Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Or like a motel 6!
  

    
Definitely more Motel 6 than zen. (Her reason for the bare walls was
that anything on them represented "visual clutter.")
  

    
I have some sympathy with that. I can't concentrate on writing if
there's stuff on the table that I can see peripherally from my desk. It
has to be neat or it drives me nuts!

I'll be sad to see the technical stuff in your work go, Ellen, because
you explain it so well and feeling like I've gained a glimmer of
insight into the subject is very gratifying. 

We can't escape the specialization of knowledge that's needed for
people to develope expertise, but it does bother me that parts of our
culture are so utterly ignorant of each other. It's much worse on the
humanities side of the divide, I find. You're far more likely to find
literary or "culture vulture" types who assert that there's nothing
worth knowing about the numerical side of human knowledge than vice
versa. I'd be willing to bet that the percentage of scientists who can
name 3 Shakespeare plays is much bigger than the percentage of
humanities people who can list, say, two of Newton's laws of motion.

I know we'll never go back to the days of the amazing 18C & 19C
polymaths, scientists who wrote poetry and novelists who were
naturalists, etc. But it's pathetic to revel in parochialism as I've
sometimes heard people do. Computers have reshaped our world,
especially conceptually, so I really appreciate getting this inkling of
how they work and how the people who make them work, work.
  

    <scribbled by gerry Tue 27 Jan 04 20:08>
  

    
Ellen, I don't expect to be able to read your book in the immediate
future, since I'm really *booked* for the next few weeks.  So, I
wonder if you wouldn't mind a few questions for which I might have
answers had I already read your book:

1)  My recollection of Silicon Valley in the early '80s in many ways
has a sort of small town feel to it.  There was a lot of mingling
between people in different companies.  It really did seem like
everybody knew everybody.  Do you touch upon or reflect any of that in
your book?

2)  Cocaine use proliferated greatly during that period, as I recall. 
In my experience, over a few short years I saw it go from something
relatively rare and obscure to something that became more or less
commonplace.  For instance, I remember one day (maybe '82 or so) going
over to chat with another programmer.  While we were talking, I
thoughtlessly shoved a stack of program listings (remember the old
"greenbar?") and a 9-track tape reel over to one side so that I could
sit down on top of his desk.  As I did so, he grimmaced and appeared
to be in extreme anguish.  It turned out that he had a bunch of lines
prepared on his desk, surrounded and protected by the inner hub of the
tape reel, and the program listings were on top of the the tape reel
to conceal the neatly chopped lines.  As he explained to me later, when
no one was looking, he'd lift up the program listings and discreetly
suck up a line.  That was his routine.  But it was everywhere, and I
started noticing it more and more over time.  Was it just me, or did
you encounter that, too?  Do you cover any of that in your book?

3)  I'm not your usual sci-fi buff - far from it - but a bit over 20
years ago or so, I read _Stand on Zanzibar_ by John Brunner.  It was a
wild book and great fun to read; it was a futuristic novel (set in the
year 2010 I think), and one of the significant developments in the
plot was a very important and very large computer - I think it was
called "Shalmanasser" - that went haywire and all sorts of people were
working frantically to try and solve the problem.  I'm curious to know
if you ever read it and, if so, was it an influence on your writing? 
  

    
Well, I have to say, gerry, yours is a bit of an odd request, but. . .

1)No. The book is about a man who is extremely isolated, even from
himself.
2)Yes, I mention cocaine use -- and I'm so glad someone remembers that
about the time.
3)No, I haven't read it.
  

    
>far more likely to find literary or "culture vulture" types who
assert that there's nothing worth knowing about the numerical side of
human knowledge than vice versa. 

I have been asked to review a piece for a feminist academic
publication, and it's giving me the shivers. The author (I don't know
if it's a man or a woman) calls programming "masculinist." I'm rather
enraged by this uninformed (and incurious!) point of view. 
  

    
Incurious, I agree, and vicious for that reason. And I agree with Laura that
parochialism ought not to be our aim. But at the same time, i'm struck by
the lack of parallelism in the illustration: that surely just being able to
name three plays isn't on a par with knowing two of the three laws of
classical mechanics. A big part of the whole "two cultures" stuff that
Ellen's after in *The Bug* (it seems to me) is that the technical side of
the divide packs so much into things so concise, so that knowing "Every body
continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a right line unless
it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it" is *so*
unlike being able to recall "King Lear."

