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CurmudgeonCorner

Main Entry: cur�mud�geon Pronunciation: (")k&r-'m&-j&n Function: noun Etymology: origin unknown Date: 1577 1 archaic : MISER 2 : a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old man

Merriam Webster

Glad to have you on the Wiki. Welcome Merriam!

(Or if the tripe is nuts enough to fall...)

We recommend you enjoy any rants here (from here...) with a large shaker of salt.

So, shake those trees!

If you get the feeling our BookListPage is a little too "nice, nice" try any of the juvenile books by Dav Pilkey: The Dumb Bunnies series, Captain Underpants series. No kidding, they're all the rage in elementary Special Ed schools. Dav Pilkey spent most of his school career kicked-out of the classroom, drawing cartoons of questionable taste in the hall. Check out http://www.pilkey.com

BobLee 2003.07.17

Bob, what's wrong with kids reading some not-so-nice (although Captain Underpants booksare pretty funny, and not not-so-nice books) books? I'm all in favor of kids reading anything. Anything that gets kids to pick up covers with words inside is fine by me. We don't censor anything our kids read. Although I have been known to say, "That may make you uncomfortable. If you read it now and if you're concerned, talk to me about it, great. Otherwise, you may want to wait until you're (12,13,14 or whatever I think is a more appropriate age.) -- JohannaRothman 2003.07.18

JR - I think the optimum age for Captain Underpants and toilet humor is about 10. They sure enjoy it! (Well, so do I, but then...) I see no harm in it other than maniacal laughter. bl 2003.07.19

SlogansNotEngagement

I have heartburn, I'll admit it. Tech innovations - so called, and especailly in process space - get all sloganized, dropping in the process any discussion on the merits, their own or of alternatives. "That's not agile." "That's not disciplined." Slogans become a substitute for:

• Thought about what makes sense right now.
• Honest engagement with the "others" assuming they have some reason for whatever they are doing.

You can tell when the slogans have become a complete substitute for thought when they get reduced to acronyms. YAGNI. CMM III. TANSTAAFL. It's just as limiting in tech as wish-they-had-a-life members of fandom using canned, fictitous thoughts from some SF book as a substitute for real life (perhaps "Real Life(tm)", I'm not sure.)

This is a big part of why I play curmudgeon around the "Agile Movement." They generate slogans. They say things like: "I'm not responsible for <whatever>!" They hoist entire barns full of straw men as examples of the bad, evil way non-agile development is universally done to be demolished, or is that inflamed, by some slogan: No Big Design Up Front or some such. Well who the hell ever did Big Design In Excess Of What Makes Sense? How about: "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work." Well, duh. Who did more than that, ever? Lots and lots of confused, or overwhelmed, or overextended people did. Occasionally some self-righteous boneheads. Some of them even had slogans - especially the boneheads.

If I get to pick the worst example that could possibly be said to be your methodology, I'll match any big design disaster with an equivalent so-called "agile" SNAFU. The ultimate "agility" is no form at all, which doesn't do much. Aomebas survive and multiply and don't do a whole lot else.

We happen to have a bit of a track record of big, prescriptive projects failing - except some of them don't. They got press because in it's day, all the planning you can imagine (but not all that makes sense) was the silver-bullet-du-jour. Repeatability was king, and high-volume discrete manufacturing was the metaphor of the day. For a whole lot of software (and other) work, that metaphor falls down. For some software (and other) work, that metaphor works just fine. When they fall down as models, we're probably dealing with metaphor abuse, not a model that Can't Possibly Work Ever (CPWE, pronounced "See-Pwee".)

Slogans substitute for thought. Slogans substitute for engagement. Slogans lead to good powerful ideas being tarnished by brainless knee-jerk application, flavored by the self-righteousness of zealots and the anointed few. Jargon "chunks up" a conversation we've had, and an understanding that's been developed, dragging all that nuance with it. A slogan, or worse an appreviation of a slogan becomes "name magic" complete with priests, initiation rites, a series of hidden teachings, and of course the anointed vs. the not. Or we can engage absent the slogans and talk about some practices, and figure out what makes sense and how to adjust when we need to.

