Blogger's Block #3: Dreaming in Browser Swamp

Part 3 of an N-part series of short (well, fast, anyway) posts intended to clear out my bloggestive tract.

I've been doing a lot of JavaScript and DHTML and AJAX programming lately. Increasing quantities of it. Boy howdy. The O'Reilly DHTML book has gotten big enough to crush a Volkswagon Bug, hasn't it? And my CSS book has gone from pristine to war-torn in under a month. I've managed to stay in the Dark Ages of web programming for the past 10 years: you know, HTML, a little CGI, font color="red". Way old school. And now I'm getting the crash-course. The more I learn, the more I wish I'd known it for longer. Although then I'd have had to live through the long transition from Dark Ages to the muchly-improved situation we have today. Far from good, to be sure, but it's improved dramatically since last I looked.

JavaScript is probably the most important language in the world today. Funny, huh? You'd think it would be Java or C++ or something. But I think it just might be JavaScript.

For one thing, despite JavaScript's inevitable quirks and flaws and warts and hairy boogers and severe body odor, it possesses that magical property that you can get stuff done really fast with it. Well, if you can find any halfway decent tools and libraries for it, that is. Which you can't, not without effort. But the situation is improving. Slow and steady wins the race and all. JavaScript is definitely the tortoise to Java's hare.

See, JavaScript has a captive audience. It's one of those languages you just have to know, or you get to miss out on Web programming, and in case you hadn't noticed, thick clients are like Big Hair these days. Most non-technical people I know pretty much live in their browsers, and they only emerge periodically to stare in puzzlement at iTunes or a game or something, and wonder why isn't it in the browser, because everything else useful seems to be. It's where the whole world is. To non-technical people, of course. Which is, like, practically everyone.

We technical folks like to eye browsers with suspicion, and for a good reason. They're not platforms. They're sort of like platforms, but they're missing all this stuff you normally expect from platforms. The DHTML book (which covers pretty much the only semi-reliable intersection of the browser platforms) is, for all its massive size, still just one book, and any platform worth its salt will need a whole shelf.

It turns out if you dig deep into Mozilla (aka Netscape, aka Firefox, aka SeaMonkey, aka SwampMonster, I mean the thing really has way too many farging names already), you'll find that it actually is a relatively full-featured platform. It's not quite as general-purpose as an OS (or Java), but it's certainly big and hairy enough to be making threats in that general direction.

But my God, it's sooooooo ugly. It's got well over a decade of ugly packed in there. "Hello, World" in Mozilla is six or seven files in as many different languages. I kid you not. It's worse than Hello, World was back in the Petzold days of Win32 programming. You have your XUL file and your JavaScript file and your CSS file and your manifest.rdf and your i18n.something and I can't remember what all else. And then you have to build them together (using some other files) to make even more files: a JAR file and an XPI file at a minimum. That's one gnarly-ass introductory program.

Me, I kinda prefer Python's version:

print "Hello, world!"

Color me silly with font="red", but it just seems cleaner to me.

And then when you try to graduate from Hello, World to something that seems like it should be only epsilon more difficult, like, say, "Get me a list of the user's bookmarks", you officially launch off into this eerie XPCOM world where you have to write dozens and dozens of lines of JavaScript code that looks nothing at all like you'd imagine it should, if you closed your eyes and thought to yourself: "I wonder what the JS code for getting bookmarks would look like?"

Look, I'll even show ya:

/**
 * Returns a sorted list of bookmark objects.  Each object
 * has properties name, url, and (optional) kw.
 * @return bookmark list:  an array of anonymous objects, each
 * with "name", "url" and "kw" fields.  Sorts the list by name
 * if sort is true.
 */
function getBookmarkList(doSort) {
  var rdf = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/rdf/rdf-service;1"].
    getService(Components.interfaces.nsIRDFService);
    
