12 ms·

Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

215 points by manuhortet 3y ago

manuhortet 3y ago
I recently read Ellen Ullman's memoir about her life as a software developer in the dot-com bubble era: "Close to the machine: Technophilia and its discontents". The book was written before I was born, but I can still closely relate to most of the cultural points made. She does a great job defining the anxieties and frictions you experience working in the duality of the very formal computer systems and the subjective, messy working contexts, filled with deadlines, bureaucracy, "rockstars"... Her takes on the internet are also super relevant today. A favorite extract of mine: "When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer. The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove — all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria — if only they could figure out how to use it. But they just sit and click, and look disconcertedly at the junk that comes back at them". What other similar books would you recommend?
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  >The book was written before I was born Oh my god I'm so fucking old.
  - agentultra 3y ago
    My friend, it happens to everyone. I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89. I dropped out of high school in the late 90’s to program uh… high quality adult entertainment websites. I had a small e-commerce site for a while selling weird stuff. I eventually finished school and tried to move on but I got back into programming for a living to this day. Twenty some odd years of doing it professionally. For fun. For curiosity. And looking at trying to keep at it for twenty more. Life’s a trip.
    - mikelevins 3y ago
      "My friend, it happens to everyone." Indeed. When you were typing in your first BASIC program, my younger daughter was two years old.
      - agentultra 3y ago
        My daughter is 11 now and just getting into creating her first Minecraft mods. Life is wonderful!
      - quickthrower2 3y ago
        The oldest possible HN might have been a great grandparent at that point
    - KineticLensman 3y ago
      > I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89. I created my first program on punch cards in '79. I can't even remember what the programming language was although I suspect FORTRAN. I wish I'd kept a listing. Tangentially, my valued copy of The Lord of the Rings that I loved as a child has the date 'Christmas 1973' inside the front cover. I'm going to read it again this Christmas, 50 years later. I've been avoiding anything Tolkien-related since about 2017, when I last re-read it (and noticed the upcoming anniversary), to come to it as fresh as possible, accepting that I know the story backwards.
    - ubermonkey 3y ago
      If we're lucky, it does. When you were typing in '89, I was on a mainframe in college.
  - commandlinefan 3y ago
    That was my first thought too - but my second was "there are people who were BORN after the internet who are now adult members of society and we're still managing software projects the exact same braindead broken way we were doing it back then".
    - plagiarist 3y ago
      Isn't it even worse now because we need JIRA tickets that all start with, "as a user," before continuing on to describe something like obtrusive ad placement that a user absolutely does not want?
    - nonameiguess 3y ago
      My oldest niece (who is my little sister's daughter) graduated college two months ago and wasn't born until after 9/11. I think that was the most recent thing to make me feel old. I'm class of '99 and currently rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, depicting kids who were also class of '99, and I now identity with Giles the school librarian, and in fact I'm exactly the same age as Anthony Head was when he took the role. Charisma Carpenter and Nicholas Brendon have now both been over 50 for years and Alyson Hannigan will be 50 in 7 months.
      - ubermonkey 3y ago
        I do enjoy, Whedon revelations notwithstanding, that BTVS is in some ways evergreen. I do not enjoy that one of the defining moments of my adult life -- 9/11, which happened when I was 31 -- is now long enough ago that there are adults who do not or literally COULD not remember it. Time marches on.
        commandlinefan 3y ago
        Fun fact - if someone was born 9/12/01, they've been old enough to drink for about a year now.
    - stcroixx 3y ago
      I think I’m general projects are managed worse than they were 25 years ago. As the years go by and Agile gets further entrenched there is more time lost to ceremonies and rituals and less time spent solving real problems that provide value.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  "The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove — all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria..." Personally, I feel that this is one thing that worked out about as well as could reasonably be expected (it would be unreasonable to expect that the benefits of this could be reaped without effort...)
  - developer93 3y ago
    There is a treasure trove, it's just mixed in with a lot of trash. Like panning for gold, you need to know where the good lodes are and recognise it when you see it.
    - chinchilla2020 3y ago
      I disagree. I have had no moments of profound discovery or insight from surfing the internet. It has been a useful tool for finding specific knowledge and skills, but I would say that there is no "treasure" on the internet. Any treasure you find will be found through experiences in the real world.
      - developer93 3y ago
        I can say that I've got a much more open mind via conversions I've had with strangers on various platforms over the years. My feminism is much more informed and mature than it would be if I hadn't had access to the differing opinions I've read and discussed over the years for example. I also wouldn't be able to do my job without the internet. When I was just starting out, I learnt perl out of a big thick book (O'Reilly maybe?) and I can say that searching the internet is easier! I'm not saying it's perfect, but you must get some value out of it, or you wouldn't be here in the first place...
