Wildly Over-ambitious Book Title of the Week

One of my co-workers has on his desk "Teach yourself SQL in 10 minutes". Yes, it is a SAMS book.

According to Ben Forta, the author, it is one of the best selling SQL books of all time. Not surprisng: who could resist a title like that?

I like his emphasis on getting stuff done. Even so, I think ten minutes is just about long enough to decide whether to pronounce it "sequel" or "ess queue ell".

J G Ballard: an appreciation

From time to time radio programmes and newspapers come round to discussing the most important post-war English language novelist. To my mind there is only one candidate. Ballard was one of that select band of writers whose world view is so singular that it has become an adjective. We can describe a motorway flyover, shopping mall or stretch of industrial wasteland as Ballardian and instinctively expect our audience to know what we mean.

Ballard was attracted to these alienating structures not because he hated people, precisely the opposite. Ballard was a very sociable man who loved life. What Ballard disliked were people who relinquished their individuality to become part of some wider, blander community, whether it be the Home Counties conservatism of the expats in the Shanghai of his childhood or the zombie-ite consumerism of New Labour's Britain. He enjoyed individuals who rejected conformity and gave free rein to their enthusiasms, even if that led them into self-destructive psychopathology. The brutal concrete of a multi-storey car park or the glittering perfection of a science park on the Cote D'Azur serve simply to emphasize the humanity of the protagonists.

As a writer he was a superb stylist. Sometimes his relish for incorporating the language of modern professional writing - physics journals, medical advertising, corporate press releases - teetered on the verge of parody. But his books were always full of striking images and precisely targeted metaphors. He also had a sly sense of humour, for which I think he was under appreciated.

Although Ballard was pegged as a science fiction writer he was never interested in the technology so much as our response to it. His stories almost never deal with the struggle to get a man on the Moon but rather the isolation of the astronaut after he has returned to Earth. He always had an ambivalent attitude to technology, being in favour of things which increase our sense of vitality - cars, aircraft - and distrustful of those which deaden sensation - word processors, fitted kitchens. His awareness of the built environment extended to the virtual environment of television and advertising. He was one of the earliest writers to analyse the modern obsession with celebrity, seeing it as a logical development of globalised media. I think he was vindicated by the narrative arc of Jade Goody; Reality TV is very Ballardian.

Now Ballard has lost his own battle against cancer. I've been reading his books for over thirty years and the news that there will be no more is hard to comprehend. The obituaries will dwell on Empire of the Sun, Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition. I will always have a soft spot for Vermillion Sands, a collection of short stories set in a futuristic holiday resort situated in the middle of a desert. The melancholy surrealism of the golden sands and blue skies provides a backdrop for a series of psychodramas involving the usual panoply of damaged eccentrics. Ballard applied the techniques of science fiction to produce works with a haunting poetry. It's lovely, evocative stuff. His autobiography, Miracles of Life, is a fascinating, inspirational read too.

J G Ballard 1930 - 2009. RIP.

All about me

I have been tagged by Tim Hall who was tagged by Chris Muir who was tagged by Dan Norris who was tagged by Jake Kuramoto. This gives me a Jake Number of 4. Not very flattering. [It turns out I have a Jake Number of 2 - see Laurent Schneider's comment. APC]

Of course, even by the solipsistic standards of regular blogging, this blog-tag tsunami is very narcissistic. Still, as Oscar Wilde once observed, the only thing worse than being blog-tagged is not being blog-tagged. And it annoys Howard Rogers, so here goes.

1. My nickname Arfur C comes from my schooldays. It derives from the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke, who presented a TV series on unexplained phenomena. I railed against the nickname for a couple of weeks but without success and now I like it.
   
2. I am not Andy C. I think the real Andy C is the one who writes the Norman Brightside blog. There's also Andy Campbell who use to write the "Oracle Stuff I should Have Known" blog, but recently appears to have withdrawn from the blogospshere.
   
3. I can't program in C, which I think means I'm not a real techie..
   
4. I'm a consultant with an annual season ticket. In fact, out of the nigh on thirteen years in my career with LogicaCMG I have had only three weeks of working away from home.
   
