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   [7]Baldur Bjarnason

   Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

   21 November 2022

Programming is a Pop Culture

   (What follows is an extract from [8]Out of the Software Crisis, lightly
   edited to work as a blog post.)
     __________________________________________________________________

     So I think what happened is computing has turned into pop culture
     and the universities are not helping in general, at least not in the
     US.

     So, Cicero---anybody know a good Cicero quote having to do with the
     present and past? Let's check your classical education here. So, you
     know who Cicero was. He was one of those old Roman guys.

     So, Cicero once wrote: 'He who knows only his own generation remains
     forever a child.'

   [9]Programming and Scaling (Alan Kay, 2011)

   The programming pop culture defines change—any change—as progress. Most
   developers, myself included, have a fascination with novelty. If it’s
   new, then it must be an improvement. You even hear this stated outright
   as an argument by developers: it’s newer and therefore better. Trends
   in software development are rarely based on objective observation or
   sensible practice. This endless chasing of trends leads to projects
   being needlessly rewritten, code being abandoned, and new projects
   being started when fixing the bugs in an old project would have done
   the same. The stocks of the software development system are flushed out
   at a moment’s notice simply because the developers found something
   shinier.

   Experienced developers are aware of this tendency in themselves and
   work to mitigate it, but younger developers are often under the
   mistaken impression that this is how software development works. Unless
   they can pare back this tendency or are matched with teammates who hold
   them back, this tendency can lead to immense destruction of value for
   an organisation.

   Pop cultures favour the visual aesthetic of the day. We all know what
   sort of aesthetic designers commonly favour. Small, low-contrast text,
   lots of whitespace, no pure whites or pure blacks (just greys). The
   details vary with fashion, but each generation of designers has a
   preferred visual aesthetic. That aesthetic tests poorly; the text is
   illegible; the layout doesn’t have enough contrast. The information
   density is so sparse it’s effectively non-existent.

   Looks pretty, though.

   Coders have a similar tendency, their preferred aesthetic is just a bit
   different, but as with designers, it tests horribly when put in front
   of genuine users. The exact details of the preferred aesthetic tend to
   vary from generation to generation. One group prefers light-on-dark
   text (despite not suffering from conditions that benefit from dark
   mode) and unusable hyper-complex layouts where everything is
   configurable. Another group goes for ultra-minimalism where nothing is
   shown by default. You constantly scrub around and hunt for a button, a
   widget—anything that even vaguely resembles an affordance. This is
   usually not an issue if you have designers on the team. If you’re
   letting the programmers design the user interface or are a programmer
   designing a user interface, you need to be aware of it.

   But this adherence to a specific aesthetic isn’t limited to designs.
   It’s also an issue when it comes to the code itself.

   The programming pop culture favours specific code aesthetics based on
   the trends of the day. I’m not talking about code style or formatting.
   The code in a project should adhere to a single style, simple as that.
   The issue is that the programming pop culture demands that code exhibit
   the latest popular aesthetics of rigour, formality, and cleverness.
   Whether the code actually is rigorous, formal, or clever matters less.
   A few years ago, as the popularity of the Ruby programming language
   peaked, a certain dynamism and trickery were en vogue. It didn’t matter
   if you were writing in Ruby, JavaScript, or Objective-C. Your code had
   to have a level of “magic” to it. Metaprogramming, syntax-hacking
   languages to create ad hoc Domain-Specific Languages, tricks with
   extreme late binding, and more were frequent topics on developer
   weblogs and forums. Even a phrase like “objective-c runtime
   metaprogramming” will date you to a specific generation of native app
   developers almost down to a single year.

   As with all of these pop culture trends in programming, this led to
   unreadable code that was impossible to work with or fix as soon as it
   faded from popular consciousness.

   The current trend is towards the aesthetics of correctness. Everything
   has to look like it has strong or static typing. It doesn’t have to
   really have static typing. That can all be made up after the fact in a
   declaration file. It merely needs to have the aesthetics of types. Type
   annotations everywhere, implementing logic through type system
   trickery, and forcing any and all dynamism out of the system in the
   name of correctness is the name of the game.

   A part of this trend is the unpopularity of the approaches and
   languages that are seen as less rigorous. CSS is dropped in favour of
   statically typed CSS-in-JS approaches. HTML is dropped in favour of a
   strict inline XML-like markup format called JSX. Just a few years ago,
   everybody in web development hated and dropped XML and XHTML
   specifically because it was too strict and felt less dynamic and
   flexible than HTML. At some point, pop culture will bore of this and
   swing its attention back the other way.

   It’s a fashion industry. Trends come; trends go. The lack of historical
   awareness is considered by most to be a feature.

   This rigour is useful in moderation. Static typing does prevent bugs.
   Usually, they are the same sort of bugs unit testing prevents. Both
   have immense value as tools to manage your software development.
   Currently, the fashion is to favour static typing over unit testing for
   establishing a certain base level of correctness in your code. At some
   point, they are likely to switch again. They have a couple of times in
   the past. That you could use both at the same time and get the benefits
   of both doesn’t enter the discourse. Static typing with compile-time
   correctness checks has its uses. So do dynamism, extreme late binding,
   and metaprogramming. Most of these approaches can be used together, but
   that isn’t how pop culture works. Pop culture demands there be only one
   winner at a time. Choose one, not whichever works the best at each
   time.

   Product development can’t indulge in being pop culture. Be wary of
   these popularity contests.

   These issues with programming culture aren’t new.

   Jamie Zawinski calls it the [10]“Cascade of Attention-Deficit
   Teenagers” model. We can’t do much to change the nature of the field by
   now—Alan Kay has certainly tried—but we can mitigate the harm done by
   the trend-seeking. We can work to ensure that everybody on the team,
   programmers and designers, is aligned, and have the same understanding
   of what matters and how to accomplish it.

   For that, you need everybody to understand the context they are working
   in—the works of their field and how they are received. You need to
   develop taste and understanding.

   You need research.
     __________________________________________________________________

   Bonus Alan Kay quote on programming as a pop culture that I didn’t
   include in the book:

     But pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all
     about identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing
     to do with cooperation, the past or the future—it’s living in the
     present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for
     money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]—and the
     Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural
     resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was
     man-made.

   Alan Kay, [11]Dr. Dobb’s Interview with Alan Kay
     __________________________________________________________________

[12]Out of the Software Crisis

   [13]Out of the Software Crisis by Baldur Bjarnason

   Software projects keep failing, not because we don’t have the right
   team or tools but because our software development system is broken.
   Out of the Software Crisis is a guide to fixing your software projects
   with systems-thinking making them more resilient to change and less
   likely to fail.

   [14]Systems-Thinking For Software Projects

   [15]WTF is a Framework?

   [16]The response to Out of the Software Crisis has been amazing

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References

   1. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/feed.xml
   2. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/archive
   3. https://softwarecrisis.dev/
   4. https://softwarecrisis.baldurbjarnason.com/
   5. https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/
   6. mailto:baldur.bjarnason@gmail.com
   7. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/
   8. https://softwarecrisis.baldurbjarnason.com/
   9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuBY
  10. https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
  11. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm:978-3-319-90008-7/1.pdf
  12. https://softwarecrisis.baldurbjarnason.com/
  13. https://softwarecrisis.baldurbjarnason.com/
  14. https://softwarecrisis.baldurbjarnason.com/
  15. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/wtf-is-a-framework/
  16. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/ootsc-update/
  17. https://softwarecrisis.dev/
  18. https://toot.cafe/@baldur
  19. https://twitter.com/fakebaldur