I play curmudgeon around tech slogans even more. First, no actually somewhere along the way from mud and sticks to hologram projecting data pads we lost the clue that a tech to use has to actually exist. Clark's "minisec" was fiction, and PARC actually prototyped what one might work like way, way "back in the day". Englebart worked out some of the fundamental problems of data organization something like 30 years ago.

Silly people, they thought of marketing as having something to do with having something to ship. These guys didn't have any good slogans. They didn't push the "Information Appliance" meme out there, to substitute for thought and engagement and actually shipping something. Too bad for them. It's all about the zeitgeist.

So, now, as we watch Palm implode by taking their eye off the ball, while Microsoft foists "Windows on yet another form factor" into that space? (Just what I need, a phone that takes 10 minutes to boot, and periodically hangs with a blue screen of death while racking up LD charges to Botswana) somebody else, maybe Nokia, is going to win the "Information Appliance" derby. They'll have a better name, of course. So let's all go have a debate about whether Oracle is "truely relational" or whether Ada is "really Object-Oriented." Or maybe about whether the "Industrial XP" people have the right to coin a moniker for themselves. I'm convinced that in the end, the strident Agilistas and the CMM are mostly pissed off at each other because they're competing for acronyms, and there are only 26**3 TLAs available using a standard english alphabet.

So now, "Federated, Distributed Systems" - a name for the Frankenstein accretions that will spontaneously (and with neither investment nor the need for skill) emerge from the soup of "Web Services" - has given way to an enabling technology, the "Enterprise Services Bus" or ESB. BTW, "FDS" is a trademark in the US and it doesn't have to do with software. Here's the thing.

• A "Service Based Architecture" has some benefits.
• I think distributed systems can do (and have done - this idea's not new either) some good
• The web protocols & infrastructure provides a pretty good foundation for plugging this stuff together.

But, we've gotten so tangled up in manufacturing slogans in anticipation of the up and coming buzz-word of the day, nobody ships. Nobody cares that they don't ship. Web Services are still mostly fiction, there's one guy currently writing about enterprise architectures for Federated Distributed Systems, and we've already zoomed past all that into the next enabling technology complete with slogan: Enterprise Services Bus. Having not built the stuff that will be connected by the stuff, to create the stuff that might use an ESB, the pundit-sphere already rings with knowing analysis of what is goodness in an ESB.

BTW, how will you "agilely" build disributed apps? of this hugeness? Some techniques have been out there for years, but no doubt when Fowler or somebody writes a book from the right publisher about this stuff, it'll become the one true solution. With a slogan. And an acronym for the slogan. Damnit, a whole bunch of good ideas are getting wrapped in this stridency, trivialized by this slogneering, and packaged up into abbreviated pablum - acronyms actually. Process ideas. Tech ideas. People ideas.

More important, without the ability to rapidly generate catchy slogans myself I can't cash in this way. Until the AYE Conference. As of today, thanks to the AYE conference I now have a slogan generator, located off on BuzzWordBingo, so I too can play in the sloganeering meme-off.

I'll be sure to remember the "smart mob" from which I extracted this "emergent model", in a "loosely coupled" fashion. Fortunately, I had the "agility" to "adopt and adapt" vs. "plan and prescribe" so maybe I can make some money off this. But I won't be paying you folks. YAGNI.

Welcome to the "New, New Thing" (or is that one taken?)

---- JimBullock, 2003.07.17 (Inside my head, it's like this all the time. 2003.07.19 Edits: shorter, clearer.)

I remember some ads about the "New, New Economy" It was like the old new economy, with old economy messures, like profit, but I don't remember any, "New, New Thing" -- ShannonSeverance 2003.07.17

Shannon I really like your "economy messures" -- like "tax erasures" from "compassionate conservatives" I assume? --BobLee 2003.07.18

"The New New Thing" is the title of a book about Barksdale, of Silicon Graphics and Netscape fame, and how he was busy at Healtheon inventing the "New New Thing" being all ahead of the curve and disintermediation-y. Barksdale and his fan club used the phrase "new, new thing" deliberately. It's all about catching the next emerging wave.

