Rethinking Design, Risk, and Software (2012)

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Introduction by Joel Orr

(time: 0:06)

Joel Orr was Chief Visionary (Emeritus) at Cyon Research.

I'm Joel Orr.
this title the topic central topic of  this symposium and I'm
also using the  words engineering and science and
I'm taking the
larger sense of those terms larger
sense of engineering and the larger sense
of what science is and I want to apply
it to our thoughts
and needs about software
Viewpoints Research Institute is a 501c3 nonprofit public benefit organization so so we don't have a product, we're not trying to sell you anything.
Brad invited me here to provide some alternative points of view on how we might think about software, and how we might make software because the time is going to be dire
I put my email address up there. I should put it at the end but I'll put it here so that if people have a question that didn't get answered while I'm here. I welcome email I like email.
I love it better than almost any other form of communication because I can decide when not to use it.
You all know what I mean. Okay, let's tackle engineering first.
One way of thinking about engineering is that in the world we're presented with situations. Here's a really nice beautiful one but it has a couple of drawbacks from practical human need that gives rise to an idea.
We design something we make a thing that caters to that.
And, if we don't extract principles from this thing, then we're not doing engineering yet we're just tinkering.
Tinkering is kind of the thing that is built in to many mammals. If you have a cat, imagine what a cat would be like if it had hands it would be basically a monkey. If you'd come home from vacation your house would be dismantled.
So, we want to extract principles we want to push them back into the things, so we start doing principles building of things.
Those principles leak back into how we design things, and they even leak back into how we have ideas.
And so, this has been going along on a lot longer than mathematics and science.
And, in the twentieth century one of the ideas that gave rise to was a really really tall building done very quickly.
Here's what it looked like when they got done with it. And, I'm not going to spend a lot of time with this but when you talk about engineering, this is one of the three or four things that comes up, the Empire State Building.
So, here's an article in one of the engineering magazines that says planning control permit erection of 85 stories of steel in six months. It wasn't just 85 stories of steel, it was 85 stories of steel and granite.
Here's what it looked like. Here's the site after they demolished the old Waldorf Astoria Hotel, and then, Bing Bing Bing Bing Bing.
So they clad the thing as they went up and the entire building of the Empire State Building took less than 12 months and was done by about 3,000 people.
We could not muster 3,000 people to do something major in less than a year in computing. So, whatever we mean when we say software engineering, we don't mean real engineering.
We mean something that we're aspiring to. This is the way the term software engineering was intended back in the 60s at the Garmisch conference in 1968 where it was coined as an aspiration.
Today, if you go to a university or many companies and ask them what is software engineering, they'll say it's what we're doing. That is manifestly not the case.
There's some really interesting things. Anybody who aspires to being an engineer of any kind should be intimately familiar with how this was done.
What's wonderful that there are many good books about it, including this facsimile of the Foreman's, notebook. One of the foremen, every night, typed on his pica typewriter, and took a picture and pasted it in there.
This has come down to us but we don't know who the foreman was. And, a few years ago it was a facsimile into a book that you can buy and are many interesting things are in there.
One of the questions that was asked the aspiring contractors was what tools do you have for this job.
One of them was Paul Starret who was one of two Starret brothers. They had built some very large buildings in Manhattan previously but they were one of three big companies bidding for this job.
(Paul Starr) They'd all said to this question, "well we have all the tools we need in blah blah blah blah."
What Starrett said is not a blankety-blank thing, not even a pick and shovel.
"Gentlemen, this building of yours is going to present unusual problems. Ordinary building equipment won't be built worth a damn on. it will buy and make new stuff fitted for the job that's what we do on every big job.
It costs less than renting secondhand stuff, and it's more efficient." Okay
Now in software, a first order theory that's obtained as long as I've been in the field, which is 50 years, is that you should never build your own tools. It's a black hole. Don't build your own operating system. Don't build your own computer for god sakes .
Don't build your own programming languages. Get all this stuff from the vendors.
That way, you're actually going to speed up your ability to produce the thing that you want to do. It turns out this isn't true. Or, it's true, if you can't, if you don't know how to build your own tools.
You can certainly get into a black hole. We all know of them. But in fact the second-order theory is also true, which is, if you know how to build your own tools then you better, because you can bypass not just workarounds that you have to do but you bypass an entire set of perspectives that may have nothing whatsoever to do with what you're trying to do.
And, they might even be antagonistic to it.
So, these guys did a lot of wonderful things. This is a narrow gauge railway that was on every floor of the Empire State Building.
They also built twice as many elevators than there they are now just as temporary elevators, but going up 85 stories in order to move equipment around, and when they got the building up they took down these elevators.
