Does the government have any idea of which direction it should shoot?

Once in a while I read something that makes my blood boil.  Yesterday, around noon, a flurry of articles were published indicating that the Department of Justice intends to begin stricter enforcement of antitrust laws. Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney said the Justice Department is abandoning legal guidelines established by the Bush administration in September 2008.

So who is in the cross-hairs of the sniper rifle this time?  Sure it is Citibank, Bank of America, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo, right?

Wrong!  Google, Intel and Microsoft are the main targets.  Obama is shifting to the European approach to anti-monopoly action.  Since Google, Intel and Microsoft are constantly in trouble with European regulators, we can expect the same from the good old Federal Government.

Now, as much as I like small competitors like Borland (now dead), Yahoo (dying) and AMD (also in trouble), I know better than to think that monopoly power did it.  AMD simply failed to compete with Intel.  There were some very bad decisions there, such as the merger with ATI.  I know Yahoo has not been competitive with Google in terms of apps & hard information research for years now.  That isn't Google's fault.  Yahoo wanted to be a celebrity tabloid machine.  They decided move towards People Magazine on their own, and now they are fucked.  Borland died because it didn't seem to know how to market to corporate America.  They had awesome persuasive powers with true programmers, but they had no idea that they needed to market direct to corporate officers.  The CIO needed to be in the crosshairs.  They also had no idea that they needed to recruit MS Office power users.  It is a horrible thing that Borland basically died, but market-wise, they were stupid.

So, instead of breaking up the Banks, who fucked the entire world, the Justice Department intends to prepare anti-trust proceedings against Google, Intel and Microsoft.  These are the three most powerful and important firms in the high-tech sector of the world.  Incidentally, the tech sector is the only thing keeping our American economy afloat right now.  Boy, these supreme assholes in the Justice Department really don't have a fucking clue do they?

I have nothing against Trust Busting.  Teddy Roosevelt did it all the time.  He is one of my favorite guys, and I don't much like presidents and politicians.  If you are going to bust some trusts, bust the dangerous ones.  Don't go after the healthy, useful and benevolent ones.  For crying out loud!  Shoot strait will yah!?!?!?

This new policy statement indicates indicates that the Government does not know the difference between its ass and hole in the wall.  This has to be the most AFU announcement I have heard in sometime.

Why I don't like talking to other programmers online

Those who I work with know I don't spend much time online interacting with my fellow programmers.  Sometimes I regret this.  The websites we have today for interaction are vastly superior to the ones we used to have.  The web software itself is better, but the content is also much better.  You have multi-disciplinary coders, working with many languages, and many architectural patterns all sharing one common web forum these days.  Unfortunately, these cats seem to be in a perpetual flame war.

The problem is that most of the heavy users of these sites are beginners.  They ask a lot of questions, because they don't have much knowledge or experience.  Intermediate pros answer these questions.  They give very stereotypical platform-centric, ethnocentric advice.  You get rote Java advice from Java programmers.  You get rote VB advice from Visual Basic programmers.  Same thing goes for all the languages.  These guys do not know or understand each other's approaches.  No VB programmer is particularly honest about, or even aware of the flaws in his game plan.  Same is true for Java programmers, C++ programmers, C# programmers, Python programmers, etc.  Ethnocentrism reigns supreme all over these forums.

Very few of the guys on these forums have more than 10 years of experience.  Most of us stop coding before we reach age 10 as professional coders.  We get kicked up the chain of command.  This is what makes a brilliant guy like Robert C. Martin so amazing.  He has been coding for 39 years.  He just never stopped coding.  This is a deeply experienced polyglot programmer who really knows the answer to the question "Why?" because he has seen the full evolution of software development.  He lived through every movement. 

Recently, Uncle Bob had a smack down with the dudes at StackOverflow.com.  I was rather appalled.  The Stackoverflow gang wrote the site in C# and the Microsoft MVC framework.  Ergo, they are members of my most recent tribe.  I was shocked to see such good members of my tribe speak so ignorantly.

It was pretty clear to me that the very brilliant young entrepreneurs at StackOverflow.com did not use the SOLID techniques Uncle Bob advocates.  It is also clear that they felt threatened by the advent of SOLID, because an acceptance of these techniques would marginalize the StackOverflow.com software itself.  They took Uncle Bob to task for preaching SOLID.  As you listened to these podcasts, forum posts, and blogs, it became clear that the noise coming from the stackoverflow gang was driven of their own personal insecurities about the status and longevity of StackOverflow.com rather than the validity of Uncle Bob's SOLID principles.  They didn't want to talk about SOLID.  They wanted to talk about owning a business.

Uncle Bob knows this.  He did a caper Podcast with Scott Hanselman in which the recapped this smack down.  Although he didn't explicitly say it in this way, Uncle Bob gave me every impression that he knew he was dealing with young and insecure entrepreneurs floating on their very first life-boat on the high-seas of commercial SAS.