Healtheon was going to revolutionize health care. So, SGI struggles, still groping for relevence, Netscape is a smoking crater, and Healtheon never really got out of the starting blocks. Barksdale got way rich several times. Of his compatriots at Netscape, some got rich. Even so, people don't quote Andreeson much these days.

I wonder what kind of LessonsFromBooksAboutCeos we could find here. -- JimBullock, 2003.07.17 (If you're going after sacred cows, why not try for the whole herd?)

<laughing out loud> OK, I'll be a Curmudgeon about all you Curmudgeons... :-)

There are times when I WANT to use buzzwords, esp when I'm thinking about particular problems. There are times when my particular life-experience has taught me lessons that I'm simply not interested in revisiting or analyzing further.

For instance, last week, when that scammer was trying to sell us $40K of worthless business consulting, I made my mind up the moment I heard him say "And you have to decide tomorrow (after their long, hi-pressure pitch) or you'll not become one of our customers." I thought to myself, "Cool. I'm not going to be one of your customers." I simply refuse to make any significant decision without time to think it over away from the pressure. And boy, did he get angry at me the next day, when I stated that and stuck to my guns!!!! :-)

Another slogan I find myself using frequently (unfortunately <sigh>) is "I am not a bank!" And we've had a lot fewer people try to hit us up for loans since we copped that particular attitude.

I think slogans--distilled bits of experience and wisdom--can be useful. Sometimes.

The challenge is in detecting when they are useful and when they just get in the way.

--SuePetersen 2003.07.18

Sue, I love the salesman who nicely illustrates a sort of job suicide. Buy from me or you won't be my customer! A candidate for change if I ever heard one. - Becky 2003.07.22

Well Becky, if you're really curious, you can check out this link. :-)

I was surprised, it never occurred to me that business consulting could be quite _this_ slimy... <shaking head in awe> Oh yeah, I walked out when he started making little digs about my marriage and my partnership with my husband. B was still trying to be polite (both because he's a conventional, polite sort of guy most of the time, and because he thought he was getting some good information even though he knew we weren't going to bite on their offer.) I understand that after I left, the salesman told B that I was "wasted" where I was, that "I needed to be off making big bucks programming while B ran the business..."

There are times when I think B is entirely TOO polite. I would have physically thrown the guy out the door. B just smiled and went on talking. (And B knows and agrees the outfit is a scam but he still thinks I'm overreacting. <rolling eyes>)

--SuePetersen 2003.07.22

Yes, that link exudes slime. (Was that the guy that called you? ... or just a wantabe?) If you ever feel a need to refresh that memory just tune into TV at odd hours of the night on cable. They all swarm there promoting their promises. - Becky 2003.07.23

Yes, that's the company that called on us. (I think inc.com must have just cleaned house, I printed out 7 pages from that article link a couple weeks ago.) They brag about using telemarketing processes to sell business consulting. It's the first time I've really seen "Fly-Over Consulting" in person (you know, like the seagulls do...) I suspect they target (prey on) small companies that have outgrown their operating procedures. We must have looked like low-hanging fruit, not only do with have some problems managing our growth, we actually have cash in the bank... -- SuePetersen 2003.07.23

Wow. I wonder about the people who have funded this crap. _ BeckyWinant 2003.07.24

Kids are very adept at discovering and passing jargon. Try to understand any group of teens chatting!

The difference between jargon and slogan is snake-oil.

On another Curmudgeonly note: StephenNorrie posted a link to a nicely curmudgeonly Infotech white paper on the origins of the Methodology Wars tracing from the 60's up. "Software Methodologies: Battle of the Gurus" http://www.shtull-trauring.org/aron/Work/Articles/SoftMeth.pdf The Dijkstra to Brooks to modern guru wars is pretty loaded with curmudgeonly judgements. Fun! Thanks Steve!

BobLee 2003.07.19 (thanks for correcting the link, someone!)