      - ifyoubuildit 3y ago
        > Any treasure you find will be found through experiences in the real world. That's romantic, but why would it be true, unless you just define treasure as something that you find in real life? Specific knowledge and skills are not treasure? I'm curious if you lived before the days of having so much knowledge instantly accessible, practically for free.
- dpkirchner 3y ago
  That quote also stood out to me, but probably in a different way. It's missing a crucial piece of information: What is the correct way to use the internet? And computers, for that matter? A generous interpretation is that users are expected to take the knowledge and do greater things with it, instead of sitting and clicking, but that obviously doesn't make sense after a few seconds' thought. I'm stumped.
  - prometheus76 3y ago
    Her quote reminds me of Eternal September[1], when AOL started allowing their users to interact with Usenet. The people who were already there were not happy with this influx of the unwashed masses coming in and breaking stuff and ignoring good manners and the protocols that had been established. In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a different crowd because the barrier to entry was pretty high and required a lot of dedication and problem-solving abilities. As the bar of entry came down, along with it came all of the things that come with football stadiums, shopping malls, and time-share condos. A more recent, similar event was when Digg shut down and all the users from there flooded onto Reddit. That was the beginning of the end of the golden days of Reddit, imo. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
    - dleeftink 3y ago
      Unfortunate as it may be, we would be remiss to accept Digg's 2010 exodus as recent, especially in internet years. At the same time, I'd be interested to compare and see what is currently purported to be the 'golden age' and what it ends up being.
      - sixstringtheory 3y ago
        > we would be remiss to accept Digg's 2010 exodus as recent, especially in internet years Why? > what is currently purported to be the 'golden age' My guess is that we’re on it right now.
        3y ago
- xo5vik 3y ago
  >What other similar books would you recommend? Similar era at least: Po Bronson - The Nudist on the Late Shift ... and other tales of Silicon Valley (1999)
- Random_BSD_Geek 3y ago
  > What other similar books would you recommend? "Close to the Machine" by Ellen Ullman and "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland occupy roughly the same space in my memory.
  - manuhortet 3y ago
    This looks exactly like what I wanted - thanks!
  - pramsey 3y ago
    Both genius. Other readable computers books from an earlier time, that still resonate. - Soul of a new Machine, Tracy Kidder - Dawn of the New Everything, Jaron Lanier
  - senkora 3y ago
    Can you or someone else explain what they liked about Microserfs? I read it after hearing a recommendation for it somewhere online, but it didn’t really connect for me. I’m young enough that I don’t have any personal knowledge of the time period to compare it with, so maybe I’m missing a nostalgia angle. I don’t doubt that it is a great book, it just didn’t grab me for whatever reason.
    - eep_social 3y ago
      I am an “old millennial” and Coupland’s work sort of resonates but my understanding is that it’s written primarily for and to gen x.
- huimang 3y ago
  "When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer." I think this is an asinine quote, to be honest. It comes across as elitist: "these idiots don't use computers how they should be using them, according to -me-". The internet, the ability to communicate and access data instantly across the globe, has been one of humanity's greatest achievements to date. But because some people look at junk or don't use it efficiently, it's "the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer"? Really? People like this complain about "the unwashed masses", but fail to recognize that the internet would not nearly have been as useful if it were limited to an insular group of similar people until now.
  - manuhortet 3y ago
    I don't think she criticizes users here, but content. I see how your way of understanding it is valid without more context.
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    This line of criticism has always had elitism woven into it. The real internet was the internet of those that build their own modems/wrote their own modem code/added specific NNTP headers to their news messages/had their own static IPv4 IP/understood what I understand. Mix that with nostalgia over a time when "have you tried restarting it" was the most common piece of advice and you get this line of critique. It's an alluring tale and appeals to the technologist in all of us old enough to feel nostalgic about a lost time, especially as the internet and then the web has become used by a broader swath of the population. I have a successful uncle who tells us stories about how calculators and CAD dumbed down engineering and only his ilk of paper calculations and slide rule approximation can truly engineer.
    - wizofaus 3y ago
      > nostalgia over a time when "have you tried restarting it" was the most common piece of advice I think I missed the memo... that's surely still the single most common go-to when something stops working mysteriously? Or are you suggesting it's no longer "advice" because everyone already knows that by now?
- criddell 3y ago
  I bet you'd like Ullman's book Life in Code. A passage early on that resonated with me is her report of a talk given by Whitfield Diffie: > We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.
- muricula 3y ago
  I haven't read Ullman's memoir, but I'll just put down "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder as a peek into hardware history you may find interesting.
- jonjacky 3y ago
