10 ms·

Anyone know where to find the full length interview? This is just a clip. "We thought computing would be artisanal. We did not imagine great monopolies." In a

Anyone know where to find the full length interview? This is just a clip. "We thought computing would be artisanal. We did not imagine great monopolies." In a sense, it still is, and always will be. I feel that the core of programming, just making the computer do things other people want it to for money, will always lead us back to a highly individualized workflow, where a single programmer has complete mastery over the system. It's just that the programmer-artisan must find work in the context of these great, monopolistic organizations, which inevitably apply pressure to reduce the amount of skilled labor required to perform a given business function, and thereby increase the organization's leverage in salary negotiations, leading to hyper-specialized assembly line processes that eventually just stop working because no one has the broad systems-level knowledge required to trace a bug to its source anymore. It would be great if these monopolies could just accept the artisanal nature of software development and pay people what they're worth.

virgilp 9y ago
> I feel that the core of programming, just making the computer do things other people want it to for money, will always lead us back to a highly individualized workflow I would be willing to bet against that. In fact, it's safe to bet that "always X" is false regardless of X, especially when humans are in that equation. "Always" is a very long time :)
- tboyd47 9y ago
  I'm not a betting man, but history tends to repeat itself. If you read some of what was written in the 70s and 80s about programming, you often find certainty that programming is going to be commoditized and standardized within our lifetimes. I read one book where the author (who's very well-known in the CS world) was sure that by year 2000, we would have a standard catalog of programming tasks with labor estimates similar to what auto mechanics have. If anything, I think we're even further away from this now than we were in the 80s. It would be hard to find anyone who can even imagine such a catalog, much less create one.
  - virgilp 9y ago
    I heard an anecdote that in the late '60s someone put a bunch of interns in a room with with a few computers & digital camera to solve the object detection problem - he figured they'd be done by the end of the summer. 30 years later, that looked very much impossible to do. But 50 years later, it was eventually solved. Like I said - "always"/"never" are very long time periods...
    - mindcrime 9y ago
      This may refer to the project you mention there. http://www.lyndonhill.com/opinion-cvlegends.html http://www.lyndonhill.com/opinion-cvlegends.html
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      > But 50 years later, it was eventually solved. We've made progress, but I'd hesitate calling it "solved".
  - 8bitsrule 9y ago
    In the late 1970s, I was the only teacher with programming experience in a system. I will never forget the words of my superintendent, coming back from a conference in Arizona. The experts at the conference told everyone that the world wouldn't need many programmers in a few years. And so, he had concluded, the school wouldn't need more than the two Apple IIs it had borrowed.
luckydata 9y ago
The first time you build anything it's artisanal. Look at the process of building the first doll, or the first car etc... of a multi million run of the same object. The difference in software is once you're done with the first one, there's nothing else to do.
- fsloth 9y ago
  "The difference in software is once you're done with the first one, there's nothing else to do." I'm not sure if I parse what you wrote correctly. Currently we can't have enough software written. And solutions - patterns (but not in the god awful Gang-of-four sense) - are transferable between isomorphic problem spaces. Following the doll metaphor, a police doll, a firefighter doll, a child doll, a werewolf doll, a gorilla doll - * a bicycle!?*. Sometimes you truly come up with something totally new, and adapt.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    And a large part of the reason we can't get enough software written is that our teams are adversarially pitched against one another. One set of Great Minds is writing advertising, code, another ad-blockers, another HFT and financial derivatives crud that's quite likely to precipitate yet another financial speculation-bubble-crash cycle. And basic needs and wants go unanswered, in large part because those with the needs and wants have no financial means to pay for them. For numerous reasons, the information which should be more available and standardised ... is instead obfuscated and/or sliced-and-diced behind ad-ridden, paginated, metadata- and classification-free CMSes. You can dig in to find various economic, power, political, psychological, sociological, and other reasons for all of this. But the upshot is that the frenetic code-generating that's going on is doing little to move the needle on improving either quality-of-life or overall systemic health. Frequently the opposite. This is a Big Problem.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - BoiledCabbage 9y ago
IpV8 9y ago
People writing software are generally in the top 5% income level. Why do you feel that they are not being paid what they are worth?
- randomdata 9y ago
  I'm not sure that is generally true. The median software developer salary in the US is $102,280[1]. An income of $100,000 puts you in the top 9.15%[1]. A top 5% income writing software isn't completely unheard of, but it does not seem to be represented by any kind of majority. There are always outliers. [1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
  - IpV8 9y ago
    Thanks for fact checking me, I should have done my homework first. I still think that the 9.15% stat supports my claim though. I hang out with mostly non-engineers so its a bit comical to be shamed by hacker newsians for proposing that we get paid enough. Most studies on the matter have demonstrated that any income over 75k has no correlation on happiness, so for me I guess I feel more concerned about finding meaningful work than a higher salary. On another note, I am not sure why all of these people claiming to providing value equal to 10x their salary don't simply work for themselves and see if they can really rake in that much without the support of their company.
    - randomdata 9y ago
      I understand where they're coming from. Pay, of course, is a function of supply and demand. Nothing more, nothing less. The greater the demand, relative to the supply, the higher the price. We're constantly told that developers in high demand and that companies cannot find anyone to hire, to the point that the government has even pushed 'learn to code' programs to try and bring more people into this 'future industry', so price should be rising rapidly to close that gap... but it's not happening for the most part. So we have this disparity where the market is not reflecting what the media (et. al.) are reporting. I can see how that is leading to much confusion for those in the industry. In 2014, the median income for software developer, applications was $103,054.85[1] (in 2017 dollars). Today, the median income for software developer, applications is $102,212.06[2] (again, in 2017 dollars). Developer incomes are on the decline. It appears that we're reached equilibrium. If the industry was honest and said "go away, the industry is full" people would have less belief that they're worth more, but that's not the message we continue to hear. [1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/2014/may/oes151132.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/2014/may/oes151132.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
