by
Ellen Ullman
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We went to a movie. He held my hand all through the show. Afterwards he waited for me outside the ladies' room. When I walked back out into the lobby, there was Brian leaning against a wall, with all the other boyfriends. I felt strangely pleased at the sight of him, at his highschoolish, date-night good manners. It wasn't nostalgia- I had been a sullen, rebellious girl who drove off any boy who tried to get within a foot of me. No, it wasn't memory but the brief idea of some other life entirely. As he put his arm around me to make our way out, I had time to regret the morose young woman I'd been; to wish I had let a few more boys into my life to hold my hand at the movies and wait for me outside the ladies' .
unexpectedly sweet
Before I finally fell asleep, I remembered a conversation I'd had with an old friend , the one who recruited me into the communist party. We had both been pretty wild in our youth. I used to kid her that she'd slept with everybody-and she practically had. "How did we do it?" I asked her. "How did have so many lovers? And how did we go so blithely from one to the next?"
"You have it wrong," she said. "We weren't blithe. We suffered. We fell in love with all of them."
"Oh, right," I said. "I remember now."
I'll start to worry about the payroll clerks using the software I design . I'll wonder what I'm doing helping the IRS collect taxes. It will bother me that so many entities-employer, software company, bank, IRS-know so much about the simple act of someone getting paid for labor delivered. I'll think about the strange path of a paycheck direct-deposit, how it goes from employer to bank, company to company, while the person being paid is just a blip, the recipient's account a temporary way station, as the money flows through the bank's hands into the hands of a borrower, then out again through the great engine of commerce.
And I'll have to muddle through without certainties. Without my father's belief that the machinery of capital, if you worked hard and long, was benign in the long run, so benign you could even own a piece of it. Without my generation's macho leftism, which made us think we could smash the machine and build a better one. Without Brian's cocksureness that he was smart enough to know all the machine's little secrets, and so control it.
the blessing and curse of the postmodern age
Quietly, I say, "You know, that's what the Nazis did."
They all look at me in disgust. It's the look boys give a girl who has interrupted a burping contest. One says, "This is something my wife would say."
When he says "wife," there is no love, warmth, or goodness in it. In this engineer's mouth, "wife" means wet diapers and dirty dishes. It means someone angry with you for losing track of time and missing dinner. Someone sentimental. In his mind (for the moment), "wife" signifies all programming-party-pooping, illogical things in the universe.
Still, I persist. "It started as just an idea for the Nazis, too, you know."
The engineer makes a reply that sounds like a retch. "This is how I know you're not a real techie," he says.
ooof
To build such a crash-resistant system, the designer must be able to imagine - and disallow - the dumbest action. He or she cannot simply rely on the user's intelligence: who knows who will be on the other side of the program? Besides, teh user's intellligence is not quantifiable; it's not programmable; it cannot protect hte system. The real task is to forget about the intelligent person on the other side and think of every single stupid thing anyone might possibly do.
In the designer's mind, gradually, over months and years, there is created a vision of the user as imbecile. The imbecile vision is mandatory. No good, crash-resistant system can be built except if it's done for an idiot. The prettier the user interface, and the fewer odd replies the system allows you to make, the dumber you once appeared in the mind of the designer.
The designer's contempt for your intelligence is mostly hidden deep in the code. But, now and then, the disdain surfaces. Here's a small example: You're trying to do something simple, like back up files on your Mac. The program proceeds for a while, then encounters an error. Your disk is defective, says a message, and below the message is a single button. You absolutely must click this button. If you don't click it, the program hangs there indefinitely. [...] You must say, "OK."
relevant to PEBKAC
Ironically, those of us who most believe in physical, operational eloquence are the very ones most cut off from the body. To build the working thing that is a program, we perform "labor" that is sedentary to the point of near immobility, and we must give ourselves up almost entirely to language. Believers in the functional, nonverbal worth of things, we live in a world where waving one's arms accomplishes nothing, and where we must write, write, write in odd programming languages and email. Software engineering is an oxymoron. We are engineers but we don't build anything in the physical sense of the word. We think. We type. It's all grammar.
Cut off from real working things, we construct a substitute object: the program. We treat it as if it could be specified like machinery and assembled out of standard parts. We say we "engineered" it; when we put the pieces of code together, we call it "a build." And, cut off from the real body, we construct a substitute body: ourselves online. We treat it as if it were our actual self, our real life. Over time, it does indeed become our life.
A storm was coming in off the Pacific. The air was almost palpable, about to burst with rain. The wind had whipped up the ocean, and breakers were glowing far out from the beach. The world was conspiring around us. All things physical insisted we pay attention. The steady rush of the ocean. The damp sand, the tide pushing in to make us scuttle up from the advancing edge. The birds pecking for dinners on the uncovered sand. The smel of salt, of air that had traveled across the water all the way from Japan. The feel of continent's end, a gritty beach at the western edge of the city.
I feared for the health of my ENTER key. I looked for manuals: found none. Searcched for help disks: hiding somewhere in the mass of CDs Microsoft had relentlessly sent me. Two hours of pawing through stacks of disks. Horns of rush-hour traffic. Light fading from the sky. Disks tumbling to the floor.
[...] 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.
pretty
An immense calm settled over the room. We were reminded that software engineering was not about right and wrong but only better and worse, solutions that solved some problems while ignoring or exacerbating others. That the machine the world wants to see as possessing some supreme power and intelligence was indeed intelligent, but only as we humans are: full of hedge and error, brilliance and backtrack and compromise.
Linus Torvalds talk about Linux design tradeoffs