Sounds ridiculous, right? Not really.
Now, the other thing about engineering, real engineering that makes it rather different still from what we attempt to do in software is this problem.
This is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. We have much< of our infrastructure is crumbling.
Here's one that wasn't as funny as the Tacoma Narrows Bridge wasfunny because nobody got hurt.
It was predicted by a University of Washington professor.
The reason they got good movies of it is he said when a wind comes up that's over 55 miles an hour, this bridge is going down. So, when that wind came up, they went down to a now-famous camera store in Seattle, famous for supplying the movie cameras, which they then took out to the bridge, set them up.
And, watch the thing shake itself apart.
this one though, in Minneapolis, was not so funny because many people got killed and a whole school bus full of children just missed getting demolished.
So there are many casualties on this.
The trace back on this one was: first they thought the rivets were substandard but they turned out to be right. They finally found out that those gusset plates, those square things that the rivets are joining those beams with.
By a clerical error where about .. 3/16 of an inch too thin. 20 years later that defect in the structural engineering plus the clerical error brought down the entire bridge.
The point here is that one of the reasons you can fly in a jet plane and not feel upset, if you knew what was going on in the jet engine that's right outside there,
and you should if you're aspire to be an engineer, you will know that inside that jet engine, there are temperatures that are higher than the melting point of any of the materials in the jet engine.
It's just one of those great things.
But jet engines run for thousands and thousands and thousands of hours. They're one of the most perfect engineering creations especially given the difficulties that they labor under.
They have to spin at 30,000 rpm. They have these temperature problems. They have enormous shear forces and everything else going on. they're just fantastic.
The thing that has allowed engineering to advance is that people get really pissed off when their friends and relatives wind up dying on some engineering failure.
So the forces of nature plus the social forces have conspired to make engineers rather careful.
Of course if you think about the parallel situation inside of a computer, the forces and the masses are slight.
Many software systems are starting a crash that will take 10 years to happen from this instant they are actually deployed.
They're completely buggy but the gusset plate is going to take a long time to gradually come apart as it gets more and more complicated.
When you move from something where doing something out in the world of forces and masses into a world where you don't have these, you have to have an artificial sense of discipline.
This is omething we are still learning how to do.
Now we don't know what happened to the Roman engineers who failed.
I've suspected, because their engineering was so good for its time, I've suspected that theyactually wound up in the Colosseum for failures.
But consider this. This is the longest extant, it's not the longest Roman bridge ever made, but it's the longest one that we still have. With those light poles on it.
Becasue it's been continuous use for over 2,000 years, and has had cars running on it for the last century.
Now, if go look at this bridge it's in Merida, Spain, near the Portuguese border, it looks like it was built yesterday.
This is partly because the Romans created the best cement the world has ever known. It took a long time for us to find out, just really about 10-15 years ago, to find out exactly what the secrets were of the Roman cement.
How about this one. Same age. Again, if you walk right up to it, looks, holy smokes. This thing looks like it was built yesterday.
If ever been to, how many people have ever been to the Pantheon in Rome. She's been to Rome you've been to the Pantheon.
First time I went, I thought wow! You know, it looked like it was made out of granite, and then I found that it was made out of reinforced concrete. How many people, most people here might have found that out. Do you realize?
How many people realize it was made out of reinforced concrete?
It looks like it was made yesterday. You go around. It's just every, nothing is crumbled. Just Incredible.
If you really care about it, engineering goes from beyond a set of these principles to a true art form.
And, you could even go so far to say the big art form of the 20th century were science and engineering.
That's a lot to live up to for something that wants to call itself a science like computer science, and that wants to call itself an engineering discipline like software engineering.
Yeah, so the answer to this question is, "no". Software Engineering cannot do anything like this today.
To make some comparisons here, I just note that a 400 page book has 20,000 lines of text in it. Each one of those could be a line of code so 20,000 line program is one 400 page book.
And a foot of books is about 300,000 lines. Million lines of code per meter: there's an easy one to remember.
The Empire State Building is about 441 million lines of code high, as stacked books is 20,000 lines, 50 lines of code at a time stacked up.
That sounds like a lot. But in fact a lot of companies are wrestling with about this much code.
Personal computing, which I had something to do with a long time ago. Microsoft's essays into it provide operating systems over a hundred million lines of code and application suites is well over a hundred million lines of code.
You look at that, you think, "Are we really getting that much bang for a couple hundred million lines of code?"
I hope you're saying no. I hope you haven't gotten complacent about this.
So personal computing, 250, say 200 million lines of code. But of course it's not really that much. The problem is that when you make a lot of code, there's a point, where their dependencies are so intertwined, the engineering has been done so poorly, that people start becoming afraid to remove things.