THough I'm hard put to say what *would be* similarly large on the humanities
side of the divide.

And non-humanistically trained folks would not know the law that way,
anyway, but rather F=ma, I suppose.
  

    

For some reason I'm imagining an "Ain't I a woman" monologue by Ada Byron,
Lady Lovelace.
  

    
My take on the feminism issue is that programming was one of the most
unbiased areas, and that women could advance as easily as men. That
made it quite unusual for its time (remember this was the heyday of the
glass ceiling). I can remember many companies met their EEO quotas for
women through their IT departments.
  

    
I agree that, for me at least, programming offered an avenue that was
relatively degendered. But not entirely, and only for its time. At the
interview for my second significant programming job (this was in 1980),
the guy who eventually hired me said -- at the interview --"Geesh, I
hate to hire all these girls, but you're all so smart." 

So it was true, during a narrow window of time, that women could
*almost* advance as easily as men. The need for people who could do the
job, for the moment, outweighed other considerations. But only if we
women were willing to lean sideways and let the shit fly over our
shoulders.

But all this changed by the mid-1980s, when the first crop of BSEEs
(99% men) was spit out of the technical university system. The whole
culture then changed very abruptly. What we think of as the nerd
culture began right at that time--but it was really just a side-effect
of the rather narrow education that all these engineers had just had.
The NY Times reporter John Markoff is working on a book about the
people (it was mostly men) who created what we now think of as
computing. I look forward to this book, because I'm sure John will show
that those pioneers were stoners and dreamers, political
free-wheelers, intellectual gadflies -- the exact opposite of the
straight-thinking engineers that came out of MIT and Berkeley in 1984
with whom I had to work.
  

    
>I'm hard put to say what *would be* similarly large on the humanities
side of the divide.

Oh, Bruce, you do: postmodernism. Nothing could be more "technical"
and forbidding (and ingrown and jargon-full) than a steady diet of
papers derived from Foucault and Lacan, and all their progeny of
feminist-queer-theory, etc. 

I remember a very smart programmer friend of mine who once came to my
house. As people will do, he looked through my bookcase. Despite the
fact that he was years and synapses ahead of me in computing, he was
impressed that I had read (and perhaps understood?) _Discipline and
Punish_. Go figure.
  

    
Ellen, I'm very struck by what you said in <86>.  It's so true, yet I
never consciously thought about it until now.  When I - a USC Business
School dropout - was just starting out, it was a black woman from
Guyana who took me under her wing and taught me the ropes.  In fact,
several of my programming mentors were women.

And of all of the best and brightest programmers I've known, not a
single one was a computer science graduate.  They were people who had
majored in history, music, and other liberal arts.  One was a high
school dropout who started working with me in 1979, when he was just
17.  Two years later he was sent to Australia to teach some engineers
about programming.
  

    
Funny isn't it? It's true that programming is highly ruled-based and
precise, but the ability to do it well seems not to be teachable. It's
more a talent than a skill. EE programs seem to turn out people (mostly
men) who have been taught the skill but who don't have the lively
frame of mind that good programming requires.
  

    
>And of all of the best and brightest programmers I've known, not a
>single one was a computer science graduate. 

As a computer science MS, I resemble that remark :)

At the large state multiversity where I got my degree, many of the
best programmers came over from the School of Music (which was very
good).  I was an especially odd ball, technically a Comparative
Literature grad student when I started taking programming courses.  At
least we Comp Sci grads believed we needed to learn programming as a
serious discipline.  Some of the EEs I knew seemed to think that
because they understood circuits, they knew all they needed to know to
become first-class programmers.
  

    
Heh.  I'm a BSEE (and now a programmer), but more than once it was the
programming projects that saved my grade in a class!
  

    
NB that I was careful to say "some".
  

    
Oh, and I believe you!  I'm just saying I was maybe a little odd.

