Ralph Waldo Emerson immediately came to mind. The 19th-century essayist/philosopher and Transcendentalist wrote often about the intellectual life of the individual, and of the virtues of independent thought and Self-Reliance over the weakness of rote conformity in thought and action.

While he preached self-reliance and ideas originating from within, Emerson remained a man of the world, not drawing inward like his tenant Henry David Thoreau, whom he thought a misanthrope. Emerson writes, “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Retain your ideals in the world, but let the the neck-beard-wearing idealists be the ones to go into seclusion in their shacks.

The Case Against Emerson Liking Java

“Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.” —Self-Relianace

Reading Emerson, it’s hard to see him embracing the constraints of Java at its most enterprisey. He wouldn’t survive in the typical corporate development shop, where compliance with the standards necessary to steer such a massive ship would produce deep dissatisfaction. But this is just rejection by association; while we can safely say Emerson wouldn’t last at a company such as SAP, where a single four-year project has 2500 developers coding away, this only indirectly condemns him to distrust of strong typing. Conventional wisdom holds that shops running four-year projects involving 2500 coders by necessity must embrace not only more rigid statically typed languages, but a byzantine set of internal standards and expectations of conformity as well. SAP’s future relies not on the will of any individual, but of the collective of 2500 wills to produce great work that conforms. The success comes down to the individual(s) who set the expectations for conformance; if they falter (by, say, following the convention wisdom Emerson distrusts) or fail to subjugate enough of the individuals into alignment, the iceberg-like mass of 10,000 developer-years will not save them from the upstart innovation arising from collections of individual intellects working in harmony.

The Case Against Emerson Digging Design Patterns

Emerson looks not to the past for guidance, but within, and it is hard to imagine him looking at the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns book with anything other than scorn. Emerson would develop his own patterns, no doubt, and his own style, but would routinely reject the old way for the better way. In fact, much of his writing is calling for the rejection of patterns by shredding the patterns of the past with layers of anti-patterns. The only pattern he aspires to is the rejection of received patterns. (Or as the Boomtown Rats put similar words in the mouth of God: “I’ll let you in on my big secret Ray/The final truth is there is no truth.”)

The Case for Emerson Being Refactoring Junky

“Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” —Self-Reliance

Emerson valued a very rational, fresh look at problems. He wouldn’t grow attached to a particular design, fall in love and fight against changing it. The code and facts would speak and he would adjust as necessary. Junky might be too strong of a word; his refactoring wouldn’t be endless for the sake of ever-increasing clarity, but would be pragmatic, for the sake of solving the problem as better understood today.

The Case for Emerson Being into Functional Programming

“Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you.” —Compensation

What Language Would Emerson Use?

Before reading Self-Reliance and Compensation again, I pegged Emerson as a Ruby guy. He’s too idealistic to go with PHP; too unconventional to go with Java or C#. Despite the functional quote, I don’t see him going down that route. In reading his essays again, I came away with the distinct sense that Emerson’s sweet spot would be something pragmatic, yet baroque in an unconventional way, and not lending itself to patterns other than those that come from the programmer himself. It would have to be a language that let him live in the world, and reflect the sense of an entrepreneurial landlord rather than the idealistic tenant.

In short, Emerson would have hacked Perl.

Lammers’ book profiled what might now be called the original rockstar programmers: guys like Andy Hertzfeld, Charles Simonyi, Dan Bricklin, and Jonathan Sacks.

What’s striking is that unlike the rockstar entrepreneurs of today (on display in PaW’s equally zoological companion book from the 21st century, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days), the programmers interviewed back in the mid-80s are humble, curious and focused on the code, perhaps even surprised that anyone would care to interview them about their work. In Founders, you can’t open a random page without encountering yet another insufferable ego (with the exception of a few notable interviews with del.icio.us founder Joshua Schacter and recently minted millionaire HOTorNOT founder James Hong); yet in Programmers at Work, the wonder shines through. There aren’t any Zed Shaws lurking in those pages.