So they just let it stay there and they start layering over it.
This big software company has now gone over 400 million lines of code.
I haven't changed the slide. Yeah, I used to use this analogy, because, I mean, a pyramid is kind of a garbage dump plastered over with limestone so it looks nice.
Just a big accretion. But when I look at this picture, I think I can't use that metaphor anymore because, look at how modular these pyramids are.
We would love to have that modularity in the code that we write. so I think the picture that fits our code better is a slum.
Particularly the web. But basically it's all rather slum like.
There is no large sense of architecture of any kind. Things are tacked in there.
Urban renewal bulldozers out some stuff but just leaves the stuff lying around, never carts it off and and so forth.
The real question is not whether we can improve on this.
But what is the actual level of improvement, which is tantamount to asking, how complex is the actual problems we're trying to solve compared to the complexity we're creating by just bumbling around.
Let's ask a question about what science is. Now that we've talked about engineering.
Real science looks at hairballs. This is my favorite hairball. It's about this big, recovered from the stomach of a woolly mammoth found in a glacier.
But because hair balls are ugly to look at but it got your attention, especially when I say how big it is.
It represents complications. But, you know, the universe is good enough.
The starry night it's pretty air but it's still complicated. People spent thousand of years misunderstanding it in a bunch of ways.
We little creatures with our brains have languages. We can make all of our languages out of the Scheffer's stroke. Here, this is the NAND operator.
Because we have tiny little brains, we invented mathematics, and we come up with something like Maxwell's equations, or heavy sides version of Maxwell's equation, and put a large part of the phenomena that we're looking at out there on a T-shirt.
This represents complexity, so the complexity of the electromagnetic field, in large amounts of it, enough to invent a radio and radar and etc. etc., can be represented by a couple of these equations.
These equations should be symmetrical because the magnetic field and the electric field are trade off against each other but aren't.
So, if you worry about that and you happen to be named Einstein, you will come up with the special theory of relativity which will put symmetry into the whole thing and you get down to two equations, just like you should have. One for the electric field and one for the magnetic field.
Now science is not this. The problem is when most people take science courses they're taught the T-shirt.
But science is actually that. Science is the realm of the relationship between the phenomena that we can't get to./subtitle> <subtitle id="0:20:53"> Similarly, we can do science with engineering, because it's an artifact that has phenomena so we can actually look at that bridge that we built there. Scientists can look at what engineers do and make a T-shirt of it.
We have T-shirts of what bridges are, their theories of bridges. Then, the cool thing, this is why it's great to be alive today, the cool thing is you can take that T-shirt and make one hell of a bridge.
Engineering was around for a long time but it didn't hit its stride until it had this beginning the yang here, event of making things and looking at them the special way that science does.
How big is this bridge? Well, See those little boats down there? Those are super tankers.
Just for comparison, there is our Empire State Building. So the pylons on this bridge are the height of the Empire Building. And, there's the Great Pyramid of Egypt.
This is the Asahi [Akashi] bridge in Japan. Just can't beat it. So lovely.
So, this is what we want to think about. We want to think about real engineering. We want to think about real science.
Computer science is not real science. Ask anybody to give you a definition, and they will give you an engineering definition.
Part of it is because computer science persists in only building things. It doesn't spend a lot of time trying to understand them.
So, you can look, you know, computers We have built.There, you have their complicated artifacts. Programming languages is a complicated artifacts you can do the same thing.
John McCarthy looked at them, and being a mathematician, you want a G-shirt ["T-shirt"]. This is the programming language Lisp on the T-shirt.
Once you look at that you realize, whoops, programming is not as complicated as I thought. All the semantics I really care about are not in these in humongous Fortran or Java compilers but they are actually very small.
When I make them small enough for my tiny little brain I can actually think about to manipulate them.
Whereas trying to go over on the other side and mess around with Fortran directly to make it better, it just never happen.
So, John came up with a mathematical theory of computation. And, those of us who came in the next generation after McCarthy got to do some really fun things with this idea. I should mention that what I'm talking to you about actually happened in the 60s.
And, it bore some real fruits. But, in fact, it never made it into the world of the 60s which was dominated by IBM. Or, the world of the 80s and 90s which is dominated by Microsoft.
It just didn't happen. So most people program in a way that is strikingly similar to the way programming was done around 1965.
Let's take a look at the idea of tactics versus strategies.
The simplest thing when we have materials is to think tactically.
Have a bunch of these materials piles and stacks.
Simplest things we can get out of those hardly any design effort at all as pyramids and walls.