  What other similar books would you recommend? Other memoirs by people who worked in computing and became disillusioned or dissatisfied with it: Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) Cliff Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil (1995) Neither is all memoir like Ullman's book -- both are mostly exposition and argument. But both have some passages of memoir, and in both the author's personality shows through clearly throughout.
- entaloneralie 3y ago
  - Dealers Of Lightning: Michael Hiltzik - Soul Of A New Machine: Tracy Kidder
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  Close to the Machine was published in 1997.. had the dot-com bubble already started at that time?
Tomte 3y ago
From 'Life in Code': "We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."
- ReactiveJelly 3y ago
  Maybe that's the only possible way. More than a few systems have failed from over-planning and under-iterating. And they do say cities are the greatest invention of humankind
  - RetroTechie 3y ago
    Most successful systems are 1st & foremost practical. They do a job, and do that well enough to be carried forward. Imho the "Keep It Simple, Stupid" (KISS) principle very much applies here.
  - dleeftink 3y ago
    I'd say ruins are a precursor for cities to become beautiful--computation concerns similar strolling along age old paths and alleyways.
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    It's even how we as biological systems work, there's plenty of evidence of old stuff and iterations still within every body and within every cell. This even was an explicit programming paradigm in the 60s and 70s, "extensible programming", for example driven by a lot of the designers of languages such as Smalltalk, aiming to enable systems that can grow not unlike living systems.
- sergius 3y ago
  Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone. Jorge Luis Borges
- mrits 3y ago
  At the time of the writing there was actually a lot of planning going on before you started writing code.
doctorhandshake 3y ago
Back when syntax was a challenge for me and documentation more scarce generally, and, perhaps even more than I’d like to admit to this day, I find myself mentally thinking of programming as ‘begging a computer to do things.’
- nlawalker 3y ago
  Thanks for that, I’m going to use it anytime someone asks me what prompt engineering is!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- criley2 3y ago
  Then it goes from begging a computer to do something to cursing the designers of the latest popular framework for doing The Thing in a Slightly Better But Radically Different Way. Oh great, we get to learn how to do this basic Thing for the eighth time, hopefully this time is sticks (it won't).
- severak_cz 3y ago
  as @daisyowl tweeted: a CPU is literally a rock that we tricked into thinking
dusted 3y ago
This looks like a review or comment on something, that Ellen wrote, but I've no idea what, it does not link to anything ?
- tekla 3y ago
  The title of the book is the title of the article. If you read the article, the author clearly states this is a review of the book.
  - dusted 3y ago
    I read the article, and I see nowhere that the author states that the title of their review is the title of the book. However, whatever was being reviewed seemed interesting enough to ask here. So, except for your arrogant way of telling me so, I am thankful that I now know, so that I can look up the book.
- neogodless 3y ago
  You and the person responding to you are both right. If you don't know Ellen Ullman or Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents, it's kind of sideways. He does mention Ellen and says > The book is a memoir about her life but never explicitly connects the title of the article to the title of the book or explains this is a review of that specific book (though that section is titled "Review.") So I understand your confusion. I put "Ellen Ullman" in google and that quickly got me to Goodreads.com and seeing a list of her books, including this title. A little mystery left for us to solve. But the author could've also chosen to do a better job of explaining what they were doing here!
- layer8 3y ago
  The title of the blog post (which is different from the title of the HN submission) is the book title (I found out after googling the reviewed author).
- manuhortet 3y ago
  Right. I cross-posted without thinking about this, thanks for pointing it out. As you have figured out already the linked post is a short collection of notes on Ellen's book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/486625 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/486625
danielovichdk 3y ago
Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents https://www.amazon.com/Close-Machine-Technophilia-Its-Discontents/dp/1250002486 https://www.amazon.com/Close-Machine-Technophilia-Its-Discon...
jbl 3y ago
FWIW - I found "The Bug", by Ellen Ullman, to be a really engrossing piece of fiction to read. I wasn't aware she'd authored other works. I'll have to check them out!
- chrsw 3y ago
  Came here to say this. "The Bug" is one of my favorite novels ever. But I'm a biased computer programmer.
sebstefan 3y ago
I think I'm one onanistic "article about engineers (from an engineer)" away from completely losing it
- debo_ 3y ago
  When I feel this way, I think about how many films about filmmakers and books about writers I've experienced. It doesn't really help, but I do think about it :)
jfarmer 3y ago
This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ "The dumbing-down of programming" > The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of the computing machine. Under Windows was DOS; under DOS, BASIC; and under them both the date of its origins recorded like a birth memory. Here was the very opposite of the authoritative, all-knowing system with its pretty screenful of icons. Here was the antidote to Microsoft's many protections. The mere impulse toward Linux had led me into an act of desktop archaeology. And down under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins. I repeat the last sentence to my students all the time ("We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.") There's no way to understand why our computers work the way they do without understanding the human, social, and economic factors involved in their production. And foregrounding the human element often makes it easier to explain what's going on and why.