Much of Programmers at Work holds up well even after 22 years. By today’s standards, a few of Lammers’ questions seem rather quaint (”Do you write a lot of comments in your programs?”), but then you’ll run into something interesting, like Simonyi taking a potshot at the “cult of simplicity” and how in the long run of computer science and other symbolic sciences, he believes that embracing complexity over simplicity will be what leads to the biggest breakthroughs. Leave it to the space-traveling creator of Hungarian notation to comment on that. At least Lammers didn’t ask Simonyi about his commenting style.

While The Soul Of A New Machine showed a deep slice of real coders and engineers at work and inspired almost through tacit observation, Programmers at Work captured the breadth of the development opportunities available, in the programmers’ own words, and by showing their own work products in a much more explicit and expository form.

More PaW stuff here:

• Salon’s coverage of the reunion.
• Susan Lammers’ Amazon review of Founders at Work

A Brief History of Being Cheated at Football and Other Games of Chance

The first football game I ever owned was Mattel’s Talking Football. Not the later “Monday Night Talking Football”. Just plain old Talking Football. You got a big box, a cardboard field, a little record player that looked like a red cassette player, and the gramophonic intonations of Dick Enberg calling the plays. The box became the stadium no detail was spared. The game even came with a plastic yellow coin for the opening coin toss.

The offensive coach picked the play, for example “Short Pass”, or my personal favorite, the high-risk, high-reward “Gadget” play, inserted the disk into the red “sportscaster”, and the defensive player looked at the back of the disk and rotated it until the specific defensive alignment was chosen, for example, “Prevent Defense”. Then you’d flip the switch to start the record player and listen the result: “Pass over the middle…intercepted!…he’s going to go all the way…TOUCHDOWN!” Or one I can still remember today with its pregnant pause and sudden reversal “Prevent defense, three man rush, trap up the middle for ten…uh oh…penalty.”

There were about 70 combinations of plays and defenses, and one Christmas my older brother, then in grad school as a T.A. for stats courses, calculated the expected value of each defensive and offensive play selection and routinely beat me. This was typical of the competitive torment I endured at the hands of someone with an understanding of probability and statistics which dwarfed my second grade math skills. Once he crushed me in Milton Bradley’s Game of Life by carefully observing the tendency of the spinning wheel’s non-random distribution. As he rolled up on the Day of Reckoning, he opted for the rarely used attempt at becoming a MILLIONAIRE TYCOON. From the instructions (warning: PDF):

Try to become a MILLIONAIRE TYCOON. If you have little or no money, place all that you have (your car if you’re broke) on ONE number on the number strip. Spin again. If you’re sic number comes up, you have become a MILLIONAIRE TYCOON, the WINNER and the game is over. If you lose, the bank takes your money, and you sit out the rest of the game at BANKRUPT.

So he lays it all down on #3, spins and bam, 3 comes up and the frustrating hour of spinning and trying to stuff little pink and blue pegs into those cars goes down the drain. The one in ten chance might as well have been a one in a million chance. That’s still as close to a lottery winner as I’ve ever been.

Subprime crisis, Milton Bradley style. One minute you’ve got a car, six kids stacked up in the back and not a dime to your name, and the next minute you’re a winner.

Fixing What Ailed Us

Fast forward about eight or nine years and I come across the listing for Tuesday Night Football from a copy that a friend apparently cracked. Our relationship with the game was love/hate all the way: because while it made for an entertaining and addictive game, some bug in the code caused way too many fumbles to occur for our tastes. If I recall correctly, each play had about a 5% probability of a fumble; and either a logic bug or a problem with the pseudorandom number generator caused every fumble to be lost by the human coach, while the computer only occasionally lost a fumble. This was an easy fix to make, but what was notable was that in just a few pages of code, a plausible football game could be created. I remember seeing the listing on green and white fanfold paper and thinking, I could do that. When I later got my own Apple IIc, I modified the code to create a more balanced game. And by more balanced, I mean one that probably tilted more in my favor.

Searching for Tuesday Night Football

I set out last night to see if I could find the source code for Tuesday Night Football to confirm whether my recollections were accurate. Were we just complainers who couldn’t handle getting beat fair and square? Or were we right, that the fumble issue was a bug and not a feature? Although I found a disk image that I believe contains the program, and a host of Apple II emulators that might actually run it, I haven’t been able to locate the actual TNF source or even get the original game to run successfully in an emulator.

