Language and lock-in

One of the favorite arguments for free software is that it avoids lock-in to a particular manufacturer’s products. Something similar happens due to choice of programming language, though, which accounts for the sometimes-baffling project rivalries in the free software world. While this may be a surprising result to end users, it makes a lot of sense if you think about how developers—especially free-software developers—work. Occasionally, you hear complaints about these “divisions” of the free software world, but is this really a bad thing?

Is it true that programmers enter a state comparable to deep meditation while they are at work? Some claim that they do, but how do we know what they mean by this? In order to understand, we first need to decide what we mean by meditation, for it has been defined in so many different ways. One is the ability to rest in the here and now and it is usually understood that meditation will lead to a state of increased awareness and undivided attention. Since I run Song Of Life, I often wonder this.

I’ve mentioned before the recent move among UK charities to become more “professional”, which is often translated as “do what the corporates do” (particularly when it comes to IT). One reason for this is the dreaded bespoke friend-of-a-friend database. These “databases” (and I use the term loosely) are often written by a student, with tenuous links to the charity, looking for a final year project and usually in Microsoft Access and they are usually awful to maintain.

As we follow the zig-zaggy quest of me trying to learn to program, I discover the next significant step, “Interest”. I started with a goal: to learn to program. Next I came up with a plan: Learn Python by writing a program called PT (period tracker) but I lacked the last bit, interest.

You see, there was very little that period tracker did that a calendar didn’t. Spending hours to make a program to do work that I could do in five minutes with a calendar and a pencil seemed like a waste of effort.

[Click here for an expanded, updated version of this blog entry which hasnow been published in issue 17 of Free Software Magazine!]

Programmers. The system administrators worship their bit twiddling capabilities. The users exchange vast quantities of beer for new features and tools. And the project managers sell their soul when they make the magic work. But inside the average programmer’s psyche are several demons that need exorcising.

Pride

You know what I’d like to see? I’d like the various Free software groups (whether they use “open source” or “free software” doesn’t matter) get together to produce the greatest educational tool the world has ever seen:

A website dedicated to Free / Open Source code. Not programs. Code.

I recently re-read David Brin’s essay, “Why Johnny Can’t Code”. He posits an interesting idea, one I’ve had for a while—we are raising a generation of techno-illiterates through our focus on high-level languages, rather than on the simple languages like BASIC, on which many of us cut our geekteeth.

What I observed had nothing to do with programming, and everything to do with Mr. Brin’s approach to computers. His point may be valid, but his sight is limited by his own understandable ignorance.

He forgot there are other options.

There are really two bazaars that fire the boilers for free software: one dominated by talented amateurs who create for love; the other, by professionals who create for money. This creates a curious bi-modal nature to the free software/open source community: there’s always a certain amount of tension between the schedule-driven bottom-line interest of commercial entities like Novell, Red Hat, or even Canonical and individual hobbyist developers.

I finally began learning python. I wrote my last program in the 80s in Apple Basic, and here I am again starting to learn a new language. I can already guess what my biggest problem will be. I am incredibly impatient. How can I learn to program when I refuse to read the documentation all the way through? Will I succeed in writing a program or am I doomed to give up? No need worrying about it. I type python on the command-line, and start.

Last week I mentioned my decision to learn Python and write a free software program. I found some cool online tutorials. I found my Learning Python book, and I was ready to begin. So like many a programmer I sat down in my chair, opened my books… and watched “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” instead.

Why aren’t there more female free software developers out there. In my attempt to find out, I decided to write a program and see what barriers got in my way.

Most free software developers are men. Women are vastly under-represented in the world of free software. Being a woman, I wanted to know why, so I tried to do it myself. The first barrier was my inability to program in any modern computer language, so my first step was to learn a new one.

First I had to pick a language to program in.

Python.

With all of the recent argument over the lack of women in the free software community, especially as relates to the reports from the Free/Libre/Open Source Software Group, which state that only 1.5% of the free software development community is female, and that women are actively discouraged from becoming free software developers. I decided to take a new approach and ask myself, “Why am I not a free software developer?”

Back when I got my first computer (a TRS-80 “Color Computer” with a whopping 32 kilobytes of RAM and Microsoft’s “MS-BASIC” in ROM), programming was something that computer users took for granted they’d have to do. That’s what you got a computer for! But something dark and sinister happened after that: a great divide opened up between the ‘developer’ lords and the ‘user’ serfs.

Fortunately, free software has liberated us from this digital feudalism, and revived a new middle class of ‘user-developers’.

I’ve always been interested in how our brains work. The brain is a very powerful computer, and we still don’t really know just how it really works.

As a writer and a programmer, I sometimes experience a “wow” moment. Today, I had one of them.

I am a proud Ruby programmer; Ruby saved me from Perl, and I can only be extremely grateful to Matz for creating it. I can say now that I “know” Ruby (even though I don’t really know it as well as I would like). And yet…

And yet, I don’t. At all.