broken something in the process of changing the way it works, it is now time to implement the code to write to the new device. You will want to make sure that the current test suite still passes and that the code that supports the new device works properly. After that you need to write tests specific to your new code and ensure that it passes those new tests. When they work, check the new code and the new tests into your source code management system. You’ve implemented your new feature and you are ready to start on the next one.

Oh and don’t worry. Someone will want the program to do something more or differently before you know it. You have job security for as long as you want it.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.