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Is the Future Going to Happen Somewhere Else?

I noticed that Chris Campbell's blog often includes a note about what music he was listening to as he wrote. This seems like a nice personal touch so I thought I'd copy it. I'm listening to a funny John Prine song about predicting the future and the chorus goes like this:

We are living in the future, I'll tell you how I know
I read it in the paper fifteen years ago
We're all driving rocket ships and talking with our minds
Wearing turquoise jewelry and standing in soup lines

A long time ago, when I was in college, I had a front row seat for the final act of the Disappearance of the Steel Industry in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. It had become cheaper to manufacture steel elsewhere and to have the work down by other people. It never occurred to me that the industry I was hoping to join might suffer the same slow fate. Of course it is, just as surely as one can increase profits by cutting costs. Last week the local paper's technology section included a column that gleefully warned the "Larry Lunchpails" of Silicon valley that their mid-level technology jobs were headed to Beijing and Bangalore. This is hardly a breaking story, in fact I noticed that the most popular java.net blog from August is a call to arms about the very same topic.

If current trends persist, one has to wonder what will become of the software engineering business here in Silicon Valley. Will an aging Ross Perot announce that he has finally found the source of the "giant sucking sound" he first heard back in 1996? Will some industry pundit finally be right about the biotech industry? Will there be souplines? I'm thinking that the answer can be found in Microsoft's market share and in computer viruses.

Microsoft's software runs on more than ninety percent of the computers connected to the internet. It has become the dank fetid breeding ground for computer viruses, a mosquito infested swamp that needs to be drained. And why are our Microsoftware computers so vulnerable? Why is it that each successive computer plague leaves an even bigger infestation than the last one? It's not (just) because Microsoft has a unique talent for creating the gaping security holes that computer viruses flow through. It's because their success has created a monoculture and any farmer will tell you that monocultures are highly susceptible to disease epidemics. Our computer farm lacks variety. Which brings me back to Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley is a diverse place. We're multicultural on many levels, from the places we come from to the places we think technology should go. Silicon Valley boosters will tell you that we're more innovative or that we work harder (but please don't say "work smarter") or that the entrepreneurial spirit is stronger here than anywhere else. I'm glad to believe that it's all true however I think the reason we're going to thrive in spite of the gravitational pull generated by lower costs is because of our differences. I don't know what idea is going to trigger the next economic boom however I'm confident that creative thoughts buzzing around in the brain of each technology dreamer here in Silicon Valley are unique. Most of those ideas will fuel little more than insomnia however thanks to large numbers it's inevitable that a few of them will be great. Insanely great. And because they're here, the individuals who possess the great ideas will not be able to avoid bumping into neighbors and friends and aquaintances who will help them get the next gold rush rolling. Right here.

Sharing a Week With the GUADEC Generation

I'm here at Trinity College for the 4th annual GNOME users and developers conference (GUADEC) in Dublin Ireland.

Dublin Ireland time is eight hours ahead of PST back in Silicon Valley however I've mostly overcome the jet lag. Except from 1-2 PM every day when I feel like a narcoleptic. It's 1:30 right now and it feels like my brain is draped with a big hot wet wool blanket.

That was as far as this blog got on Tuesday. After failing to find a way to make both eyes focus on the screen at the same time, I stumbled out of the computer room to find strong coffee.

The computer room was the conference's social hub. As rooms go it wasn't terribly impressive: a big windowless room filled with folding tables surrounded by chairs, plenty of outlets on the floor, and a broadband ethernet cable duct taped to the table in front of each chair. It's hard to explain how inviting your own little space at the internet trough can look after you've been offline for a few days. The computer room was a magnet for the folks attending the conference. It was jammed all day with GNOME developers who were yacking and hacking and enjoying the camaraderie. It was here that I discovered some things about the conference and the GNOME community:

• They're friendly, they like to talk, and they really like to talk about the software. I'm shy and hopeless at making conversation however I found myself talking to all kinds of people about what they were building, what they planned to build, and (typically for me) about how Java might fit in.
• There's no point in finishing your GUADEC presentation before arriving at the conference. That's something that can be taken care of in the hours before you're scheduled to perform. Preferably in the terminal room, where you can procrastinate further by talking to me.
• Hacking on big systems that you're passionate about is fun, and both qualities are contagious.
• There's a clear hierachy among the developers. There are high priests, there are groups of trusted lieutenants, and there is the rabble. As a member of the rabble, I appreciated the fact that ones relative position in the hierarchy didn't seem to have any effect on the hobnobbing. Everyone made time to talk with everyone else.

Last week I spent the entire week at JavaOne and had a great time of it. One consistent theme that JavaOne attendees have fed back to the conference committee is that they want more technical content in the sessions. They want to see source code. This week I was at the conference (GUADEC) where code was king. The technical sessions were filled with developers hacking away at their laptops while the speaker talked about code and in some cases actually wrote code while everyone watched. Raptly. In one session the speaker ran a new (JIT) compiler on a small app and everyone watched attentively for several minutes while the instructions the compiler generated scrolled by in blur on the screen.

These are my people.

One of the most memorable keynote presentations of the week was given by Alan Kay, who appeared via a video link from his home in California. The average age of the GNOME developers I met at GUADEC was probably mid 20s and I felt very old, although not as old as Alan Kay. Alan's presentation began with an inspiring review of projects he'd worked on (or witnessed) back in the 1960s, including some great video of those old apps in action.

Ivan Sutherland's early 1960s "SketchPad" drawing application, which featured the first use of multiple windows (SketchPad3), still looks great. Users draw directly on the screen with a stylus and the app recognizes crudely drawn simple shapes and redraws them as perfect rectangles or semi-circles or rectangular polygons. Alan pointed out that this was the first object oriented system - a user could create classes of graphic objects, editing the class changed existing instances.

There was also a 1966 video of Doug Engelbart using a combination mouse/keyboard system to navigate around a little information tree. Response time was excellent even though the app was running on a 1/2 MIP time sharing system with 192KBytes of memory. Engelbart's goal was (is): "augmenting the collective IQ of groups of people". Still seems like a worthwhile goal.

These projects and more like them were intended to inspire everyone to build new apps that were atleast as capable as the ones built 40 years ago. Ofcourse there was an implicit dig in the call to action - we've lost the ability to craft small responsive apps even though we're now working with hardware that has 1000 times the capacity of what our forefathers had to work with. In other words, why does it take so much more code and computer horsepower to build high performance interactive data visualization apps then it used to? There are a variety of tired responses to such questions, some cynical, others self deprecating. The one that's not trotted out very often is the punchline to an old Bill Gates joke - "that was the demo". Great demos are a combination of technology and theater that deliver a little shot of adrenaline to the viewers imagination. The 1960s era demos we saw were certainly masterpieces, however they were still only demos. The difficulty of turning the vision those demos inspired into apps suitable for everyday use by everyone should not be underestimated. Hollywood had us traveling to the moon in the movies 40 years before anyone set foot there.

Bulding practical useful systems that deliver on the implicit promises in great demos is hard and it's time consuming. The GNOME community has done as much for Linux desktop computing and I can say from personal experience that it works like a champ.

Opening the Door to JavaDesktop.org

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