- shrubble 3y ago
  Except that BASIC is not underneath MSDOS...
  - bebop 3y ago
    That may have been a reference to that fact that many computers of the early 80’s had a basic rom that would be booted into if no operating system was found.
  - lallysingh 3y ago
    You could find some vestigial BASIC in the DOS batch language.
    - zabzonk 3y ago
      for example?
somewhat_drunk 3y ago
I think you mean accurate, not precise.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
> How much of this is impostor syndrome and how much reality? How different are other fields really? I also feel any new programming task as something foreign, for which I am not ready, basically undoable from my position. But at the same time consider myself able to get into anything and everything, and of fixing and building whatever that can be done. I cannot figure out any straight explanation for such senseless duality, nor feel I adopt the same position for anything else in life. I believe this is a side-effect of the "creative" aspect of computer programming. Creative jobs tend to have impostor syndrome, because there is no piece of paper that you receive that says "this person is 100% certified to be a song writer" or whatever that creative job is. Since software engineering also has no paper certificate, apprenticeship, mastership, etc, there is no proof that you know what you are doing, and it's all a little too loosey-goosey "figure it out for that one job". There's no certainty that you're doing it right. A Computer Science degree is about as much evidence of you knowing what you're doing as a warranty on a hammer and chisel is evidence that you know how to cut wood joints. Software engineering is a trade, completely distinct from Computer Science. That's why so many people in the industry don't need a degree. You learn the trade on the job. It's just bizarre that we don't have apprenticeships or trade organizations to ratify someone as a Real Programmer(TM). I can hire someone with 3 years experience working as a programmer and they'll turn out to be almost incompetent. That shouldn't be possible, especially for a job that pays $140,000. But I guess it happens with construction contractors too, so maybe it's not surprising?
- louthy 3y ago
  I think the creative and craft element is some of this (maybe most), but it's also often the case that software engineers are producing code for business domains that they are also not experts in. Most code is for business, and most programmers are not trained or experts in those business domains.
- developer93 3y ago
  I assume tech moves on so fast that you have to rewrite the course every year. But you do have some certifications which go some of the way, for example the sun certifications for Java.. At least you know the holder will have an idea how it fits together under the hood...
darkwater 3y ago
Side note for the author: your LinkedIn link is broken (it looks like it was parsed as a relative link to your blog, rather than an absolute one)
- manuhortet 3y ago
  You are right. Thanks for letting me know!
forkerenok 3y ago
I haven't read the book, but the quotes do really read as timeless. I was in my early teens during dot-com era, but without a PC yet and still an "internet virgin". One question that really tickles my curiosity is how much the spoils of the dot-com era shaped the direction of the free software in the next decade? When looking at (the aged) projects under Apache umbrella, it seems a lot of them kicked off around that time. Is that because of the dot-com money or because Java graduated to a different stage around that time?
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  I don’t know but I assume GNU/Linux and the need to complete the OS user space would have driven a wave if such free software.
zer8k 3y ago
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html Nothing will beat the Jargon File.
hax0ron3 3y ago
>The project begins in the programmer’s mind with the beauty of a crystal. The knowledge I am to represent in code seems lovely in its structuredness. For a time, the world is a calm, mathematical place. […] Yes, I understand. Yes, it can be done. Yes, how straightforward. Oh yes. I see. […] Then something happens. The irregularities of human thinking start to emerge. It's ok, so-called "software development methodologies" solve this problem by making sure that the project begins in the programmer's mind in just as chaotic and irregular a state as it will eventually end up once the code has been written.
dimatura 3y ago
I encountered Close to the Machine by chance in my university's library, many years ago. I flipped through the first few pages and was quickly hooked. Definitely a great read.
polynomial 3y ago
Hmm, the 1st/top link in TFA (to the book in question on Good Reads) appears to be broken(?)
Minor49er 3y ago
I read this book years ago. One part that I still think about from time to time is how the author was approached for a job that entailed maintaining an ancient mainframe. Despite the pay being so high, the mainframe and its model were dying. Both her and the employer knew this. The author turned the job down just because it seemed like it would have been an unfulfilling and depressing endeavor, despite the high pay. It reminds me that sometimes, a line must be drawn between pay and self-fulfillment
ggm 3y ago
The wikipedia for Ellen doesn't mention Jeffrey Ullman by name. Is there a reason which people prefer not to refer to, which explains why the coyness, or was it some other computer science Ullman which adopted Ellen? It does state she was raised in a computer science family. People deserve to stand on their own two legs, and if its "not in the shadow, shines by herself" I can get behind that. Or indeed "no, it's just a coincidence, the adoptive parent isn't Jeffrey and his partner" (I too was raised in a computer science family, 3 generations now. In my own case, regression tended to the mean but I have high hopes of the next one.)