People did this with bricks for thousands of years before somebody had a strategic thought which is,
"hey, let's make something out of the bricks before we make the thing.
Let's make a new kind of building component a different kind of structural integrity than a pyramid does, and all of a sudden, we can kick ass.
Took thousands of years to get beyond what the brick forced into our minds by being in front of us to this very odd thing that requires more building materials to make than when you're done. This is one of the hard things about an arch.
It's hard to imagine it because it doesn't work until
it works so people just ignored it
and the same thing happened in computing
where we build things out of Nan's
basically computing is all about comparing
things so you can take
materials like even two
something that first graders love is they can do any
fractional arithmetic problem
their ten-year-old brother can't do and
they can do it in two seconds with two rulers
all right because the ruler is an addition slide rule you
show this to a kid they'll love you for life
just compute the whole thing out ahead of time
and say here's
what it is and by the way you're teaching them vectors at the same time
and so it beats regular fractions in many many
ways and of course the Romans and the Greeks
Romans had a socially
accepted QWERTY form of numbers called Roman numerals
but they didn't use them most
people use this the wrong way the Romans and the Greeks had
abacuses to compute with this is
a Roman abacus and those stones are called calculi the
calculus came from this
notion of what they pull out of your teeth
also when they you go to the dentist to get the plaque
removed they call them calculi and
flip-flops didn't come
people wanted to do computers but because a couple
of Brits wanted to see if they could make a memory
that could do some of the things human memory could do
out of materials because
there's a vitalism was a big deal back then
and ENIAC
but the problem is matter is inconvenient for
this it's just
you know basically the scaling problems
overwhelm you very little return so
you need to go strategically and
of course this was done a long time before with
a jacquard loom von Neumann architecture x'
by anointment style programming languages and
even the programming languages of today like Java which
is also a von Neumann style language in
spite of a few trappings it has on it and
basically the programming that we're doing
today has
not stirred from this in 50 years
there have been about 3000 different programming languages
invented and some of them really useful but
style of programming that is used today is almost
entirely this style and it's
tyle where the programming language is rather similar
to the underlying storage mechanisms
and control structures of the machine there
are few convenience is there but not a lot and not
enough but of
course there are always weird people out on the fringes
who like Turing himself
who did things are completely
different for instance sketchpad which is having its 50th anniversary this
year computed by
you programmed it by putting in
constraints that sketchpad had to figure out
so instead of writing solutions
to problems you just gave sketchpad what the problem what
the nature of the problem was what the nature that would
characterize a solution and sketchpad had three problem solvers
and in 1962 it
would solve those problems for you by
the way he also invented computer graphics while
it and also this is the first object-oriented
system I know of so those three things were
done by Ivan Sutherland as a thesis project in one
year one person and I once they asked
Ivan how could you do these three things in
one year he says well I didn't know it was hard
Ivan as a genius but
he had also had the advantage of just
aiming for what we really needed he
worry about whether it was hard because nobody knew
what was easy and hard in 1962 he just went for
what we needed which is an interactive system that
you could show sort of what
you wanted then tell it what the criteria were to
the job up and it finished the job up great
too bad we don't have it today the
Internet another thing which
is almost completely ignored by computer people why
because it works too well most
computer people certainly most people in the world but most computer
people even don't even think of this as technology it's
completely different from the technology
they're used to the internet has never gone down
started running in 69 but
not continuously since then to replace all of its atoms and
it's bits without ever being shut down
people are shutting down their software systems
the time they shut down individual servers even though
a server is just a name you never have to do that
so what we've got is two cultures here we got
culture that was able to make something get scaled successfully
of magnitude we've got
another culture who that who can't even appreciate the
feat of engineering and science that
took to do so
the Internet is really the only extant true object-oriented
system in the world right now and then
there's of course AI which
people have lost interest in just as
it was starting to get really well work done
so we should
be spending more time thinking about about
this now one little
blast from the past 1973
we showed this machine and this the
system notice
overlapping windows there was a view
oriented object-oriented system
desktop publishing was
essentially the views
without the borders on them these
split up when they came out into the real world but it's Xerox
theory one thing there was no operating system
because you don't need one
okay and
so when Xerox asked us what we
were we're doing we gave them
our own version of Paul starts
speech not even a pick and shovel so so
part of the deal at Xerox PARC was we built every bit
of the hardware and software ourselves from scratch
we did not go out and buy
commercial computers we did
not go out and buy commercial software
the reason is this stuff was so different that
we would have spent all of our time running
into walls that were simply irrelevant
to what we were trying to do
then the cool thing was this was
a tiny machine 128 K Ram