Older, veteran, multi-lingual programmers with 14 years of experience and 4 or 5 major languages worth of professional experience have a hard time finding people to talk too.  Programmers are rare.  Veterans are scarce.  Multi-lingual veterans are seldom seen.  I wonder if it is possible to form a club where the scarce 2000+ of us might get together on line.  We would have to restrict membership quite sharply.  No monolingual or mono-platform guys allowed.  If you are Unix only, you are out.  If you are Mac only, you are out.  If you are Windows only, you are out.  If you are C/C++ only, you are out. If you are VB.NET only, you are out.  etc.

If such a forum existed, it would be possible for serious and objective software engineers to discuss the patterns and practices of the various languages and platforms free from the sort of fundamentalism that drives so many in our field.  That would be a wonderful thing.  Can you imagine an objective discourse on the strengths and weakness of software systems?  Could be very beneficial.  

But you just can't discuss the pros and cons of Islam with Osama Bin Laden.  Neither can you discuss the pros and cons of VB.NET with a mono-lingual VB programmer.  Neither can you convince a Java programmer that Microsoft uses its own software to write MSN or Microsoft.com.  They think must be running on Unix because Windows doesn't scale.

The last time I had a "conversation" online, it was with a young Java programmer.  I am sure he would have embarrassed James Gosling.  I was doing a comparison of Java, C# and Scala.  He quickly got belligerent.  He seemed to think I was unfairly putting Java down, by not recognizing it's innate superiority to C# and Scala.  His response was to resort to mocking derisiveness.

The lad didn't seem to know that Java generics aren't real generics.  He didn't seem to know that Java lacks full lexical closures.  He was sure it couldn't be important if Java didn't have it.  He didn't know that closures have been burning topic #1 in Javaland for some 2 years now.  He didn't know what an event is.  He didn't know what a delegate is.  He didn't know what a Scala trait is.  He was quite sure Scala could not replace Java because it could never be as cross-platform as Java! (!!!)  He was very rude & insulting in the process.  Young men like to play king of the hill, and they want to beat you down.

I can recall the bad days of 1994 when I was first doing a bit of professional work on the market.  I was very insecure.  I didn't know if I could make it in life doing this particular line of work.  I didn't know how long it would last.  I did know the other options were worse.  But still, this profession might not be for me.  One thing I knew:  Borland and Pascal were my only life-line.  An attack on these agents was an attack upon my livelihood.  I took any objective criticism as an attempt to sink my ship.

I am sure that the young Java lad was in the same boat.  He is probably working on his first pro assignment.  He knows some Java and nothing else.  Any objective critique of Java is immediately interpreted as an attempt to sink his financial lifeboat.  He must respond vigorously.  Most other members of the tribe feel this way.

Still, you can imagine that a guy like me dislikes dealing with a young guy like that.  He can't discuss the pros and cons of his system.  He just isn't experienced enough.  At this point, he would not be willing to be honest about it.  He really can't hear what you say because fear of financial collapse.

This is the rant of a lonely old programmer who has nobody to talk too.  Many of these points are being refreshed in my mind day by day as I learn Scala.  Many programmers around me, particularly those I work with, have no idea why I would ever want to learn a language like Scala.  They believe I am letting down the Microsoft faction.  

What these young fellows don't know or understand is that you can't get married for life if you are a programmer.  Computer languages are not women.   You do not wed a language or vendor as you would a woman.  Even if you did, languages and vendors die, ergo in death shall you part.  Neither are languages religions.  You do not experience a religious conversion experience and become a programmer of language XYX.  

Excited about Scala

I am excited about Scala! Those of you who know me know that I am a career-long Micorosoft Developer. First with Borland tools, second with Microsoft tools. Delphi & Paradox gave me my first real taste of professional success late in 1994, but there has been plenty of VB and C# along the way. Ergo, it will suprise many of you to know that I am excited about Scala.

For those who don't know, Scala is an OOPS/Functional hybrid language which primarily focuses on the Java VM and J2EE framework. It does run under .NET, but good luck in finding tool other than Notepad to program with.

Speaking of tools, the primary reason I have not learned Scala already was the tool experience. I am not a fan of EMACS. I piss on VI. I detest Notepad. Don't show me a plain text editor and expect me to accept that as a development environment. I am Borland guy at heart. I expect and advanced IDE, powerful tools, and a great experience. Borland JBuilder shocked the Java world, and tools like Eclipse and Netbeans followed quickly. Borland guys want killer IDEs. Visual Studio wasn't always the most advanced environment. Microsoft was forced to compete on an entirely different level by Borland.

Sadly, until just yesterday, I just couldn't get any of the plugins for Eclipse, Netbeans or even IntelliJ to work correctly with my installation of the Java SDK, and my installation of Scala. Without a good development environment, I just would not get into the language.

Wonderfully enough, this all worked out last night. I noted that there was a new edition of a Scala plugin for the Eclispe environment provided directly by the Scala team. I grit my teeth as I began to think of another major disapointment. It took some effort to get it going under Windows 7, and this effort included installing the basic JRE on top of my already installed JSE.

