Do you live in civilization?

Like so many such questions, the answer entirely depends on your definition of "civilization"; once you've accepted the definition, the answer is obvious. Another of my favorite examples is "Is X art?"; once you accept the definition of art, the answer is usually obvious. It's the accepting of a definition that's the interesting part, not the question itself. Often it's not even meaningful to try to say which definition is "better" or "worse", it's just a matter of what each given definition captures and highlights.

In 2007, with a well-loaded Linux desktop installation, my /usr/bin is 257 megabytes, with debugging off and dynamically-linked libraries not contributing to that count. My particular copy of the Linux kernel 2.6.19 with certain Gentoo patches has 202,381,268 bytes of C code alone. If I'm computing this correctly, at a constant 100 words per minute (5 chars/word), that's 281 24-hour days just to re-type the C code in the kernel.

I've gone on before about how distrustful of metaphors I am, and it seems like every year I'm getting more distrustful of them. Either deal with the thing as it is, or just give up understanding it. Metaphors lead to the beginning of understanding, but no farther.

Programmers aren't immune to the metaphor sickness, and if there's one metaphor you can expect to see trotted out at the earliest available opportunity, it's the "programming as construction" metaphor. This metaphor has been skillfully deconstructed many many times before, but I'm going to deconstruct it from the opposite angle... what if construction was like software engineering?

I've chickened out on going to see The Last Mimsy. Subsequent reviews make me fairly convinced that the scriptwriters completely missed the point of the original story, or simply didn't care, and took the opportunity to turn a story of wonderment into yet another polemic about how the world is doooooomed. (Sure, in the movie it's saved in an utterly unbelievable way, but since that's not going to happen in the real world, it's just another Doomed World story, in the vein of Spielburg's AI.)

A heads up on what's coming with the Programming Wisdom series: Since it's both a "book" and a series of "blog posts", some of the writing priorities are different than they might otherwise be.

The next few posts are primarily intended to motivate the work, so as standalone pieces they are less than compelling, although they still have some interesting points, I think. After the next three or four posts, it starts getting meaty.

Engineers of other disciplines often take offense at the claim that software is uniquely difficult. They do have a point. As pointed out by Fred Brooks in hyper-classic The Mythical Man Month, one reason software is hard because software is so uniquely easy.

We fundamentally built on top of components that have reliability literally in the 99.999999999% range and beyond; a slow 2GHz CPU that "merely" failed once every trillion operations would still fail on average in eight hours at full load, which would be considered highly unreliable in a server room. Physical engineers would kill for this sort of reliability in their products. Or an equivalent to our ability to re-use libraries. Or how easily we can test most of our functionality with the ability to replicate the tests 100% accurately. Or any number of other very nice things we get in the software domain. Our job is far easier in some ways than any discipline concerned with the physical world, where nothing ever works 100%.

The first step to attaining wisdom is to understand why special "programming wisdom" is needed in the first place.

It's easy to get the idea that software is easy to create, because it is partially true. Computers get more powerful every year, and we trade in on that power to make programming easier. Every year results in more and better libraries. Changing software is very easy, and it's relatively easy to test compared to an equivalently-complex real-world object. J. Random User can write an Excel macro with a reasonable amount of effort that saves him a lot of time, and early programmers can become excited about what amazing things they can do just by assembling existing libraries and frameworks together which makes everything seem so easy.

Expanding on my quote by John Stossel: I know a lot of people accuse the Bush Administration of trying to build up fear and then take advantage of it.

The latter point is partially true, but the more I think about it, the more clear it is that the fear is almost entirely a media construct. The proof is that fear of (direct) terrorism is only one particular example of a pattern of over-blown media-induced fears, including death by plane, gun violence (for most people), and child kidnapping. I said the latter was partially true because if we're afraid of something, even irrationally, it's our President's job to deal with that fear.

So take our reporting with heavy skepticism. Ignore us when we hyperventilate about mad cow disease and the danger of asbestos hidden behind a wall.

Instead, worry about what's worth worrying about: driving, acting reckless, smoking cigarettes, drinking too much, and eating too much. "What is your blood pressure, what are you eating; are you exercising?" is what patients should think about, says internist Marc Siegel. "But obesity is boring. Heart disease is boring. So we tend to not think of the things that can really get us."

I've been saying it a lot lately, and I'll probably say it some more. Actions speak louder than words.

I won't try to specifically interpret that into this case because that'd probably just trip your finely-honed political BS filters. So I'll just say, over the next few days as Iran cranks the pressure up a notch, watch the actions. Ignore the words.

Well, I will say this: Since the soldiers were kidnapped, not much has happened on the action front, except for some humiliating videos being released which probably don't count for much action. Somebody's going to have a next move, though, because clearly Iran's not very interested in talking. They know to watch actions and ignore words.