Lately, I've been reading "Beyond Mach 3"), Col. Buddy Brown's memoir of his years piloting the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes. If you like that sort of thing, it's an interesting read on its own, but it also has parallels to the software industry, particularly in the way it describes pilot workload. The concept of pilot workload provides a nice way to think explicitly about the burdens our systems place on us as engineers and operators to keep them running properly.
Over the last few months, I've started making an attempt (with the help of my patient coworkers) to more intentionally learn the programming language Haskell. I have professional reasons why this is directly important, but it's also been a good way to challenge some long held assumptions. Being purely functional and lazily evaluated, Haskell lacks traits like implicitly sequenced evaluation, forcing its reconstruction where needed. Sequence is among the first concepts taught in programming, and it can be disconcerting to have to consider it explicitly. Despite my good intentions and years of experience with functional programming (mainly in various Lisps), the Haskell learning curve has presented challenges. It has been a rewarding journey with a number of connections to other parts of software design. I hope to share some of that here, and hopefully draw some connections that will make it easier to approach this content whether you use Haskell or not.
If you've been around programming for a while you've no doubt come across the Lisp family of languages. One of the oldest language familess still in use, much of what we take for granted in modern programming has roots in Lisp. This includes everything from dynamic memory management to first class functions and a comprehensive library of standard data structures. However, despite the considerable influence of Lisp on the field, one aspect of the language that hasn't been widely adopted is its syntax. Lisp syntax is one of its most distinctive aspects, and is both a strength and a weakness. In this post, I'll share a few thoughts on why that is.
As a child of the 80's, I had a front row seat to the beginning of what was then called personal computing. My elementary school got its first Apple around the time I entered kindergarten. That was also the time personal computers were starting to make inroads into offices (largely thanks to VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3). By modern standards these machines weren't very good. At the time they were transformative. They brought computing to places it hadn't been before, and gave access to entirely new sets of people. For someone with an early adopter's mindset, it an optimistic and exploratory time. It's for this reason (and the fact it was my childhood) that I like looking back on these old machines. That's something I hope to do here in an informal series of posts. If there happen to be a few lessons for modern computing along the way, so much the better.
If you're reading this, you're probably familar with retrocomputing. It's easy to go to eBay, buy some used equipment, and play around with a period machine from the early 80's. Emulators make it even easier. As much as I appreciate the movement, it doesn't quite provide the full experience of the time. To put it in perspective, an Apple //e was a $4,000 purchase in today's money. This is before adding disk drives, software, or a monitor. After bringing it home, and turning it on, all you had was a black screen and a blinking prompt from Applesoft basic. If you needed help, you were limited to the manual, a few books and magazines at the local bookstore, and whoever else you happened to know. The costs were high, the utility wasn't obvious, and there wasn't a huge network of people to fall back on for help. It was a different time in a way retrocomputing doesn't quite capture.
My goal here is to talk about my own experiences in that time. What it was like to grow up with these machines, both in school and at home. It's one person's perspective (from a position of privlidge) but hopefully it'll capture a little of the spirit of the day.