Antiquitates - liber I - In memoriam Robert M. Pirsig

Introduction

This mediation is meant as the first of a short serie about antiquitates: good ancient things, knowledge. The central point of this is to focus on figures and ideas, or better pictures and schemas, that we have in our heads. This Pantheon is something we never speak about but is central in our approach to problems.

Infact while in our past (i'm speaking of the western colture) this pantheon were very homogeneous (geographically speaking but also between distinct social classes) in the current, global and postmodern world is something very variegated and fragmented and almost each one has a pantheon on his own.

Another point of this serie will be the importance of ancient wisdom. I totally disagree with the concept of human progress. I'm not speaking, obviously, of material conditions, but I believe the deepness reacheable by human thoughts has not improved over centuries. Only elements we play with have changed. Our fathers already discussed many still actual questions, useful also for us as programmers. I start here with an example in the near past, just to be kind with you, but other meditations will go far backward in time.

In an era while the organisation of production is even more constrained into fixed binaries, where new methodologies are put in the field to force us to act in a precomputed manner, where technologies too reorganize themselves to be impersonal, becomes even more important to focus on which immaterial bricks are worth to be collected to build the unique construction of our creativity as programmers.

Pirsig's Chautauquas

Pirsig's recent death pushed me to ponder again about the importance of his discourse for my life and for my Perl programming activity. Pirsig is the author of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that I read many lives ago but which never disappeared from the background of my mind. Two central concepts still remain from his book as two rocks after thousand years of erosion.

Quality

The first one is quality. Quality, if memory deserves, was what caused the protagonist's brain short circuit as filosophy professor. The research of quality and implicitly his definition, is something central in our lives. Ok but what this can be related to Perl and to programing? Is not maintainability just an aspect of quality? Readability over a clever jumble of hacks is not just another face of this concept? And why we prefer, well we love, Perl if not for a matter of overall quality? Quality of the programmer's activity while coding, not constrained by the interpreter's laws to double sign with blood the laguage way to code. Quality of the produced code in all it's phases: imagination, drawing, realizing, improving, testing and maintaining.

Quality is everyday something less. As the programmer hired after he told the interviewer he was able to cut ten lines of code each day. Quality is polishing the diamond (*).

But quality cannot be teach. We, well you, can show some incarnation of it. You can cast some light from your own quality and draw a beautiful picture on the white wall of ignorance. You cannot show directly the source of these rays, just the projection. Why? because quality is not a place but a path, a neverending one. Is a driving tension.

Underlying form

The second concept is underlying form. This is crucial concept for the programmer. We solve problems. Solutions must be aware of underlying forms. Problems are occurences of the reality in the platonic world of ideas and forms and even if such abstract world does not exists, it heavily concurs in our understanding and approaching of problems.

Without the perception of something in the background our solution can just be a mere workaround or a color patch. A valid solution to a given, complex problem, can born only from the understanding of underlying forms.

Here the discourse becomes even more actual. We are living in the end of the firts Internet generation. Most of us have born in a totally analogic world and will die, as late as possible, in a totally different world. What about the next generation? Who knows? An anecdote, inspired by real life, can show different aproaches to the same problem.

Generational anecdote

Tizio and Caio are both of the first internet generation. They share the usage of computer at home. Tizio, for fun, put an entry in the file HOSTS for the Caio's preffered website pointing to 127.0.0.1

Some hours after Caio points his browser to the preferred website and he notices a connection error. He then issues a ping to the website name and sees it strangely resolves to localhost. He wonders a bit if the provider has blocked the website so he issues an nslookup to the website domain name and he is happy to see that nslookup returns a valid public IP address. He points the browser to this address and he sees his preferred website again. So he realizes the problem must be at level of local name resolution. He opens the HOSTS file and comment the incriminated entry, adding some bad words addressed to Tizio.

Tizio make the same funny pun in a computer shared with Sempronio, a millennial second internet generation. Sempronio notices the error then tries some other websites and they are ok. Sempronio starts thinking that something is broken within the browser and he installs another browser but, with his big disappoint, the problem persists.
So he opens the Bag Of All Answers website and searches for "preferred_website blocked" and he discovers a plethora of causes that can make a website to be blocked. He reads superficially a bunch of articles without invastigating why governments block websites. After three minutes he modifies the search: "preferred_website blocked solution" and he happily discovers that some software can circumvent the problem.
So he installs a program named after the sligthly modified name of an ancient god, let say Marz. Sempronio does not know but this geeky program uses it's own nameservers and redistributes web requests over it's own network in a peer2peer way, Sempronio just complains it's a bit slow but finally the preferred website shows correctly again in the browser.
So for him it is a happy end (not saying that an international agency intercepts all Marz's traffic and programtically breaks all computers using it, but this is whole another story..).

With the above i dont mean all young people are stupid and all older ones are wise and spot everytime the rigth solution. I dont mean this at all. Just I want to highlight that if you know the underlying form of a web request probably you'll arrive to correct conclusions if experiencing some weird browsing behaviour.

Conclusions

Quoting from Pirsig's book: Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic. Author's work is full of examples of what he called classical and romantic types. I think such dichotomy is even too much stressed. I'm more in favor of the Humanistic Being, even as programmer. I dont want to be just another thooth in the gear not even knowing if I'm part of a clock or of a motorcycle. Knowing the big picture and to perceive underlying forms can make us better programmers.
An old book by a philosofy professor is worth to read, probably even better to have in the books shelf than an aseptic manual of programing methodology.

Roma 2770 AB URBE CONDITA / 8644 September 1993

L*

(*) update Feb. 2018 I found two quotes perfectly fitting here, visiting the cell of the only monk that is here since never:

> I know I'm on the right track when, by deleting something, I'm adding functionality. -- JohnCarter

> I find it most entertaining when, to fix a bug in an existing system, I need do nothing but delete code. -- JeffGrigg