and we used half of it for the display
so it had a display about 800
by 600 and
all the software from the end-user down to
the non-existent operating system down to the
metal of the machine was only about 10,000
of code it was done in a language we invented specifically
for the purpose so
one way of thinking about this is in the end no
matter what it is you think you're doing
math wins the
thing that is math the mathematize ation
of an idea dominates
all other things once you've done the
spadework around the edges at some point you have to
sit down and do something like mathematical thinking in
order to collapse all the
things that seem to be artificially dissimilar
into things that are similar this is called
making an algebra and this
was a technique that we use pretty generally at Parc and
so in a
few years we did this the
bitmap screen the GUI
WYSIWYG in desktop
publishing real objects laser
printers Ethernet pierre-pierre
and client-server and about half of the internet
now what was interesting about that perhaps is
it was only two dozen people
any company
here could have afforded to do this two
dozen people just ten million dollars a year in
today's dollars you could do it right now
you won't
do it though nobody is doing it you
won't do it in spite
fact that it returned 30 plus trillion bucks
returning about a trillion dollars a year still
so this is a huge win but
in fact it is against what
most people think is good practice I
don't mean in computing only
I mean in management okay
so we'll leave that because we don't want to talk about the past too much but
I just most people do not realize it was only two dozen
people that is only four to five years
to do all this stuff and doing it all from scratch
okay
now let's take a look at a
science project in the present same idea
here so all of these ideas I've been talking about here
we're going to apply them to this big thing
called personal computing and it's got all kinds of stuff
in it so
again we're interested in this area that
goes from the end-user
all the way down to the metal so there's a lot of
stuff we want to know
how many t-shirts does it take right
so this is a completely different thing
here we are not interested we're doing
science here now we're going to have to do a little bit
of engineering because the only way we can validate this science is by
making it run but this is
a science project we want those t-shirts
so let's take a look
so let's say half of
what Microsoft or Moore has in there is just
code they can't get rid of but still most
of these you know Linux and
OpenOffice and stuff
it's like a hundred billion lines of code so it's a lot
of a lot of stuff of different
kinds and
so
now here here we have the
we're kind of behind the eight-ball of
having a brief talk so this part
to do this part in a
reasonable way would take a couple of days so
I'm and I hate bullets so please do
not regard these as bullets just look they're ten blobs
out of twelve or thirteen blobs that
we used and what they
are are things a couple
of those we invented but most of them were things that have been around
for 50 years that didn't make it into
the particulars einer that
computing is see the difference here
is nature helps physicists be
honest because in the end you're
supposed to submit your theories back to nature but the problem is
we're a design field so our trade is bullshit
that's what design is and it's
good and there's bad and there's indifferent a lot
a lot of stuff in between and so
we can have a fad like
for instance semaphores semaphores
were known to be a bad idea when they were first invented by
Dykstra and whore but in fact
in that culture they took
on and for a variety of different reasons
being taught today and they're still being used today why
are they a bad idea anybody know
what's wrong with a semaphores
gets a
system lock up and there
is no way to do something
time that will tell you you won't get system melaka so
this is like the world's worst idea to
let the cpu control the time base
of your computations you're screwed
may take a while may
happen quickly but it's just basically
a bad idea and there was already a good idea also thought
up by John McCarthy in the early 60s
that actually works and works much
it's just not generally used and it won't be used for
a while because these things take decades
to get rid of things that are you
know de facto religions so I'm
just going to pick on a couple of these I already talked about math wins
and I want to talk about this
now in this area
up
around in here because we have to
one of the things we have to do in personal computing
today is make anti-alias two and a half d computer
graphics and we have to make it look really
good and if we didn't have it look really
good then we will be sloughing
off part of making something
that is like computer graphics that
we can recognize today so
of course whenever you have a hard problem you
get a graduate student to do it because
they are just so much smarter than we are
a mom of course we all do but his mom happens to be a high
school geometry teacher of that special kind that
actually understands math and so
they
do exist and so he went home Thanksgiving
three four years ago and his
well son what are you doing at viewpoints and he
said well I'm I need to reduce
the amount of code to do computer graphics on
a personal computer by a factor of a thousand and
she said oh that
sounds interesting what are you
going to do and in fact her expertise was in
projective geometry so Dan
did not come back from Thanksgiving he stayed
working with his mom he and his
mom worked together on this thing through Janney finally
showed up in January with this formula
and so this is one of these serendipitous
things that you can't completely
supply by method but because this stuff has been kicked
around by the best people in the world for
forty five years but in fact they found a new way of thinking
about the involvement of an arbitrary polygon
with a pixel that computes
exactly the right shade of the pixel
to give you perfect anti-aliasing and it's
only that big and the next thing Dan
did was to make a math
a language out
of the mathematics that looked like the mathematics but