When people express surprise that I diverted into software, I often
remark that programming is as logical as I THOUGHT engineering was when
I went into it.  (Well, the activity, not the human politics you find
in every job.)

(Just had a devil of a time getting this posted; I think Engaged was
down for a few minutes.)
  

    
Well, CS curricula have come a long way since the '70s and early '80s,
when it was a relatively new academic discipline.  But I think that
regardless of background, really good programmers are always people who
are passionate - if not obsessed - with the art of it.  Guys like
Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, et al, never studied CS.  Hell, they
practically invented CS.

I think the attitude commonly heard toward CS grads in the '80s was
something to the tune of, "They're well suited for firmware, compiler
design, or R&D at some place like HP or IBM, but they're clueless when
it comes to real-life applications and users."  But a lot has changed
since then.  

BTW, I didn't mean to diss CS grads.  I'm just jealous because I don't
have a CS degree and I wish I did.  Besides, I might be begging you
all for a job one of these days.      ;-)
  

    
Another CS major here. I always say I learned to "think like a
programmer" rather than any particular technical skills.  I know
exactly what you mean by the art of programming, Gerry. A well written
program is a lovely thing to behold.
  

    


Ruchira Datta writes:



Hi, Ellen.  Thanks so much for the great book.  I found both Roberta and
Ethan very sympathetic.  As both a programmer and a voracious reader (I
felt so smug about knowing the significance of the Key to All
Mythologies!) I saw a little of myself in both of them.  Afterwards it
amazed me how you had managed to make the reader identify with and feel
for Ethan, when objectively speaking if we ran into him in real life we
probably would dislike him.

Spoiler space






















When Ethan gets reamed out on the phone just as he's about to hang
himself, I felt like screaming "NOOOO!"  Yet her reaction is perfectly
understandable and we can't blame her; we might react the same way in
her shoes.  I think engaging our compassion is one of the highest
things a book can achieve, and _The Bug_ has done an outstanding job.

I was chilled by Ethan's body not being found for days, because just a few
weeks before I read _The Bug_, I learned of a similar recent incident in
real life--a programmer who died (naturally) in his home and wasn't
found for nine days.  (Also with a significant interest in AI, by the
way.)  Did you base that part on an actual occurrence, or did it just
seem to you like something that might happen?  I wonder how often it
does happen?
  

    
Actually, I think my example is sufficiently parallel. Yes, it's
unrealistic to expect a humanities person to come up with ""Every body
continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a right line
unless
it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it," but
it's not outrageous to think that knowing that one of Newton's major
"discoveries" is the law of *inertia* should be something the average
cultured person should know. That, after all, is a word people use
metaphorically all the time. Since I'm about to have lunch with about 6
book review editors, I'll see if any of them can do it.
  

    
>I was chilled by Ethan's body not being found for days, because just
a few weeks before I read _The Bug_, I learned of a similar recent
incident in real life--a programmer who died (naturally) in his home
and wasn't found for nine days.  (Also with a significant interest in
AI, by the way.)  Did you base that part on an actual occurrence, or
did it justseem to you like something that might happen?  I wonder how
often it does happen?

Something like that happened to a programmer at a place I once worked.
He didn't show up for work for several days, and calls to his house
went unanswered. Later we learned that he had hung himself. The story
that went around the office (and which I used in The Bug as office
gossip) was that he had died in an act of autoeroticism gone wrong -- a
*really* bad bug, went the joke. 

What stayed with me about the incident (beyond the loss of life and
the callousness with with his co-workers received the news) was the way
he had had not been found for days. I was astonished by lack the
disconnectedness in this programmer's life, the lack of friends or
family connections, the fact that it would have to be his manager who
would miss him, but only after he had disappeared for nearly a week.
  

    
A body in motion tends to stay in motion; a body at rest tends to stay
at rest. Everyone surely knows that!
  

    
groan...

And on that note, I wanted to thank Ellen and Laura for joining us in
Inkwell for the past couple weeks. This has been a fascinating discussion,
indeed. We appreciate having you here, and though we've launched another
interview, we wanted to assure you that you're welcome to continue as long
as you wish. This topic won't be frozen and we'd be delighted if you stick
around. Thank you!