mempko 9y ago
except that most computers now are closed and dont allow control of the system. In fact, most comouters now dont even have adequate programming tools besides those meant for children.
davisr 9y ago
I emailed the author, and received this response: > I'm so glad you found the interview of interest. Unfortunately, as with our print interviews, the full unedited interview is not available. However if we get a number of similar requests, we may consider releasing a longer edit, Please message him; I'd be interested in an uncut version as well.
- tboyd47 9y ago
  Okay, I did!
- morphle 9y ago
  I also emailed Stephen.Cass[at]gmail.com for the uncut version
- IrishJourno 9y ago
  I'm the editor (Stephen Cass). I really should have added "independent" to "similar" in my response there, but oh well ;). Anyhoo instead of emailing me, you can just let me know here if this thread has inspired you to want to see a longer version! We're unlikely to just drop the raw footage (for the same reasons that journalists very rarely publish scans of the notes they take during interview, or the raw audio of any recordings, because part of our whole raison d'etre is editing things), but as I indicated, if there's enough interest to justify the resources, I could argue for a longer cut. (Also, ProTip re: the poster below, yes, my personal email is publicly available with a google, but no, it's not a good idea to send a lobbying email to a journalist's personal account when there's a known-good work address available, not least because who knows when that email is going to be seen, and depending on the journalist's filters, it might never be seen at all.)
  - mattgreenrocks 9y ago
    I'd definitely be interested in a longer cut. Thanks!
  - nzeribe 9y ago
    Me, too. Ted Nelson is a G.O.A.T.
walshemj 9y ago
I know its wrong but I'm imagining a Hoxton based start up offering artisanal computer bureau running on a restored IBM 360 - where the punch persons craft each punch card by hand using a 18th century bradawl. Top of the line would be leased line cyberpunked up asr33 (actualy they are quite cp as is)
terminalcommand 9y ago
It is not this interview, but I found out that Ted Nelson has a Youtube Channel. The link is: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr_DXJ7ZUAJO_d8CnHYTDMQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr_DXJ7ZUAJO_d8CnHYTDMQ In there you can find interviews/talks in full length: For example: this might be of interest to you: Ted Talking Fast: How Computer Documents Got Dumbed Down-- and the Alternative https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDrHkNgGQDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDrHkNgGQDs
joe_the_user 9y ago
In a sense, it[programming] still is[artisanal], and always will be. Certainly, programs will continue to be made essentially "by hand". But as Nelson goes on in the discussion, he expands his statement to mean something universe programming literacy, "citizen programmers" produce programs for each other. Despite some stabs at putting programming in elementary school curriculum, we're fairly far from that.
- dragonsky67 9y ago
  I understand what you are getting at, but aren't we some way towards the "citizen programmer", especially when you consider the number of private individuals contributing to open source software. I would also class many of the independent phone developers as citizen programmers. I would say that we have never had more independent developers writing software that other individuals want.
mattgreenrocks 9y ago
The only programming I want to do is artisanal. (That sounds really...something, but I'll leave it there.) I'm glad to work with other people, but it feels like the past ten years or so have strains of collectivism trying to crowd out the artisanal aspect because social or whatever. I'm sure part of it is the enormous incidental complexity brought on by the web.
hyperpallium 9y ago
I think productization of software use, for specific purposes, was inevitable... and therefore monopolies because of economies of scale. However, I also thought this would happen to libraries/components, because the same dynamic is in play. But it's only happened to very large "libraries" that are in effect a platform, putting the programmer at a higher level of abstraction. Often called "engines': databases, game engines, etc. Yet... for the vast majority of library product categories, open source has won... it might be as simple as whether the programmer user has the expertise to make that engine themselves, or if there's a gap (as for non-programmer users). The coding imperative: If I can write it, I must write it. How can a business compete with that? Another factor is companies "commoditizing their complements", so e.g. we got java, to sell sun boxes. It became impossible for a non-free language to win.
nabla9 9y ago
Yet Ted Nelson killed what he created because he wanted a monopoly for himself. From the start he covered ZigZag and zzstructure with patents and could not get his own software going (I don't think he is very good manager). Several decades later, when some enthusiasts reached out and tried to recreate the ZigZag as open source project GZigZag he eventually screwed up the people involved. https://www.google.com/patents/US6262736 https://www.google.com/patents/US6262736 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/233#comment-1715 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/233#comment-1715
- abvdasker 9y ago
  I think it's fascinating to listen to baby boomers — not just in tech but in almost every realm — when they talk about the naive optimism of the '60s and '70s. Free love, hippy communes, drug use, tech-as-democratizing force and widespread anti-war sentiment eventually gave way to The War on Drugs, terrorism-fueled paranoia, #MeToo, income inequality and hypercapitalist tech monopolies. They weren't just profoundly wrong about the future, a lot of them unwittingly helped to create what we have now. And to this day none of the boomers I've talked to seem to understand their role in that series of cultural and economic shifts. I'm generalizing a lot here, but it's a pattern I keep seeing when it comes to the legacy of that particular generation.
  - jacobush 9y ago
    Something will be said of us and social networks.
    - rbanffy 9y ago
      I always remind myself, only half joking, making computers easy to use so that anyone can use one was a huge, huge mistake. :-(
      - mattgreenrocks 9y ago
        The problem was ceding the technical culture to people who only want TV 2.0. Wanting a new form of entertainment is fundamentally at odds with people wanting to build bicycles for the mind.