could run on a computer and when you tell this
these 45 lines of code to do it
they can do things like this they can render anti-alias text
and anti-aliased
graphic objects so that was a great
start and this
language that he devised he decided to
make it a dataflow language with kind of
functional engines at the nodes and
because of that it is highly amenable to automatic
use of parallel resources
so here's
one of our benchmarks so this is 5000
anti-aliased
translucent characters
being re rendered every time
by this these 45
lines of code so there's no caching or anything
here and we can take a look at the CPU usage
and we can see that it's basically using so
this is a fork or Mac but
the the cores can handle two highly
interleaved threads at once so
seeing that one of those is being devoted to this task and
the fan has come on and
as I say go faster it says
okay give me another thread there it is
go faster and faster it starts interleaving them I can start zooming in
here so you can sort of see what's going on a little better you
got enough monkeys
yeah so
so we're actually quite surprised that
this is a lot of computing
but
we're getting a lot of a lot out of it so
I thought was wow we
should be able to make a whole system just out of this math
and so this is in fact
what I'm using so I'm not using PowerPoint here it's
probably obvious by now but here is this
system that
is this replacement
for personal computing and
now here's my next slide and
here's Dan's brother and here's all the compositing rules and
so for instance here's
this one is invert
here's another
combination rule here so
it's 95 lines to do all of the compositing rules that
you use so now that you've now
that you've seen and of course there
are those
45 lines there's gradients so
I should actually now this user interface
here is made out of the system also because
it's all one sort of one big desktop publishing document
and I'm going to the system is also live
so this has not been compiled away into
C code down there so I'm actually going
to pick an object here like this
this menu
here and I'm going to say
okay let's change the gradient fill on this
and
yeah something like that maybe or maybe we
don't want as hard an edge so we'll zoom
this out okay get the idea so the whole system
is live it's using its own stuff
here and
we keep on chugging along we
can see here's pen stroking
filtering and so all of
the graphics for personal computing in this little science exercise
came out to be four hundred and fifty seven lines of code
how do we know is 457 because you can count
457 things
it's hard to count 400 thousands or
440 million or so on so this
is about a thousand times smaller than the way it is
done say in Firefox right
so a thousand should get your attention right you
have to learn a new language on the other hand here
it is the whole thing is just a
few pages of code and it's live and you you
can run and use it okay
so now
of course where did this language
come from I have to build that and so
there's actually quite a distance between one of these compositing
rules a one-liner of code and getting
the result at the other end and so I might need
remove the hood and show you what's there and this looks a little more daunting
because I have to
translate this language into a standard
form I have to
translate this into another language that is sort of like see
I have to translate to
something that eventually will run on the 86 architecture
that's on this machine that looks
like a lot of work and of course I run the system
runs on multiple processors so I have to do that and
so one way of thinking about it is gee looks
like there's a lot of work in these square boxes here
and all so we need another special
language so we've just showed
you a domain-specific language
in the old days you are called problem
oriented languages I like old terminology because I'm old
and so we need another problem oriented
line language here whose problem domain
is transforming languages and of course there are tools
around for doing this but this is one of the
big stoppers for people doing this themselves is
making a language the way it is
a daunting procedures usually taught through
some set of tools like yak this is not the way
to do it but the poor student comes
out either not understanding it all or convinced that it's
too hard but in fact you
can make a much better language so here's
one we did called Omata and here's a simple
arithmetic expression and here's
the program and if I say do it it
transforms that expression into a tree
and if I come down here
and
pick this more
complicated expression up and paste it in
here and say do it I
get that and so that this
translation system isn't just for translating
things that have strings it translates any kind
of objects into any other kind of objects so you want to
do it in that generality because you're going to use this everywhere
and so
this graphical language winds up being 130
lines of code to make the trees and another 700
lines of code to make the
lower-level stuff that is actually run on the machine so
you could say a thousand lines of code 900 lines of
code to make that graphical language
but this
like a shaggy dog story right because well now I
have to make the language transforming language and but
of course it can make itself and
Alex Wirth did it particularly nicely so it can make
itself in 100 lines of code and
as you get closer and closer down
to the bottom of the system you start using these base
things over and over again and the
problem oriented language is stay on the top
okay but we have to do
the internet so tcp/ip
20,000 lines of
c-4 that so one book one of
those books this happened the C code and most
computers is a good nice job and
tcp/ip was invented by experts and
so we didn't expect to get a
factor of thousand on this in
pia Marta only got a little more
than a factor of a hundred so
tcp/ip is about 160 lines of code
using these techniques and if you're interested I can
exceed this is particularly elegant the way he did it I'll
explain it later for people who are interested so
this is represents taking
something it was done by very good people but in the wrong language
and done essentially the in a way that