  var bmks = rdf.GetDataSource("rdf:bookmarks");
  var NC_NS = "http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#";
  var kwArc = rdf.GetResource(NC_NS + "ShortcutURL");
  var urlArc = rdf.GetResource(NC_NS + "URL");
  var nameArc = rdf.GetResource(NC_NS + "Name");
  var rdfLiteral = Components.interfaces.nsIRDFLiteral;
  var e = bmks.GetAllResources();
  var items = [];

  while(e.hasMoreElements()) {
    var r =  e.getNext().QueryInterface(
        Components.interfaces.nsIRDFResource);
    var urlR = bmks.GetTarget(r, urlArc, true);
    var kwR = bmks.GetTarget(r, kwArc, true);
    var nameR = bmks.GetTarget(r, nameArc, true);
    if (!(nameR && urlR)) {
      continue;
    }
    var item = {};
    item.name = nameR.QueryInterface(rdfLiteral).Value;
    item.url = urlR.QueryInterface(rdfLiteral).Value;
    if (kwR) {
      item.kw = kwR.QueryInterface(rdfLiteral).Value;
    }
    items.push(item);
  }

  if (doSort) {
    items.sort(function(a, b) {
        return (a.name.upcase() < b.name.upcase()) ? -1 : 1;
      });
  }
  return items;
}

Shouldn't there be a "getBookmarks()" in there somewhere? I mean, what is all that crap?

Admittedly this function does a little extra, what with the sorting, but that's only 5 lines of code, because JavaScript came with verbs included, thank you so much Brendan. And those 5 lines are actually fairly sane; I mean, you can read them and say "hey, that's sorting!" But as the rest of the code, what we seem to have is a serious failure to separate infrastructure from business logic. We're trying to take the patient's temperature here, and they're making us saw the poor guy open and grub around in his intestines looking for the right spot to stick the thermometer. So to speak.

In any case, that's not really JavaScript's fault; it's Firefox's fault. I have trouble keeping them separate in my head sometimes, because I, unlike the rest of the Free World, have the balls not to support Internet Explorer. For my personal stuff, anyway. (Or so I believe at the moment. Time will tell.)

That's what's really holding JavaScript back, you know. And it's holding back CSS, and DOM, and all the other standards. We have this little impasse problem. You know the song and dance: Microsoft didn't want Netscape to be a competing platform, so they built IE and gave it away for free, and for a brief while they even had a better product, so they captured enough market share.

And then... nothing. Oh, sure, they've made a few half-assed attempts to make IE standards-compliant, sort of, but only after making many full-assed attempts to distort those standards to give Microsoft competitive advantages. I've heard that directly from folks working on the relevant teams over there. Microsoft cheerfully shows up at the standards meetings to make damn sure they screw up the APIs for everyone else. You know. Microsoft-style. Sorta like how DirectX was bugly compared to OpenGL. Or Win32 compared to *nix. Or MFC compared to any sane object system (e.g. TurboPascal and TurboC). Or COM compared to CORBA. (I mean, you have to work hard to be worse than CORBA.) Microsoft has always been awful at making APIs, always always always, and I've decided over the years to credit this to malice rather than incompetence. Microsoft isn't incompetent, whatever else they might be. Burdened, yes; incompetent, no.

Why am I talking about them side-by-side with JavaScript? Because the standoff between Microsoft and the Forces of Neutrality (open standards and the like) is the main thing that's holding JavaScript back. Nobody wants to build an amazingly cool website that only works in FireFox/Opera/(insert your favorite reasonably standards-compliant browser here). Because they're focused on the short term, not the long term. It would only take one or two really killer apps for Mozilla to take back the market share from Microsoft. That, or a whole army of pretty good ones. People don't like downloading new stuff (in general), and they also don't like switching browsers. But they'll do it if they know they have to in order to use their favorite app.

Everyone knows all this; not a jot of it is news to anyone, but nobody wants to be the one to make a clean break from IE. It might bankrupt them. Great app, nobody sees it, company goes bust. So the killer apps will have to come from the fringe, the margin, the anarchy projects engineers do on the side — at least at companies where engineers have a little free time for innovation. Excepting only go-for-broke startups, most places can't (or won't) bet the farm on a Firefox-only application. So even though the spec is moving forward, or maybe sideways, DHTML in the real world has been in near-stasis for years.