So Dear Lazyweb, if you’re out there, and you’re an Apple II fanatic who has the Basic source code for Tuesday Night Football, I would love to get a look at it again for research purposes.

update… More digging led me to the author of the original Tuesday Night Football, Charlie Anderson, and some artifacts related to the original version. It appears that after a brief life being sold through Apple dealers with mimeographed manuals and a disk stuffed in a plastic bag, Mr. Anderson was offered the sum of $1000 against 10% net royalties to assign the copyright of the game to Automated Simulations, Inc., which rechristened it as Tuesday Morning Quarterback. What are the chances that the source survives?

The story behind this massive electronic publishing effort, which leveraged Amazon’s S3 and EC2 Web Services as well as the MapReduce algorithm implemented with Hadoop, stands as testament to how the elimination of technical barriers brought about by falling computing costs let single developers solve problems in days that might have previously taken teams months. Starting with 4TB of source data in TIFF image format, the conversion of these files into PDF format took less than 24 hours to complete, running on 100 parallel Amazon EC2 machine instances. At market rates for EC2, this represents about $240 of computing, plus another $410 for upload bandwidth and presumaby another $41 or so to store the original source material for the two days of the run. The resulting 1.5TB of produced PDF data, at Amazon market rates, would cost the NY Times around $8 a day to host with S3, plus bandwidth costs to serve the content. Based on the presented numbers, the average article size is around 146K, which means that their bandwidth costs, when they have to rely on Amazon, are about $0.13 for every 7,200 articles they have to pull (assuming no local caching at the NYT site). Even a ridiculously small advertising rate would cover this operational cost.

Another story lurks here–since all works published in the United States before 1923 are in the public domain, and not tainted by the Mickey Mouse Copyright Protection Act (as coined by Lawrence Lessig), the content contained in this material is free of copyright (although it’s not clear whether the PDF rendering of the articles are).

Browsing articles from a random date 85 or 100 years ago gives you a glimpse into how little what constitutes public debate has changed. In the 1920s, most issues of the Times had numerous stories covering every angle of prohibition, each serving as an echo still heard in the War on Drugs, from illicit stills exploding and burning down apartment buildings, to police warnings about bad batches of hooch (redistilled wood alcohol and kerosene that removed the foul taste but not the lethal formulation) which were attributed to 100 deaths in a single month, to the investment in technology to stop counterfeiting of certificates granted for allowable uses of alcohol. The battle over evolution raged on with op-ed pieces that could be used nearly without alteration today. During WWI, many articles felt straight out of the War on Terror, with announcements of the arrest of enemy aliens, overviews of modern fighting technology (the novelty of the German armored tank merited note), handsome Thanksgiving dinners for the troops overseas. And in almost every issue, you find someone lamenting the fall of civil society or the problems with kids today.

It struck me that the confluence of these forces—dramtically falling computing costs, an unclosed loophole in copyright law (or more accurately, copyright law acting as intended), and the availability of a significant window into the history of the United States—connected me back to an understanding that though technology has evolved dramatically in the intervening years, the evolution of public discourse and of the underlying themes put forth in the media have changed very little.

Less seriously, the fact that these articles are in the public domain also means they’re fair game for reuse. Hilarity ensues.

In that vein, I offer This Day in History:

Montreal Hunts Slackers: 90 Years Ago Today
Apparently, the draft wasn’t popular with some folks in Canada, and police were engaged to round up these “slackers”. Choice quotes:

The big roundup of Slackers in Montreal began today when the police force set its dragnets and started in to sweep the city.

…

The first part of the city to receive attention was the red light district. There has been a big raid in this neighborhood every night for the last week, and many eligibles have been put under lock and key.

Because if you’re going to dodge the draft, what better place to hang out than with hookers?

Yet another evidence of the “tightening up” process is to be seen in the intimation to the officials of a local hockey club that the military authorities will strongly appeal in the case of every hockey player who has been exempted from service, as it is considered that too many of this class of men in the very best of physical condition are trying to dodge their duty through political influence or otherwise.

Who knew that the fastest game on ice could pose such peril to Canadian national security?