With that done, I only need to change the the developer "Perspective" in Eclispe to Scala, and begin work. Marvelously, everything worked. I could create a new Scala project. I could create Scala classes. I could compile. I could run. I could get correct results. I could copy code fragments from tutorials into Scala text files, compile them, and execute them. They all worked, exactly as expected.

Believe it or not, this was precisely what I could not do before last night. Copying code directly from tutorial pages into the editor would produce all manner of strange errors. Most assured me that this was a consiquence of integration problems between the development environments and the Scala compiler. That turned out to be the case, but it was little comfort when I was chomping at the bit, ready to go. It reminded me of the early days of Visual Basic 1.0, which was nasty buggy.

So why the hell do I care about Scala? I have been looking around for the next big thing for some time. I am looking for pure technical merit. I don't give a fuck about fashion trends. I rarely trust the uber geeks. It is clear to me that Ruby on Rails was advocated by Adobe web artists who clearly did not understand binary data types. It is clear to me that Erlang is being advocated by a certain species of Uber Geek that wants to exclude the mass-majority of rank & file programmers from their secrete club. When I look for the next big thing, I am looking for something with lasting and enduring power. For a number of reasons, I think Scala could be that thing.

Why?

1. Multi-parallelism: We are coming into a new era where every machine is can execute 4 simultaneous threads on a minimum of 4 cores {laptops are stuck at 2 cores these days, but even this is changing}.  Also, Hyper-threading is making a comeback.  Four-core chips like the Intel Core i7 are hyper-threaded, meaning it can execute 8 simoltaneous threads. Apple is already shipping a PowerMac with a pair of i7 Xeon processors.  That box will execute 16 simoltaneous threads.  WOW!   Right now, everybody I know {particularly my local Visual Basic programmers} are living in a violent state of denial about the implications of these developments. They intend to go on programming in a single threaded execution mode forever... or until somebody runs them out of the industry. I guarentee you, they will get run out of the industry. We are going to have to start programming in parallel. Scala offers us Actors, which are the easiest method for doing parallel programming I have ever seen.
   
2. Brevity: Scala seems to be a very terse language. It is the most terse thing I have seen since Python. Unlike Python, it does not achieve that brevity by going dynamic, omitting all type references, or type declarations. This is very good. You can write less code and get type-safety also
3. Immutable Data: Scala is a functional language. With it comes a couple of features of functional programming with which I am completely enthralled by. The first is Immutable Data. Once assigned, a variable... er... identifier becomes immutable and cannot change again in scope... unless you explicitly declare it as mutable. Most Ruby and VB programmers would blanch at this and turn white as a sheet. These buggers often want to change the class types of variables at runtime, not just the value of the variable itself. This is dreadfully unsafe. It also increases your Cyclomatic complexity dramatically. Immutable data means safer, more predictable, more stable software. This is going to be a tough discipline for some to learn, but we have to get used to it. It is good.
4. Monads: One of the terms Functional Programmers have added to our lingo in the past two years is the term Side-Effects. Side Effects are any changes to the state of the system which an application might perform at run time. Printing a document is a side effect. Writing changes to a database is a side effect and can create other side effects. Changing the users display is a side effect and can have other side effects. It turns out that things like network IO are the sources of most failures & errors these days. When you print, you cannot know for sure that the network is fully functional. You cannot know the printer is on. You cannot know the printer is loaded with paper. You cannot know it has ink or toner. When you make a web request, you cannot know the target website is up and running. We trust these things will work on a daily basis, but sometimes they do not. Functional programers have decided all such side effects must be locked inside a class type called a Monad. A Monad explicitly declares what sort of side effect will be created, and an entirely different level of error handling is imposed. This is a marvelous thing. I love it.
5. Traits: Traits are basically implement interfaces. If I have a series of common methods (say Load or Save) which must be implemented in identical fashion for 4 or 5 different class prototypes, I can now tack on a trait which will contain these methods. All the code is implemented in one place. This promotes very dry coding. Also, you can type variables according to their traits, just as you can by Interface in Java or C#. This is truly a simple and brilliant idea. I wish we had it in C#.
6. Super-Generics: For those who don't know, .NET offers us a pretty good implementation of generic collections. We can also make our own generic methods and generic classes. Java has a pretty poor implementation of Generics. In either case, both languages are out-classed by Scala. Scala brings the full-house of type-parametrization found in functional languages. This is well beyond what we are used to in .NET.
7. Functions are objects: The great shock to all imperative programmers like myself comes when we discover that we can make a generic dictionary of functions, or generic stack of functions, and pass that data structure full of actual code-functions to another class as a parameter for the further processing of data. I am not talking about passing the results of one call to function in a data stack. I am talking about passing the function itself. The possibilities boggle the mind. I have seen some stunning things done with this feature, not the least of which is pretty slick compilers and interpreters.

There are many other things that intrigue me, not the least of which is the LIFT web framework. I am very excited about the notion of writing my first website in LIFT and deploying that WAR file to Glassfish or Tomcat. I think it should be damn interesting,