5. One of my heroes is the late Quentin Crisp, the closest thing to a Taoist sage Britain has produced.
   
6. I use too many cuss words. It's not due to a paucity of vocabulary but just because I enjoy swearing.
   
7. I still define myself by the music I like. I probably should have grown out of that by now. Of course I am less tightly wound. I don't think that listening to the Fall makes me cooler than somebody who listens to Billy Joel ... er, hang on a mo, actually I do think that.
   
8. Whilst I read lots - blogs, bits of manuals, newspapers, magazines - I haven't read a whole actual book in months.
   

There can't be many bloggers left to tag. I am pretty sure that none of the following have been "it" yet...

Gints Plivna
Neil Jarvis
Adrian Billington
Duncan Mills
Frits Hoogland
Roel Hartman

Meeting William Gibson

Not many novelists bring out the fanboy in me, but Gibson is one of them. Neuromancer was, literally, the book that changed my life. It's why I decided to become a computer programmer.

In the summer of 1986 I was a disillusioned History student about to become a disillusioned History graduate. I had finished my finals, I had no job lined up and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. It was in this state of aimlessness that - inspired by an article by William Leith in the NME - I purchased Neuromancer. It was the first pure SF novel I had read in years and it was completely gripping. I can still recall the adrenal rush of the last few chapters, racing through them just to discover how the story ended.

I had read SF as an adolescent but discovering JG Ballard had derailed me: nothing else in the genre could quite match the intensity of his prose. At university I had read mainly non-fiction: there was so much reality to discover, it seemed pointless to read to stuff people had made up. When I was studying European heresy my tutor John Critchley advised me to read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (I was chuffed to explain to him that the blind librarian Jorge of Burgos was a reference to Jorge Luis Borges, because that joke had passed him by). I also read Mishima because I did courses on both medieval and modern Japan, and he seemed appropriate. For light relief I read Italo Calvino's short stories and the Blandings novels of P.G.Wodehouse.

I realise that list probably makes me sound like an insufferable prick. But then I probably was an insufferable prick at university, so that's fair.

I'm not going to do a review here. I presume everybody who reads blogs has read Neuromancer. If that's not the case stop reading this right now and go read it. Like most SF it has dated but not as badly as some. Few SF authors have changed the world. My quasi-namesake Arthur C Clarke did, with his invention of the geosynchronous satellite, but largely his vision has not been realised. No lunar explorers have disinterred mysterious black slabs because there are no bases on the moon. Heck, nobody's even been to the moon for over thirty years. Whereas it's a measure of the impact Gibson's writing has had on the world that he has stopped writing SF and moved into regular fiction without any meaningful change of tone or subject matter. (I guess Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison and others have also had something to do with it).

Gibson's insight was to take the glamour which traditionally attached to spaceships and astronauts and transfer it to computers and programmers, who were - it's fair to say - not glamourous. At Exeter the Comp Sci students were pimply-faced youths in brown and beige, as boring as accountants. In fact, more boring: at least there were some girls amongst the accountancy students. Neuromancer changed that image by making computers cool, sexy and edgy. Which is why it has had such a profound effect on modern life. All over the world, pimply-faced youths in brown and beige set about immanentising a world in which computers - and by extension the people who worked with them - were cool sexy and edgy.

Neuromancer was Gibson's first novel. In 1986 it was a bit frustrating to discover that there wasn't anything else to read by him. I just had to wait until Count Zero came out. On the other hand it does mean that every few years there is a new novel to look forward to.

So today I joined the line of people to buy a signed copy of Gibson's new novel, Spook Country, at Forbidden Planet. I told him I was grateful to him for writing Neuromancer because it had directed me into a career in software development. His face crinkled with recognition. "Oh you're one of those guys," he said. Yep, I'm one of those guys.

Asking the right question

Many years ago, before I had even heard of Oracle the database, I studied the I Ching, a different kind of oracle. This book is one of the many products of the period in ancient Chinese history known as The Hundred Schools of Thought. Its authorship is ascribed to the legendary Yellow Emperor various legendary figures (see Chris Gait's comment below) but it is actually the collected thoughts and commentaries of various unknown seers. The text distils Taoism, Confucianism and other strands of Chinese philosophy into an esoteric instruction manual. It is organised into sixty-four chapters, each represented by a symbol consisting of six lines (hence called hexagrams). Each line is either Yin or Yang, and the different proportions of each type of line gives each hexagram its particular nature.