generated unnecessary code the
big key here was not so much the language
as the method
the method came first and then we did the language
too to do it and so the whole thing collapses down
okay
let's take another one of these metaphors particles
and fields everybody understands this as a kind
of a metaphor for iron filings
in a magnetic field the iron filings seem
to know what to do they're feeling this field
and they're doing individual things that look like they're somewhat
coordinated and in fact there
are animals that do this also like ants
so here's a little ant simulation
this is their nest these guys are
their food and if we start this thing going
then we see that the
ants are finding the food going to
the nest and they're leaving this pheromone trail so this is using
about eleven thousand parallel
processes because each little cell is
being used to diffuse the perfume
the ants lay down you see right now all
of the ants have been captured by the field
they're not communicating directly with each other they're communicating
in directly with each other and we would call this
loose coupling well
if you have crazy brains you
could imagine that a paragraph of text
is one of those things
who's who said you could do the encyclopedia
over here thank you
simplest thing that you can get fifth graders to figure out is well when you have to do
something follow the guy who is in front of you and if there's nobody in front of you
go to the upper left-hand corner and if
you find yourself over the the right-hand margin tell
the guy in front of you and eventually somebody will know what
to do like go to the next line right so
let's just say go do this
so I just gave you like a three
line formatter
right so this is bath
I'm going to set it off again
and I'm going
to point out that I can edit this let's let it
so I can turn general here into
justify
and it's
just redoing this over and over again all
right so the editor is actually working
faster is to say hey don't follow the leader here because this is just for the crowd
when it's time to
wait until the guy in front of you gets to the right place
and then go right behind him so this
is called jump and here's what that looks like now
they're all standing still
okay
and so if I start jump here and I just say now do this in between frame times
bunk
okay so
all of the editing here is done like this and
in fact this is another
one of the documents in this Universal document system
remember we have to do Microsoft Office here but
why would anybody in the right mind give you
seven applications that all do almost the same thing
but not quite
well the answer is
simple because amazingly people will put
up with this silliness enough to buy it from them and thus
encourage them further
this is nonsense
really
what you want is a universal document in just different
ways really don't
a different system for the World Wide Web do
you know because it's just a different way of accessing
these multimedia Docs so
this is a this is actually how we write code so
this is an explanation to somebody
like you to
show in a
little essay how the how the code actually how
the code actually works so
we start off here and
thing we want to do is just get these guys
out there randomly
so these two lines of these two little boxes of
code do this and here's
one that just does this without the worrying
about the next line
and here
are some special cases
so
this is a reminiscent of the way Knuth sometimes
likes to program so
you actually learn the thing while you're while
you're looking at it you can do little experiments and
by the time you've done that bingo
you've got the thing
and so here the this
is a yet another problem oriented language but with
rules this time so rule base
so two seven rules for doing the layout
and
the whole editor
like microsoft word paragraphs
is 35 rules
okay so that's all you have
to do for that
's very useful to have is problem-solvers
but the problem with problem solvers and
these these problem oriented languages they're problem solvers they
aren't integrated so you
wind up with a hodgepodge of different things
serving different things and you want to be able to integrate them so
so here are we can have a simplex solver
differential equations propagation dynamic programming
relaxing the rules for
the paragraph these all have different problem domains
and what we want to do is to approach
strategically as I've been talking about here through
general relational languages that
talk to a kind of a little
operating system for solvers and often
with the help of an expert system that helps make
a strategy for using these things the
further stuff here is beyond the scope of this
short talk so I'll just move on here
okay
here's an important idea too
many ideas in this talk right but
here's something that happened in
the 60s except nobody noticed it except maybe
the ARPA researchers and the outgrowth
of that to Xerox PARC and that is that
the entire paradigm of computing because
of Moore's law was going to be able to shift
from a gear like way of doing things
basically tight coupling a
brittle code to something
more like ecology something more biological and
we use these ideas very strongly in
the invention of the internet and in the invention
object-oriented techniques that we used for software at
Xerox PARC and the deal here is
you can fix a clock but you can only make clocks of a
certain size maybe a thousand gears B for the
dis class this is what happens in today's programming
you have to negotiate with the system and
a lot of what growing the old world into this new world
is learning what it means to do this kind of negotiation as
you add more system elements so
the
is just a couple of minutes of gloss because
I'm getting close to the end here but I wanted
to say something about systems and
three of the ideas here are that
we want to control time I mentioned this a little
bit before we do not want to CPU to control time first we
control time and we'll do it by simulating
our own time we don't want to have
any preferred center so we want to have something like the internet
all the way down and we want loose coupling
now of course this has all been done before again
