Tom Graves / Tetradian

Just one of those too-early-in-the-morning ideas that arise between getting up and getting moving for the day.

Been thinking back to my (too-many) years of programming, and the various ways we described the process of change, right down at the level of code.

As a language, English fits quite well with the ideas we express in software. (Or possibly vice versa, of course.) Everything is based around a notion of state: a variable is some value, and then it becomes something else, with not much mention of what happens in between.

Much the same notion appears in most (IT-oriented) enterprise-architectures: there’s the current state – what something is – and the future state – what we want something to be – with, again, not much description of what happens between, other than perhaps some vague plan or ‘roadmap’ for change.

But in the real world, there is no state. Everything is in transit, in flux, constantly becoming something else, moving constantly from has-been to being to will-be. Few things follow a simple true/false logic, switching instantaneously from one predefined state to another; instead, most things follow a more blurry, messy modal-logic of probability and possibility, and sometimes (often?) may arrive somewhere else entirely other than what we expect. So how do we describe that fluidity, that emergence?

What triggered this off was a half-awake pondering about the old programming notations of : and =. The various programming-languages often use these in different ways, an almost random mixture, in all manner of combinations: :, =, ::, :=, =:, == and so on. The : tends to be used for definitions, for constants; the = can be used for definitions too, but also often carries the idea of assignment, of change, as in the original BASIC syntax of ‘LET X = …’. Confusing.

Yet it struck me that this can also be a neat way to describe being versus becoming:

• : implies definition – it denotes what something is, a condition of being
• = implies intent – it denotes what something will be (or that we hope or intend something will be…), a different condition of ‘being’ than that which currently pertains
• hence := implies a story of change, the transition from : to = – it denotes the often-messy, often-iterative, always-somewhat-uncertain process of becoming

It still doesn’t give us any simple way to describe the past, to denote ‘what has been but no longer is’ – but that’s something else to ponder about, I guess.

As I said, it’s just an idea. But useful to someone, I hope?

Ideafarming.

Sometimes a word will pop up out of nowhere, like the mushrooms did yesterday on the grass verge just down the road on this small suburban block.

But ‘ideafarming’ is a good way to describe the work that I do:  like a old-style farmer, planting seeds for new ideas, tending them, nurturing them, watching them grow.

Perhaps not as exciting as fishing for facts; perhaps not as challenging as herding cats; yet in its own way definitely as much hard work as either of those, and it has its own quiet pleasures too.

Different styles of ideafarming, of course. Some go for a machine-like monoculture, repeating the same ideas over and over again to reap the maximum benefit before the ground itself is exhausted – at which point an overly-artificial hydroponics-style approach may be the only option left. Others are aggressive – almost obsessive, even – in their war against the weeds: “Any idea needs to be challenged, vigorously and early … to make it more resilient”, thundered one erstwhile colleague – a tactic which seems more like ripping every tender young shoot out of the ground to check if it’s growing. My own ideafarming is probably more organic in style: watching, waiting, letting things be, letting things grow together in unexpected ways, companion-planting between disparate ideas and the like.

Some ideas ripen quickly, to give a quick harvest – but those ideas tend to be the most perishable of all, and getting them to market in time can be a chancy business. Other ideas are more predictable, perhaps with a yearly harvest – but that can mean long gaps where the work is as hard as ever but still no return in sight. Others again may take years, decades, even centuries, before they start to yield their crop – the metaphoric grapevines, hazels, chestnuts, walnuts of the ideafarmer’s harvest. They all look much the same when their first shoots first push their way out of the ground – and yet each needs nurturing in their own distinctive ways. Often the nurturing consists of deliberately ‘doing no-thing’ – which is not the same as ‘doing nothing’; and sometimes what we most need to do may make no sense at all to ‘outsiders’ – such as the paradoxical advice that “in order to remember something you never knew, first set out to forget it”.

And we’re always at the mercy of the elements, too. City-folks may see the machinery that we ideafarmers use – the mobile-phone, the library, the computer as metaphoric combine-harvester – and think that that’s what does all the work; but the reality is that those machines do nothing on their own, they help us in our work, but they don’t make the ideas grow at all. If we’re fortunate, and skilled, and careful, we may indeed at times have a bumper harvest, a glut of new ideas; but sometimes – and sometimes even for years – nothing will grow. Stuck. No matter how much we might like it to be otherwise, it’s not something we can control.