215 points by manuhortet 3y ago

I recently read Ellen Ullman's memoir about her life as a software developer in the dot-com bubble era: "Close to the machine: Technophilia and its discontents". The book was written before I was born, but I can still closely relate to most of the cultural points made. She does a great job defining the anxieties and frictions you experience working in the duality of the very formal computer systems and the subjective, messy working contexts, filled with deadlines, bureaucracy, "rockstars"... Her takes on the internet are also super relevant today. A favorite extract of mine: "When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer. The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove — all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria — if only they could figure out how to use it. But they just sit and click, and look disconcertedly at the junk that comes back at them". What other similar books would you recommend?

ubermonkey 3y ago
>The book was written before I was born Oh my god I'm so fucking old.
- agentultra 3y ago
  My friend, it happens to everyone. I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89. I dropped out of high school in the late 90’s to program uh… high quality adult entertainment websites. I had a small e-commerce site for a while selling weird stuff. I eventually finished school and tried to move on but I got back into programming for a living to this day. Twenty some odd years of doing it professionally. For fun. For curiosity. And looking at trying to keep at it for twenty more. Life’s a trip.
  - mikelevins 3y ago
    "My friend, it happens to everyone." Indeed. When you were typing in your first BASIC program, my younger daughter was two years old.
    - agentultra 3y ago
      My daughter is 11 now and just getting into creating her first Minecraft mods. Life is wonderful!
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      The oldest possible HN might have been a great grandparent at that point
  - KineticLensman 3y ago
    > I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89. I created my first program on punch cards in '79. I can't even remember what the programming language was although I suspect FORTRAN. I wish I'd kept a listing. Tangentially, my valued copy of The Lord of the Rings that I loved as a child has the date 'Christmas 1973' inside the front cover. I'm going to read it again this Christmas, 50 years later. I've been avoiding anything Tolkien-related since about 2017, when I last re-read it (and noticed the upcoming anniversary), to come to it as fresh as possible, accepting that I know the story backwards.
  - ubermonkey 3y ago
    If we're lucky, it does. When you were typing in '89, I was on a mainframe in college.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  That was my first thought too - but my second was "there are people who were BORN after the internet who are now adult members of society and we're still managing software projects the exact same braindead broken way we were doing it back then".
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    Isn't it even worse now because we need JIRA tickets that all start with, "as a user," before continuing on to describe something like obtrusive ad placement that a user absolutely does not want?
  - nonameiguess 3y ago
    My oldest niece (who is my little sister's daughter) graduated college two months ago and wasn't born until after 9/11. I think that was the most recent thing to make me feel old. I'm class of '99 and currently rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, depicting kids who were also class of '99, and I now identity with Giles the school librarian, and in fact I'm exactly the same age as Anthony Head was when he took the role. Charisma Carpenter and Nicholas Brendon have now both been over 50 for years and Alyson Hannigan will be 50 in 7 months.
    - ubermonkey 3y ago
      I do enjoy, Whedon revelations notwithstanding, that BTVS is in some ways evergreen. I do not enjoy that one of the defining moments of my adult life -- 9/11, which happened when I was 31 -- is now long enough ago that there are adults who do not or literally COULD not remember it. Time marches on.
      - commandlinefan 3y ago
        Fun fact - if someone was born 9/12/01, they've been old enough to drink for about a year now.
  - stcroixx 3y ago
    I think I’m general projects are managed worse than they were 25 years ago. As the years go by and Agile gets further entrenched there is more time lost to ceremonies and rituals and less time spent solving real problems that provide value.
mannykannot 3y ago
"The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove — all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria..." Personally, I feel that this is one thing that worked out about as well as could reasonably be expected (it would be unreasonable to expect that the benefits of this could be reaped without effort...)
- developer93 3y ago
  There is a treasure trove, it's just mixed in with a lot of trash. Like panning for gold, you need to know where the good lodes are and recognise it when you see it.
  - chinchilla2020 3y ago
    I disagree. I have had no moments of profound discovery or insight from surfing the internet. It has been a useful tool for finding specific knowledge and skills, but I would say that there is no "treasure" on the internet. Any treasure you find will be found through experiences in the real world.
    - developer93 3y ago
      I can say that I've got a much more open mind via conversions I've had with strangers on various platforms over the years. My feminism is much more informed and mature than it would be if I hadn't had access to the differing opinions I've read and discussed over the years for example. I also wouldn't be able to do my job without the internet. When I was just starting out, I learnt perl out of a big thick book (O'Reilly maybe?) and I can say that searching the internet is easier! I'm not saying it's perfect, but you must get some value out of it, or you wouldn't be here in the first place...
    - ifyoubuildit 3y ago
      > Any treasure you find will be found through experiences in the real world. That's romantic, but why would it be true, unless you just define treasure as something that you find in real life? Specific knowledge and skills are not treasure? I'm curious if you lived before the days of having so much knowledge instantly accessible, practically for free.
