Software isn’t some forbidden science. It might be hard to understand by mare mortals but it definitely is not something that you can’t do even if you’re not very much into it. But should you? How does it feel like to be a software developer?
Imagine you have this completely obedient servant ready to do everything without hesitation. You tell it to jump of a 100-story building without parachute and it does it. Right down on its face. Splash! Boom! There’s blood everywhere, harsh words,... But nobody cares - it was your servant and you have had complete control over him. The ultimate power! That’s you and the machine. And programmers do that sort of things every minute of every day when they create software. Up to the point when they figure out that the servant lives longer when he has a parachute that actually opens. Sometimes the servant goes haywire and does things the developer does not expect him to do. Suddenly he might refuse to jump even when all the precautions are in place and ready to go. Jump! Jump! Damn it! Then a moment of revelation happens: the developer instructed the servant not to jump if it’s raining, which makes perfect sense. He just didn’t realize the definition of rain was actually not very precise.
The problem with your servant is that he understands only a very specific language. That language has only two words: a zero (0) and a one (1). Fortunately enough scientists realized that ages ago and created human-to-servant translators called compilers. Other mad scientists though that telling your servant to jump without parachute is a bad idea all along and created safe nets forbidding you to do that at all. That’s how runtime environments like Java or .NET came to be... All of the sudden your servant isn’t so obedient anymore. He has more than one master now and your word means nothing compared to the rules enforced by “The Creator”, be it the one that taught you and your servant to communicate or the one that thinks you’re complete moron that needs to be controlled as much as possible.
In the center of all this there’s the programmer. But he’s not alone! There comes the light at the end of the tunnel! The new hope! The solution to every problem he has ever had.. Miracle! A new technology has been created that is supposed to take the pressure of his back. It’s not a few moments later when he realizes that the light he saw was actually coming from a train heading his way and he starts feeling much more like he was before.
The battle continues. Things are getting complicated because some other programmer comes in. The new guy might actually help but he doesn’t speak the language. Well, they both speak English but in a different way. They have different opinions about the side of the building the servant should be jumping from. Finally they agree that going from a corner makes the most sense. After all it’s the fact of landing that counts, right? It’s not the fact of flying itself (even though the most interesting one) but the safe landing that the crowd will observe. So it even makes sense to go a bit crazy and to tell the servant to wait until he’s about half the way through to open the parachute. This way the crowd will be even better entertained and get the result quicker.
There’s that one last thing the team didn’t take into account. The original developer left and with him the original reason for the servant to exist. He was the one knowing all the why’s and how’s about the jump. The rest (and now there’s like a 100 people working the servant) tries really hard to overcome all the tangled cords. Some of the Gordian knots can’t be solved so they cut them out replacing them with new ones, of a different nature, or even leaving the parachute crippled counting on the fact that the remaining strings will still do the job.
Of course since there’s a huge group of developers some of them are more aware of the actual power they have and others don’t. People are different and that’s actually a good thing. From variety comes evolution, right? Well... If you want to jump on a parachute you wouldn’t put your life in the hands of some young inexperienced fast-food assistant, right? After all he knows nothing about jumping! But hey, that’s what happens all the time! After all how the young will learn if not by killing the servant just a couple of hundred times more? That’s not something the more experienced developers like so they manifest their position very strongly. They say they need to be treated like professionals because they “know”. They create manifests, meet to grizzle about colours of the parachute when at the same time their younger colleagues help the servant meet his destiny a couple times more. The servant has many masters. He tries to listen to all of them but there’s just to many. He becomes the hooker trying to fulfill everyone’s dream...
At the end of all this no one knows why the servant needed to jump. That’s perfectly normal and to be expected. The beauty of software development though is that there’s now a servant on every single tall building because everyone wants to have one! It doesn’t matter if you sell condoms or make cars... Just make the freak jump! We need this!
Hope you’ve enjoyed the trip!
1 comment:
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