So we ideafarmers tend to be of a taciturn temperament: quiet, reflective, often rather solitary, a bit scruffy, perhaps, even a bit eccentric in our ways at times. Observant, yes – because we have to be; careful; innovative, always trying something new, yet always aware of how things work out over the longer term, looking to the future by being carefully aware of the present and the past. Passionate about what we do – as anyone can see at any conference – yet often irritable with those who get overly excited about everything: after all, there’s not much room for excitement in a working life that for the most part consists of watching, very carefully, at the way the grass grows.

And it’s a working life that never stops: get up in the morning, walk the fields, tend the fences, watch for pests and predators, for termites and ‘term-hijacks‘, for wild ideas and other weeds that will run rampant if we don’t watch out for what’s happening to our would-be harvest; a moment’s rest on the porch at sunset, perhaps, but then it’s time to settle down to get ready for yet another day. We don’t have much time for the bustle of the market: the work is calling – never stops calling – for our attention, we know we have to get back to the farm. And ideafarmers don’t take vacations as such: the ideas continue to grow whether we’re there or not, so we’re always working even when we’re not at work. We don’t have much choice about that: ideafarming isn’t a job, it’s more a way of life, a way of being. In reality, it’s not just something that we ‘do’: we’re ideafarmers because that’s who we are.

Ideafarming. A strange job, but someone’s gotta do it, I guess?

Guy Kewney died this morning. One of the legends of computer-journalism.

Unlike some of his colleagues such as David Tebbutt, I never knew Guy personally, so there’s really nothing I can add in that sense. Yet reading through the comments in David’s wonderful ‘Some words for Guy’ weblog, I came across a pointer to Guy’s very first column for the British computer-magazine Personal Computer World, way back in 1978. (Warning: the whole file is over 16Mb: GoogleDocs version is here.) The article is on p.14, and the last part of it seems amazingly prescient:

“Yet that potential [of the computer] is nearly ended. It was extended by the ignorance of semiconductors designers who decided to imitate computer memory with transistors, rather than looking at the whole field of computer architecture and saying ‘what have we here?’.

“What we have here is a computer which , when asked for the one faulty item in 10,000, has to check all 10,000 to see which it is. How much better to have a computer which merely says to its component parts, ‘Any faulty items report here at once.’

“The ability to give memory that processing power has existed for something like five years already. Associative processing has been largely ignored because the markets for supplying cheaper forms of Von Nuemann components were easier to satisfy – but the limitations of a sequential processor have nearly been reached.

“But not by us, the private users of computers. We are only on the edge of a revolution which will make the printing press, the telephone and the motor car look like minor items on a shopping list, as the population gets ‘on line’. And from here on, the history of computing will be the history of society, not just of calculators.”

His comment about ‘the limitations of a sequential processor have nearly been reached’ might at first seem a bit off, but I think he’s right: all that’s actually been done over the last thirty years has been to try to bypass those limitations by cramming more and more and faster and faster items with the same limits into the one unit of space and effective-time – the limitations haven’t been addressed at all. If so, then we’ve barely even started yet: the past thirty years have been a side-excursion down a wrong-turning, as usual for the wrong reasons (i.e. that it was the cheap-and-quick-and-easy option rather than the most fruitful one), and it may take us some time to get back to the main track again. Very interesting indeed…

Which brings me to another point: about how to do more than merely celebrate a great thinker’s life? Personal reflection is one side of this, yet professional reflection is something different again. The usual suggestion, especially in this context, would be to re-publish selected items from that person’s work: I know some people are already planning to do this with Guy’s writings. Yet what interests me even more is about what we do with a great person’s legacy – how would we continue that legend?

Guy used LiveJournal to document the later progress of his life; it seems to me that there would be real value in an equivalent to record new ideas that are linked to a specific person after their passing. Kind of like academic attribution, or with a blog, the same way that we would use web-links to reference an current article or tweet. Citations not for a completed idea by that person, but to acknowledge further ideas that are in part derived from or influenced by or extend the original work.

So is there some equivalent of LiveJournal that we could create for this, around which references to a specific person could coalesce? The technical side is relatively trivial – some practical problems around security, and ensuring that the work is treated with respect, but that’s about all. Conceptually it sits somewhere between LiveJournal and Wikipedia – much like Wikipedia, in fact, though with different guiding principles.

Seems an idea worth exploring, anyway –  comments or suggestions, anyone?

[And, of course, credit to Guy Kewney for triggering the idea.]