dpkirchner 3y ago
That quote also stood out to me, but probably in a different way. It's missing a crucial piece of information: What is the correct way to use the internet? And computers, for that matter? A generous interpretation is that users are expected to take the knowledge and do greater things with it, instead of sitting and clicking, but that obviously doesn't make sense after a few seconds' thought. I'm stumped.
- prometheus76 3y ago
  Her quote reminds me of Eternal September[1], when AOL started allowing their users to interact with Usenet. The people who were already there were not happy with this influx of the unwashed masses coming in and breaking stuff and ignoring good manners and the protocols that had been established. In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a different crowd because the barrier to entry was pretty high and required a lot of dedication and problem-solving abilities. As the bar of entry came down, along with it came all of the things that come with football stadiums, shopping malls, and time-share condos. A more recent, similar event was when Digg shut down and all the users from there flooded onto Reddit. That was the beginning of the end of the golden days of Reddit, imo. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  - dleeftink 3y ago
    Unfortunate as it may be, we would be remiss to accept Digg's 2010 exodus as recent, especially in internet years. At the same time, I'd be interested to compare and see what is currently purported to be the 'golden age' and what it ends up being.
    - sixstringtheory 3y ago
      > we would be remiss to accept Digg's 2010 exodus as recent, especially in internet years Why? > what is currently purported to be the 'golden age' My guess is that we’re on it right now.
      - 3y ago
xo5vik 3y ago
>What other similar books would you recommend? Similar era at least: Po Bronson - The Nudist on the Late Shift ... and other tales of Silicon Valley (1999)
Random_BSD_Geek 3y ago
> What other similar books would you recommend? "Close to the Machine" by Ellen Ullman and "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland occupy roughly the same space in my memory.
- manuhortet 3y ago
  This looks exactly like what I wanted - thanks!
- pramsey 3y ago
  Both genius. Other readable computers books from an earlier time, that still resonate. - Soul of a new Machine, Tracy Kidder - Dawn of the New Everything, Jaron Lanier
- senkora 3y ago
  Can you or someone else explain what they liked about Microserfs? I read it after hearing a recommendation for it somewhere online, but it didn’t really connect for me. I’m young enough that I don’t have any personal knowledge of the time period to compare it with, so maybe I’m missing a nostalgia angle. I don’t doubt that it is a great book, it just didn’t grab me for whatever reason.
  - eep_social 3y ago
    I am an “old millennial” and Coupland’s work sort of resonates but my understanding is that it’s written primarily for and to gen x.
huimang 3y ago
"When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer." I think this is an asinine quote, to be honest. It comes across as elitist: "these idiots don't use computers how they should be using them, according to -me-". The internet, the ability to communicate and access data instantly across the globe, has been one of humanity's greatest achievements to date. But because some people look at junk or don't use it efficiently, it's "the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer"? Really? People like this complain about "the unwashed masses", but fail to recognize that the internet would not nearly have been as useful if it were limited to an insular group of similar people until now.
- manuhortet 3y ago
  I don't think she criticizes users here, but content. I see how your way of understanding it is valid without more context.
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  This line of criticism has always had elitism woven into it. The real internet was the internet of those that build their own modems/wrote their own modem code/added specific NNTP headers to their news messages/had their own static IPv4 IP/understood what I understand. Mix that with nostalgia over a time when "have you tried restarting it" was the most common piece of advice and you get this line of critique. It's an alluring tale and appeals to the technologist in all of us old enough to feel nostalgic about a lost time, especially as the internet and then the web has become used by a broader swath of the population. I have a successful uncle who tells us stories about how calculators and CAD dumbed down engineering and only his ilk of paper calculations and slide rule approximation can truly engineer.
  - wizofaus 3y ago
    > nostalgia over a time when "have you tried restarting it" was the most common piece of advice I think I missed the memo... that's surely still the single most common go-to when something stops working mysteriously? Or are you suggesting it's no longer "advice" because everyone already knows that by now?
criddell 3y ago
I bet you'd like Ullman's book Life in Code. A passage early on that resonated with me is her report of a talk given by Whitfield Diffie: > We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.
muricula 3y ago
I haven't read Ullman's memoir, but I'll just put down "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder as a peek into hardware history you may find interesting.
jonjacky 3y ago
What other similar books would you recommend? Other memoirs by people who worked in computing and became disillusioned or dissatisfied with it: Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) Cliff Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil (1995) Neither is all memoir like Ullman's book -- both are mostly exposition and argument. But both have some passages of memoir, and in both the author's personality shows through clearly throughout.
entaloneralie 3y ago
- Dealers Of Lightning: Michael Hiltzik - Soul Of A New Machine: Tracy Kidder
pcthrowaway 3y ago
Close to the Machine was published in 1997.. had the dot-com bubble already started at that time?