virgilp 9y ago

> I feel that the core of programming, just making the computer do things other people want it to for money, will always lead us back to a highly individualized workflow I would be willing to bet against that. In fact, it's safe to bet that "always X" is false regardless of X, especially when humans are in that equation. "Always" is a very long time :)

tboyd47 9y ago
I'm not a betting man, but history tends to repeat itself. If you read some of what was written in the 70s and 80s about programming, you often find certainty that programming is going to be commoditized and standardized within our lifetimes. I read one book where the author (who's very well-known in the CS world) was sure that by year 2000, we would have a standard catalog of programming tasks with labor estimates similar to what auto mechanics have. If anything, I think we're even further away from this now than we were in the 80s. It would be hard to find anyone who can even imagine such a catalog, much less create one.
- virgilp 9y ago
  I heard an anecdote that in the late '60s someone put a bunch of interns in a room with with a few computers & digital camera to solve the object detection problem - he figured they'd be done by the end of the summer. 30 years later, that looked very much impossible to do. But 50 years later, it was eventually solved. Like I said - "always"/"never" are very long time periods...
  - mindcrime 9y ago
    This may refer to the project you mention there. http://www.lyndonhill.com/opinion-cvlegends.html http://www.lyndonhill.com/opinion-cvlegends.html
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > But 50 years later, it was eventually solved. We've made progress, but I'd hesitate calling it "solved".
- 8bitsrule 9y ago
  In the late 1970s, I was the only teacher with programming experience in a system. I will never forget the words of my superintendent, coming back from a conference in Arizona. The experts at the conference told everyone that the world wouldn't need many programmers in a few years. And so, he had concluded, the school wouldn't need more than the two Apple IIs it had borrowed.