Consulting the I Ching requires us first to frame a question. We then employ a randomness-generating mechanism (such as flipping coins) to find which hexagram will answer our question. The commentaries on the hexagrams use imagery from nature, mythology and society to provide gnomic advice:

• "The dragon that goes too high has regrets."
  
• "When there is hoarfrost underfoot solid ice is not far off."
  
• "Whoever hunts deer without the forester only loses his way in the forest."

We then have to apply these answers to our original question by translating the metaphors. So, if I am hunting a deer, who (or what) is the forester who can guide me through the forest? Perhaps I need to call off the chase until I have found a verderer.

Friends would occasionally ask me to "do" the I Ching for them, because they misunderstood the nature of the book. Although it is often described as a book of divination it is not a fortune telling device like horoscopes or tarot cards. It does not violate the principle of causality; its predictions can only come true if we behave in the way it suggests. A dragon who knows when to stop ascending will have no regrets. So I always told my friends they needed to have a question in mind before they flipped the coins (they didn't have to tell me the question, by the way). If there is no question there can be no answer.

So does it work? Well, the meaning of the answer derives from the interpretation of it in the light of the original question. A focused request such as "Should I take this new job?" is more likely to produce illumination than something vague like "Why am I unhappy?". But meaning is in the mind of the questioner. Sometimes the hexagrams seemed spookily appropriate to the question. Other times they seemed to have no relevance at all. On one occasion my interpretation of the chosen text differed sharply from the questioner's interpretation.

The I Ching has a world view and a specific definition of correct behaviour. But I don't think somebody has to be a practicing Taoist or believe in the literal existence of Yin and Yang in order to gain benefit from the book. Finding harmony between contending forces is a common idea. For example, here is an article by WTF's Alex Papadimoulis on striking the balance between hard coding and soft coding.

I don't do I Ching consultations any more. Now I just spend my time in the OTN forums instructing herberts like this and this in the art of asking questions properly. Different oracle, same old stuff.

In my Inbox this morning

We provide the ointments you require at really reasonably priced.

Hmmm. Seems like the spammers are moving into haemoroid treatments.

The easter egg was the random text added to defeat the spam filters. This comprised a snippet of Hans Christian Anderson and two nibbles from Jane Austen's "Persuasion". I'm particularly taken with the phrase "all histories are against you" which from now on I shall regularly drop into arguments.

Programming: is it an art?

Ming Chow writes in his O'Reilly blog that a computer program is no different than a novel. Hmmm. Obviously both books and programs comprise words ¹ whose organisation is governed by syntax; both are written. But as activities writing a novel and writing a program are completely different.

For a start novelists are writing a story to please themselves. Programmers, on the other hand, are writing a set of instructions for a machine to meet their users' requirements. Novelists work on their own. Programmers usually work as part of a team. This means their work has to conform to common standards and have a consistent presentation. The only writers who have to work like that are a bunch of Parisian surrealist poets playing the Exquistite Corpse game.

I would particularly take issue with this statement:

Source code should be read like a novel, and great programs should be planned so like any great novel.

I don't think source code should read like a novel. Even back in the days when I was writing COBOL the code was modular. In the modern world of object-oriented programs, loose coupling, configuration files and code re-use any resemblence to linear narrative has gone right out the window.

Furthermore, few novelists do plan their novels in any great detail. Rather they start off with an initial idea, invent a character or two and see what happens next. It's not unusual to hear a novelist say in an interview that they were surprised by what one of their characters said or did. Most have only the vaguest idea of how the plot will resolve itself until they get to the end of the book. Which, on reflection, does sound a lot like eXtreme Programming. That doesn't do lots of planning up front either.

As someone who studied history at university rather than a scientific discipline I'm alert to the possibilities of regarding programming as an art. Although there are some similarities some similarities with novel writing I would regard film-making as a much more analogous activity. There's teamwork, the studio system, the need to meet a budget, open source as a Woody Allen/Russ Meyer independent movie maker, etc. Indeed, watching Lost In La Mancha, a documentary about Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to film Don Quixote was just like watching a film about a computer project crashing. But writing software is primarily an engineering activity. I find I get much more insight from pondering the metaphorical implications of structural engineering, classical architecture and town planning. These all feel like activities that have a greater bearing on programming than reading a biography of Charles Dickens.

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^{1. Except for languages like BF of course. (back)}