They're exactly the same. Both have rules you must follow if your message is going to be understood clearly by your intended recipient, whether it's a human or a machine. When experienced programmers look at a piece of code, shake their heads, and mutter about "poor syntax," they're just like copy editors shaking their heads over poor spelling or misplaced punctuation marks.
There are people who write concise stories, while others are overly verbose. It's the same with programmers. Some are tersely efficient, while others write thousands of commands to accomplish seemingly simple functions.
Both writing and programming are basically boring tasks performed by solitary craftspeople sitting in front of monitors, wearing out their fingers tapping on plastic keyboards. If you have the ability to become a good programmer, you have the ability needed to become a good writer.
It works the other way around, too.
But before you say, "I can write English real good so I can be a programmer anytime I want," remember how much practice it took before you were able to write competently in English, and realize that you'll have to put just as much energy into learning to program.
The easiest? Or the best? The easiest is to take programming classes and slavishly do what your teachers tell you. If you don't fall asleep in class, you'll become a marginal, mechanically competent programmer in due course, just as studying English Composition in college can eventually turn you into a marginal, mechanically competent writer.
But the best way to become a programmer is to study the work of people whose software you admire while trying to write programs yourself, at home, late at night, when no one is watching. If you do this long enough, and put enough heart into it, you will not only become a competent programmer sooner or later, but may actually become a great one. If this is the track you choose, and you stick to it (and you have a little natural talent to begin with), formal training is necessary only if you want to work for a large company that dotes on paper credentials.
Open-source software has no secrets. Anyone can read and change the code to suit their taste. If there's a bug in a piece of open-source software, and you find it and fix it, you're expected to pass your "fix" along to other users and hope they return the favor someday. This is the basic open-source philosophy, and it's no sudden "movement," either.
Thirty years ago, almost all software was open-source. One programmer wrote some code, another improved it, and yet another made it even better. By the time that code passed through a few dozen hands, it would almost always perform its intended task flawlessly. All the people along the programming chain, and all their employers, and anyone else who wanted to use that piece of software, benefited from this evolutionary method of software development.
Then, one day, two renegade programmers in Albuquerque, New Mexico, decided that they, virtually alone among all the people in the world then producing software for personal computers, would keep their work secret and not reveal their original programming code. And instead of passing their work freely to others through online computer bulletin boards or by swapping disks full of it with others at computer hobby club meetings -- the two most common means of distributing personal computer software before 1972 -- these men packaged their programs in boxes and sold them on retail store shelves.
These renegade programmers were, of course, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who called their partnership Micro-Soft. Almost single-handedly, they created the closed-source movement, in which software flaws couldn't be found and fixed easily by other programmers.
Selling proprietary, closed-source software in shrink-wrapped packages, either to corporate and institutional users through a direct sales force or to the public through retail stores, was not cheap. The cost of the actual software "product" was only a tiny fraction of what the end user paid for it. Micro-Soft (later simply Microsoft, and headquartered in a Seattle, Washington, suburb), and others following the closed-source software business model they created, marked up all their costs at every step, developed brand awareness as though they were selling soda pop (complete with "secret formulas"), and generally tried to turn software development from an essentially creative activity into a market-driven production job little different from installing dashboards in Chevrolet vans on an assembly line.
So Bill Gates and Paul Allen and others who built their closed-source software brands effectively and built huge sales and distribution infrastructures got hugely rich, and the cost of launching new products that competed with their brands soon got so high that the few programmers who tried it were engaged in as futile a fight as a small entrepreneur who decided to take on Coca-Cola in the national soft drink marketplace.
But some of the programming drudges in the big "branded" proprietary software companies kept writing "cool" software at home, in their spare time, and swapping their homemade code with others like themselves. A few of these hobby-coders were tremendously talented. They produced work that, while it may not have fit into their bosses' business model, had seeds of genius in it. Like copy-banging newspaper reporters creating and sharing poetry for free on weekends, they put more of their souls into their hobby work than into what they were doing for their employers during their boring days at work.
We seem to have gotten back to the writing code vs. writing English thing. And once again, it's an apt comparison. You could call the open-source movement "the poetry of programming" and not be far wrong.
And along comes the Internet! All of a sudden the poet-programmers can easily share and distribute their work worldwide without trucks or warehouses or long-distance telephone bills or hordes of smooth-talking salespeople racking up "frequent flyer" miles. A programmer in Australia can now collaborate with one in Sweden. A small business owner in Hawaii can download a program produced jointly by the two of them, try it out, request a modification to it through a Newsgroup post, and get a reply to that request a few hours later from a programmer in New York who's already made that modification. Then other users of that program can test the change, and, if they find it useful, the two original programmers can include it in subsequent versions of their software.