luckydata 9y ago

The first time you build anything it's artisanal. Look at the process of building the first doll, or the first car etc... of a multi million run of the same object. The difference in software is once you're done with the first one, there's nothing else to do.

fsloth 9y ago
"The difference in software is once you're done with the first one, there's nothing else to do." I'm not sure if I parse what you wrote correctly. Currently we can't have enough software written. And solutions - patterns (but not in the god awful Gang-of-four sense) - are transferable between isomorphic problem spaces. Following the doll metaphor, a police doll, a firefighter doll, a child doll, a werewolf doll, a gorilla doll - * a bicycle!?*. Sometimes you truly come up with something totally new, and adapt.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  And a large part of the reason we can't get enough software written is that our teams are adversarially pitched against one another. One set of Great Minds is writing advertising, code, another ad-blockers, another HFT and financial derivatives crud that's quite likely to precipitate yet another financial speculation-bubble-crash cycle. And basic needs and wants go unanswered, in large part because those with the needs and wants have no financial means to pay for them. For numerous reasons, the information which should be more available and standardised ... is instead obfuscated and/or sliced-and-diced behind ad-ridden, paginated, metadata- and classification-free CMSes. You can dig in to find various economic, power, political, psychological, sociological, and other reasons for all of this. But the upshot is that the frenetic code-generating that's going on is doing little to move the needle on improving either quality-of-life or overall systemic health. Frequently the opposite. This is a Big Problem.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - BoiledCabbage 9y ago

IpV8 9y ago

People writing software are generally in the top 5% income level. Why do you feel that they are not being paid what they are worth?

randomdata 9y ago
I'm not sure that is generally true. The median software developer salary in the US is $102,280[1]. An income of $100,000 puts you in the top 9.15%[1]. A top 5% income writing software isn't completely unheard of, but it does not seem to be represented by any kind of majority. There are always outliers. [1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
- IpV8 9y ago
  Thanks for fact checking me, I should have done my homework first. I still think that the 9.15% stat supports my claim though. I hang out with mostly non-engineers so its a bit comical to be shamed by hacker newsians for proposing that we get paid enough. Most studies on the matter have demonstrated that any income over 75k has no correlation on happiness, so for me I guess I feel more concerned about finding meaningful work than a higher salary. On another note, I am not sure why all of these people claiming to providing value equal to 10x their salary don't simply work for themselves and see if they can really rake in that much without the support of their company.
  - randomdata 9y ago
    I understand where they're coming from. Pay, of course, is a function of supply and demand. Nothing more, nothing less. The greater the demand, relative to the supply, the higher the price. We're constantly told that developers in high demand and that companies cannot find anyone to hire, to the point that the government has even pushed 'learn to code' programs to try and bring more people into this 'future industry', so price should be rising rapidly to close that gap... but it's not happening for the most part. So we have this disparity where the market is not reflecting what the media (et. al.) are reporting. I can see how that is leading to much confusion for those in the industry. In 2014, the median income for software developer, applications was $103,054.85[1] (in 2017 dollars). Today, the median income for software developer, applications is $102,212.06[2] (again, in 2017 dollars). Developer incomes are on the decline. It appears that we're reached equilibrium. If the industry was honest and said "go away, the industry is full" people would have less belief that they're worth more, but that's not the message we continue to hear. [1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/2014/may/oes151132.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/2014/may/oes151132.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

mempko 9y ago

except that most computers now are closed and dont allow control of the system. In fact, most comouters now dont even have adequate programming tools besides those meant for children.

davisr 9y ago

I emailed the author, and received this response: > I'm so glad you found the interview of interest. Unfortunately, as with our print interviews, the full unedited interview is not available. However if we get a number of similar requests, we may consider releasing a longer edit, Please message him; I'd be interested in an uncut version as well.

tboyd47 9y ago
Okay, I did!
morphle 9y ago
I also emailed Stephen.Cass[at]gmail.com for the uncut version
IrishJourno 9y ago
I'm the editor (Stephen Cass). I really should have added "independent" to "similar" in my response there, but oh well ;). Anyhoo instead of emailing me, you can just let me know here if this thread has inspired you to want to see a longer version! We're unlikely to just drop the raw footage (for the same reasons that journalists very rarely publish scans of the notes they take during interview, or the raw audio of any recordings, because part of our whole raison d'etre is editing things), but as I indicated, if there's enough interest to justify the resources, I could argue for a longer cut. (Also, ProTip re: the poster below, yes, my personal email is publicly available with a google, but no, it's not a good idea to send a lobbying email to a journalist's personal account when there's a known-good work address available, not least because who knows when that email is going to be seen, and depending on the journalist's filters, it might never be seen at all.)
- mattgreenrocks 9y ago
  I'd definitely be interested in a longer cut. Thanks!
- nzeribe 9y ago
  Me, too. Ted Nelson is a G.O.A.T.

