Under Development

Posted on 8 Sep 2009 at 14:51

David Robinson is on holiday with the grandkids, but he's packed some fascinating technology books to occupy him until he can think up a good excuse to visit the bar.

It's that time of year again. I'm in France for another long rest, which I'm unlikely to get as we have our grandchildren (aged six and four) with us. It's their lucky mum and dad who'll be getting the rest. To keep the sprogs quiet on the journey, I brought DVDs of their favourite cartoon, Gogs. If you're not familiar with this Celtic mayhem, you can catch a sample online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DjAaOpsHOw.

As in past years, I'm catching up on some reading - well, trying between demands to go to the beach, swim, visit the park and so on. This year's book list is: Windows Powershell 2 Administrator's Pocket Consultant (ISBN 978-0735625952), Programmers at Work (Susan Lammers ISBN 978-0914845713), More Joel on Software (ISBN 978-1430209874) and The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll.

If you get involved with managing more than one Windows computer, the built-in command language can be a life saver. And if you use commands, then being able to automate command sequences as mini-programs can save even more time and a whole lot of grief. Powershell 2 is the latest and best way of building command automation, and it's already built in to Windows Server 2008 and the newly launched Windows 7. It's also a free download from Microsoft for XP, Vista and Server 2003. The Pocket Consultant is just small enough to be dragged around with you as a reference, but you'd need a big pocket to put it in. Shame there's no accompanying CD with a PDF version.

Period drama

Programmers at Work is a seminal work written in 1986, in which the author, Susan Lammers, interviews 19 of the world's most influential programmers. It's fair to say that without some of these guys, modern computing probably wouldn't be what it is today. As far as I'm aware, nobody has repeated the exercise since. Perhaps I can persuade a publisher to stump up the expenses for me to swan about the world doing the interviews. Send your nominations for possible interviewees by email please, and I'll give a book prize for the best list.

Lammers interviewed Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian who headed the development team on what was to become Microsoft Office. He's also the person who devised the so-called Hungarian Notation - a systematic way of naming program variables aimed at making it more obvious what kind of data the variable was holding and what its job was in the program. The 'Hungarian' bit is a joke because the result is a program that looks to the uninitiated as if it's written in Hungarian (a version of the old saying, 'It's all Greek to me').

Opening the gates

Interviewee number five was Simonyi's boss, Bill Gates. At this time, Gates was relatively poor - perhaps worth only a few hundred million. Among the pearls of wisdom he imparted, I rather liked this statement: "It's true that we're going to allow programs to be a little fatter than they have been. But in terms of speed it's just laziness not to allow something to be as fast as possible because users... notice programs that are really fast. In the most successful programs, the speed of execution is just wonderful.

"Sometimes it's a trade-off between adding features and executing really fast, but there are ways of having lots and lots of features and still making them fast," he continued. No comment.

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