This is how open-source software gets developed, distributed, and upgraded. It's a faster, more efficient, and more user-friendly process than the sales-driven, corporate-based, closed-source software distribution pattern.
Within the next decade, most of today's big software companies will die and be replaced by thousands of small consulting firms and individuals, all linked through the Internet, all trading ideas and code freely with one another. This doesn't mean all software will suddenly be free, because programmers have car payments and utility bills like everyone else, but when the closed-source fad ends, and open-source software becomes the norm once again, we'll get better programs (and faster bug fixes) than we get today, for a fraction of what it costs to write, debug, market, and distribute similar closed-source software.
Nothing. Linux is already setting the computer world on its ear. But before Linux can become anywhere near as popular as Windows, someone will need to develop an ultra-basic, stripped-down Linux release that ordinary, computer-literate people (who are not skilled programmers) can easily install and use.
The problem with Linux, in its present form, is that it's way more powerful than it needs to be for most home or small business applications. Using current versions of Linux for simple word processing and basic business bookkeeping tasks is like taking a 10-ton diesel semi to the corner grocery store for a gallon of milk.
I've been yowling around the fringes of the Linux community for several years now, trying to get the ultra-geeks at its heart to realize that the next step for Linux is to develop a cut-down version, even if some of the software's inherent power and flexibility is lost in the process. People who start with the training-wheels version of Linux -- the one that hasn't been written yet -- can then progress to more powerful, hair-on-the-chest versions the same way today's Windows users move to Windows NT if and when they need its extra power.
The Linux ease-of-use movement is getting stronger every month. You can already buy personal computers that have Linux pre-loaded on them, just as you can buy computers pre-loaded with Windows. Most of the companies currently making Linux computers concentrate on the lucrative, high-end network and Internet server market, where Linux and Apache (an open-source program) are undisputedly superior to anything ever produced by the closed-source software crowd, but a few smart entrepreneurs are starting to sell low-cost computers loaded with Linux and open-source software to home and small business computer users.
Right now, I can go buy a $1200 Linux computer that is the equivalent of a Windows-powered box that would cost over $3000 by the time I added all the proprietary software it would take to replace the contents of a single sub-$100 Linux CD set from someone like Red Hat. Not many people realize that bargains like this are available, but they will before long. I wrote a column last month about the growing availability of Linux personal computers, and the "straight" computer press and print media are usually about six months behind me, so you can expect to see lots of articles about "Linux optional" computers appearing in early 1999.
At least a few of those articles will give me a hearty chuckle, because they'll be obvious "lifts" of what I've already written. Not all writers have the time to follow Linux and open-source software developments firsthand, as I do, so I don't mind when they follow me. It's been happening for several years now, and I've gotten used to it.
I feel a little sorry for editors who are buying second-hand stories from second-raters instead of coming to me directly, but if they're happy ( or don't know any better), I'm not going to lose any sleep over their misfortune. There are enough "hip" editors out there to keep me busy and well-fed.
What chasm? I think the Internet's great. I sit at home in my shorts, writing for Andover News Network, a small -- but highly successful -- Internet publisher, and get paid well for my efforts. I own a small -- but highly successful -- limousine service, and all of my new limo business comes from my home-made Robin's Limousine Web site.
As far as I'm concerned, the Internet is the greatest thing since ground coffee. It has expanded opportunities for freelance writers so greatly that almost anyone who can spell names right, construct a coherent sentence, and put a "P" tag at the end of a paragraph can earn $20 to $100 per hour, working from home, as a "new media content provider."
The Internet gives small businesses -- like my limousine service -- access to potential customers all over the world for next to nothing. It gives small investors access to information and low-cost brokerage services that were once available only to the ultra-rich. Artwork that might never otherwise be seen has a chance to gain an audience. Every writer can publish his or work online, no matter how far-out or non-commercial it might be. This is all good, and none of it's hype.
I have no sympathy for the big companies and gung-ho startups that are always whining about how it's impossible to make a profit on the Internet. They're all run by people too stupid to understand the medium's many possibilities and its many limitations. But that's their business. Sooner or later they'll either realize the errors of their ways (or hire people like me to correct their mistakes) or shut down their overpriced, badly designed Web sites and leave the Internet to those of us who know how to use it properly -- and profitably.
Copyright 1998, Thomas L. Mangan
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