walshemj 9y ago

I know its wrong but I'm imagining a Hoxton based start up offering artisanal computer bureau running on a restored IBM 360 - where the punch persons craft each punch card by hand using a 18th century bradawl. Top of the line would be leased line cyberpunked up asr33 (actualy they are quite cp as is)

terminalcommand 9y ago

It is not this interview, but I found out that Ted Nelson has a Youtube Channel. The link is: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr_DXJ7ZUAJO_d8CnHYTDMQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr_DXJ7ZUAJO_d8CnHYTDMQ In there you can find interviews/talks in full length: For example: this might be of interest to you: Ted Talking Fast: How Computer Documents Got Dumbed Down-- and the Alternative https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDrHkNgGQDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDrHkNgGQDs

joe_the_user 9y ago

In a sense, it[programming] still is[artisanal], and always will be. Certainly, programs will continue to be made essentially "by hand". But as Nelson goes on in the discussion, he expands his statement to mean something universe programming literacy, "citizen programmers" produce programs for each other. Despite some stabs at putting programming in elementary school curriculum, we're fairly far from that.

dragonsky67 9y ago
I understand what you are getting at, but aren't we some way towards the "citizen programmer", especially when you consider the number of private individuals contributing to open source software. I would also class many of the independent phone developers as citizen programmers. I would say that we have never had more independent developers writing software that other individuals want.

mattgreenrocks 9y ago

The only programming I want to do is artisanal. (That sounds really...something, but I'll leave it there.) I'm glad to work with other people, but it feels like the past ten years or so have strains of collectivism trying to crowd out the artisanal aspect because social or whatever. I'm sure part of it is the enormous incidental complexity brought on by the web.

hyperpallium 9y ago

I think productization of software use, for specific purposes, was inevitable... and therefore monopolies because of economies of scale. However, I also thought this would happen to libraries/components, because the same dynamic is in play. But it's only happened to very large "libraries" that are in effect a platform, putting the programmer at a higher level of abstraction. Often called "engines': databases, game engines, etc. Yet... for the vast majority of library product categories, open source has won... it might be as simple as whether the programmer user has the expertise to make that engine themselves, or if there's a gap (as for non-programmer users). The coding imperative: If I can write it, I must write it. How can a business compete with that? Another factor is companies "commoditizing their complements", so e.g. we got java, to sell sun boxes. It became impossible for a non-free language to win.

nabla9 9y ago

Yet Ted Nelson killed what he created because he wanted a monopoly for himself. From the start he covered ZigZag and zzstructure with patents and could not get his own software going (I don't think he is very good manager). Several decades later, when some enthusiasts reached out and tried to recreate the ZigZag as open source project GZigZag he eventually screwed up the people involved. https://www.google.com/patents/US6262736 https://www.google.com/patents/US6262736 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/233#comment-1715 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/233#comment-1715

abvdasker 9y ago
I think it's fascinating to listen to baby boomers — not just in tech but in almost every realm — when they talk about the naive optimism of the '60s and '70s. Free love, hippy communes, drug use, tech-as-democratizing force and widespread anti-war sentiment eventually gave way to The War on Drugs, terrorism-fueled paranoia, #MeToo, income inequality and hypercapitalist tech monopolies. They weren't just profoundly wrong about the future, a lot of them unwittingly helped to create what we have now. And to this day none of the boomers I've talked to seem to understand their role in that series of cultural and economic shifts. I'm generalizing a lot here, but it's a pattern I keep seeing when it comes to the legacy of that particular generation.
- jacobush 9y ago
  Something will be said of us and social networks.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    I always remind myself, only half joking, making computers easy to use so that anyone can use one was a huge, huge mistake. :-(
    - mattgreenrocks 9y ago
      The problem was ceding the technical culture to people who only want TV 2.0. Wanting a new form of entertainment is fundamentally at odds with people wanting to build bicycles for the mind.