Tomte 3y ago

From 'Life in Code': "We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."

ReactiveJelly 3y ago
Maybe that's the only possible way. More than a few systems have failed from over-planning and under-iterating. And they do say cities are the greatest invention of humankind
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  Most successful systems are 1st & foremost practical. They do a job, and do that well enough to be carried forward. Imho the "Keep It Simple, Stupid" (KISS) principle very much applies here.
- dleeftink 3y ago
  I'd say ruins are a precursor for cities to become beautiful--computation concerns similar strolling along age old paths and alleyways.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  It's even how we as biological systems work, there's plenty of evidence of old stuff and iterations still within every body and within every cell. This even was an explicit programming paradigm in the 60s and 70s, "extensible programming", for example driven by a lot of the designers of languages such as Smalltalk, aiming to enable systems that can grow not unlike living systems.
sergius 3y ago
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone. Jorge Luis Borges
mrits 3y ago
At the time of the writing there was actually a lot of planning going on before you started writing code.

doctorhandshake 3y ago

Back when syntax was a challenge for me and documentation more scarce generally, and, perhaps even more than I’d like to admit to this day, I find myself mentally thinking of programming as ‘begging a computer to do things.’

nlawalker 3y ago
Thanks for that, I’m going to use it anytime someone asks me what prompt engineering is!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
criley2 3y ago
Then it goes from begging a computer to do something to cursing the designers of the latest popular framework for doing The Thing in a Slightly Better But Radically Different Way. Oh great, we get to learn how to do this basic Thing for the eighth time, hopefully this time is sticks (it won't).
severak_cz 3y ago
as @daisyowl tweeted: a CPU is literally a rock that we tricked into thinking

dusted 3y ago

This looks like a review or comment on something, that Ellen wrote, but I've no idea what, it does not link to anything ?

tekla 3y ago
The title of the book is the title of the article. If you read the article, the author clearly states this is a review of the book.
- dusted 3y ago
  I read the article, and I see nowhere that the author states that the title of their review is the title of the book. However, whatever was being reviewed seemed interesting enough to ask here. So, except for your arrogant way of telling me so, I am thankful that I now know, so that I can look up the book.
neogodless 3y ago
You and the person responding to you are both right. If you don't know Ellen Ullman or Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents, it's kind of sideways. He does mention Ellen and says > The book is a memoir about her life but never explicitly connects the title of the article to the title of the book or explains this is a review of that specific book (though that section is titled "Review.") So I understand your confusion. I put "Ellen Ullman" in google and that quickly got me to Goodreads.com and seeing a list of her books, including this title. A little mystery left for us to solve. But the author could've also chosen to do a better job of explaining what they were doing here!
layer8 3y ago
The title of the blog post (which is different from the title of the HN submission) is the book title (I found out after googling the reviewed author).
manuhortet 3y ago
Right. I cross-posted without thinking about this, thanks for pointing it out. As you have figured out already the linked post is a short collection of notes on Ellen's book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/486625 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/486625

danielovichdk 3y ago

Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents https://www.amazon.com/Close-Machine-Technophilia-Its-Discontents/dp/1250002486 https://www.amazon.com/Close-Machine-Technophilia-Its-Discon...

jbl 3y ago

FWIW - I found "The Bug", by Ellen Ullman, to be a really engrossing piece of fiction to read. I wasn't aware she'd authored other works. I'll have to check them out!

chrsw 3y ago
Came here to say this. "The Bug" is one of my favorite novels ever. But I'm a biased computer programmer.

sebstefan 3y ago

I think I'm one onanistic "article about engineers (from an engineer)" away from completely losing it

debo_ 3y ago
When I feel this way, I think about how many films about filmmakers and books about writers I've experienced. It doesn't really help, but I do think about it :)

jfarmer 3y ago

This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ "The dumbing-down of programming" > The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of the computing machine. Under Windows was DOS; under DOS, BASIC; and under them both the date of its origins recorded like a birth memory. Here was the very opposite of the authoritative, all-knowing system with its pretty screenful of icons. Here was the antidote to Microsoft's many protections. The mere impulse toward Linux had led me into an act of desktop archaeology. And down under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins. I repeat the last sentence to my students all the time ("We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.") There's no way to understand why our computers work the way they do without understanding the human, social, and economic factors involved in their production. And foregrounding the human element often makes it easier to explain what's going on and why.