with networks and
here's here now we're looking at physical computers on the
internet or Ethernet and ideally
we'd like our computations
to be software versions of
these hardware networks why
because
in most cases we will need to do load
we'll be able to run all of these guys on a single
machine in which case we just have increased
integrity and ability to
design quickly but a lot of the time
especially now with mobile we want to have the same
computations able to drift around
the network to different kinds of devices
and in some cases not all of the computation
is going to want to be in the machine that is next
to the user interface so if you think of the user
interface here it's basically a set of views
of processes that are
giving it images to integrate
up on the surface so
here's a great thing if you're interested Dave reads
1978 PhD thesis at
MIT the design of
an operating system for the internet was
never never done but we validated it a
viewpoints so this
is what if you want to make a system that is the size of the internet
hat is a software system what is it that you have to
do to absolutely ensure that
your going to be that your you're going
to have what people like to call data integrity
always so that no matter where you
ask a question anywhere on the network about anything anywhere
on the network you will get the same answer for
the pseudo time referent
of that question and
a working version of a
migratory system was done by Jerry
Popek I put this up here because this
written in the 80s you can still get it from MIT press
the locusts distributed system architecture you'll
find the entire book interesting just a
little volume but the first two chapters are a classic
still of the issues you have to
think about and solve in order to do this but
again this has all been done this is almost 30 years
old now but nobody uses it
but if
you were to use it all applications are now just mashups
right we don't want applications as smoke stacks
because we want to integrate so we didn't have
at Xerox PARC and we did not have operating systems
and the current web
which is getting more and more complicated can immediately get
simple except for all the legacy stuff that
has been done so far so
here's something that viewpoints has
on its list but it's we
expect not to be able to solve this at least in
this path of doing things and it
may be beyond may require a much larger
effort than a small nonprofit
can do but if you think about analogies
to what's happening with the scaling that's
going on here it basically starts looking like
a biological ecology
and these have their own dynamics
and they need to be thought about in special ways
so the ability for us
to scale to what Moore's law
allowing right now is going to require us to start thinking more and
this and we did this to some extent when we did the internet
like I have a degree in molecular biology in my
misspent youth and so
a lot of the ways I think about this stuff is through
tissue biology and how
the hundred trillion cells in our body work
without having a dedicated Center and so forth
but in computing we have problems of
our our own that are special then the next step
beyond this the best book I've ever seen about it is
Minsky society of Mind book which is actually
about a model for human psychology but in
fact it is a very good model for
what the Internet is going
to turn into okay
so the punchline here we've got three main operating systems
I won't say which one is the lemon and
down
on the bottom here our little
Frankenstein monster that we made is that I shall
been showing you today is less than 20,000 lines of code so
it's worth pondering we
are not using any of the Macintosh software
in order to do this demo
and
here's just to kick off I
think I'll just show this slide and then quit
I organized the talk so I can
stop now at any place and I need to in about a minute
but I'll just leave this one thought
with you maybe we can have a few questions and then
maybe more will happen I think there's
a smaller group question session
coming up later but
let's think about this idea something appears and we've
got two things about it that are very different there's
news and new news is the stuff that
is incremental to the categories
that we already know almost every bit of news
is a specific parameter
into some category that we already understand
so it's this war that killing
this marriage
that hems is that
right and you can get a quite a bit
of this out in a few minutes
so there's almost no context to news that it's
not already inside of our own head
new on the other hand real new
not news
real new is invisible we don't
have a category McLuhan said until
I believe it I can't see it that
is the way it works in the human nervous system and
so news is something
that's been going on for the entire existence
of the human race about two hundred thousand years
it's basically campfires and this is what we're doing right now this
is a campfire I'm doing the best I can do
in an hour of telling stories in a campfire
but the problem is new
can take two to five years
to get the new categories
that you need in order to actually see it and one
of the unfortunate things that happens is that
new when you try to talk about it and people make
on it they usually transform it
back into news so for instance
we did this as a way of boosting
mankind it was
all about learning by doing but
in fact almost everybody in the world uses it only as a
consumable device for their
own convenience I would spend
thousand five hundred dollars which is the price of an average
American car for a laptop if
I could because I know what computers are good for
but in fact people only value them as as much as
they value their television sets and they use them roughly the way they
use their television sets so the big
problem whenever something new comes along like
personal computing and the internet is that
people when they see a
convenience to themselves they recast it back
the forms that they know about so for instance object-oriented
programming never made it outside of Xerox PARC
only the term did we got designer jeans
but designer jeans are just dungarees
with a fancy label on them thank