shrubble 3y ago
Except that BASIC is not underneath MSDOS...
- bebop 3y ago
  That may have been a reference to that fact that many computers of the early 80’s had a basic rom that would be booted into if no operating system was found.
- lallysingh 3y ago
  You could find some vestigial BASIC in the DOS batch language.
  - zabzonk 3y ago
    for example?

somewhat_drunk 3y ago

I think you mean accurate, not precise.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

> How much of this is impostor syndrome and how much reality? How different are other fields really? I also feel any new programming task as something foreign, for which I am not ready, basically undoable from my position. But at the same time consider myself able to get into anything and everything, and of fixing and building whatever that can be done. I cannot figure out any straight explanation for such senseless duality, nor feel I adopt the same position for anything else in life. I believe this is a side-effect of the "creative" aspect of computer programming. Creative jobs tend to have impostor syndrome, because there is no piece of paper that you receive that says "this person is 100% certified to be a song writer" or whatever that creative job is. Since software engineering also has no paper certificate, apprenticeship, mastership, etc, there is no proof that you know what you are doing, and it's all a little too loosey-goosey "figure it out for that one job". There's no certainty that you're doing it right. A Computer Science degree is about as much evidence of you knowing what you're doing as a warranty on a hammer and chisel is evidence that you know how to cut wood joints. Software engineering is a trade, completely distinct from Computer Science. That's why so many people in the industry don't need a degree. You learn the trade on the job. It's just bizarre that we don't have apprenticeships or trade organizations to ratify someone as a Real Programmer(TM). I can hire someone with 3 years experience working as a programmer and they'll turn out to be almost incompetent. That shouldn't be possible, especially for a job that pays $140,000. But I guess it happens with construction contractors too, so maybe it's not surprising?

louthy 3y ago
I think the creative and craft element is some of this (maybe most), but it's also often the case that software engineers are producing code for business domains that they are also not experts in. Most code is for business, and most programmers are not trained or experts in those business domains.
developer93 3y ago
I assume tech moves on so fast that you have to rewrite the course every year. But you do have some certifications which go some of the way, for example the sun certifications for Java.. At least you know the holder will have an idea how it fits together under the hood...

darkwater 3y ago

Side note for the author: your LinkedIn link is broken (it looks like it was parsed as a relative link to your blog, rather than an absolute one)

manuhortet 3y ago
You are right. Thanks for letting me know!

forkerenok 3y ago

I haven't read the book, but the quotes do really read as timeless. I was in my early teens during dot-com era, but without a PC yet and still an "internet virgin". One question that really tickles my curiosity is how much the spoils of the dot-com era shaped the direction of the free software in the next decade? When looking at (the aged) projects under Apache umbrella, it seems a lot of them kicked off around that time. Is that because of the dot-com money or because Java graduated to a different stage around that time?

quickthrower2 3y ago
I don’t know but I assume GNU/Linux and the need to complete the OS user space would have driven a wave if such free software.

zer8k 3y ago

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html Nothing will beat the Jargon File.

hax0ron3 3y ago

>The project begins in the programmer’s mind with the beauty of a crystal. The knowledge I am to represent in code seems lovely in its structuredness. For a time, the world is a calm, mathematical place. […] Yes, I understand. Yes, it can be done. Yes, how straightforward. Oh yes. I see. […] Then something happens. The irregularities of human thinking start to emerge. It's ok, so-called "software development methodologies" solve this problem by making sure that the project begins in the programmer's mind in just as chaotic and irregular a state as it will eventually end up once the code has been written.

dimatura 3y ago

I encountered Close to the Machine by chance in my university's library, many years ago. I flipped through the first few pages and was quickly hooked. Definitely a great read.

polynomial 3y ago

Hmm, the 1st/top link in TFA (to the book in question on Good Reads) appears to be broken(?)

Minor49er 3y ago

I read this book years ago. One part that I still think about from time to time is how the author was approached for a job that entailed maintaining an ancient mainframe. Despite the pay being so high, the mainframe and its model were dying. Both her and the employer knew this. The author turned the job down just because it seemed like it would have been an unfulfilling and depressing endeavor, despite the high pay. It reminds me that sometimes, a line must be drawn between pay and self-fulfillment

ggm 3y ago

The wikipedia for Ellen doesn't mention Jeffrey Ullman by name. Is there a reason which people prefer not to refer to, which explains why the coyness, or was it some other computer science Ullman which adopted Ellen? It does state she was raised in a computer science family. People deserve to stand on their own two legs, and if its "not in the shadow, shines by herself" I can get behind that. Or indeed "no, it's just a coincidence, the adoptive parent isn't Jeffrey and his partner" (I too was raised in a computer science family, 3 generations now. In my own case, regression tended to the mean but I have high hopes of the next one.)