In any event, the whole MSIE standoff isn't the only thing holding JavaScript back. There are definitely other contributors.

One big problem is that it's JavaScript. Nobody wants to use JavaScript.

I'm serious. It's not that it's a bad language (it's not); it's just not the language they want to use. You know. Them. You. Everyone who has a favorite programming language. Most people only want to use one, their favorite, whatever they're best with, and when they switch to a different one, they're slower. They feel stifled, held back, uncomfortable. That feeling goes away in under a month of immersion in a new language, but most engineers begrudge that time fiercely, probably because they don't realize it's only a month.

So many folks who take a stab at browser programming wind up saying "oh GOSH, why can't I use BLUB, man this really SUCKS!" and then instead of writing their killer web app, they go off and write some lame-ass toolkit that compiles their language into JavaScript, or tries to be a Firefox plugin, or tries to be a Frankensteinian compiled-together monstrosity like Apache and mod_perl was.

The funny thing is, they wouldn't be gaining a damn thing with a new language, except maybe libraries, but even that's somewhat doubtful. The standard library and runtime for any respectable general-purpose programming language are pretty big: definitely too big to expect everyone in the world to download. And that's the problem. You'd have to get everyone to do it. Might as well work on your own browser at that point. Oh, you can bet a bunch of people run off to do that, too, utterly overlooking the fact that nobody will use it even if it's great (like Opera), because it's not the browser they're accustomed to, and it has no killer app.

But if they wrote a killer app... oh, but that would have to be in JavaScript... well, maybe we can come up with a way to write it in XYZ instead! That's right — a bunch of would-be web app programmers are stuck in a vicious circle trying to break into a market that has one of the weirdest monopolies in history: IE (and to a tiny extent, Firefox and Safari: the Dr. Pepper and RC Cola of browsers, respectively) maintains its monopolistic lock not through overt control, but through apathy on the part of users worldwide.

And that apathy extends to the browser makers themselves. Microsoft and Apple have no reason to try to make their browsers competing platforms; quite the opposite in fact. So almost no innovation happens in IE and Safari, compared to the innovation (in Apple's case) or purchase and/or me-tooing of other innovations (in Microsoft's) going on outside the browser groups at those companies.

OK, but what about Firefox? Why don't they, you know, innovate? Well, they're trying, I think, but for what I'm guessing are probably tangled historical reasons — which manifest as the developers often being gridlocked politically — Mozilla lacks what Fred Brooks Jr. calls "conceptual integrity" in his classic "The Mythical Man-Month". [Which, incidentally, remains today the most vitally relevant book on software engineering, over 30 years after it was written.] The Mozilla folks would have to do a lot of serious re-thinking in order to reduce XUL's "Hello, World" down to a few lines of code in a single language. And I'm not convinced that kind of thinking is happening in the Firefox camp right now. It's not that they're not thinking at all; don't get me wrong. They're just not thinking about radical, revolutionary user-level simplifications to the basic framework.

Like, the kind of radical simplification Ruby on Rails introduced for server-side web programming. Yeah, yeah, I know, you hate Ruby because it's not the language you learned at your mother's teat, for God's sake. Despite Ruby's near-perfect Conceptual Integrity Index, you'd sooner quit your job and become a sanitation engineer than spend a day or three just learning the language and being done with it. But whatever your feelings on Ruby, Rails has caused a huge stir, because it took something that everyone assumed had to be ugly now and for all time, and it built layers and scaffolding on top that smoothed over a tremendous amount of that ugliness. Made it almost purty, even.

Rails — now that's the kind of simplification I'm talking about. Screw all the XML minilanguages (XUL, XBL, X*L). Screw the RDF. You need to be able to do everything in JavaScript. JSON is just good enough and parseable enough and language-interoperable enough to replace all of them. For that matter, screw CSS. I don't mean the CSS spec, not the relatively elegant constraint system they have in place; I just mean the CSS syntax, since it's one more language piled onto the heap. The whole selector minilanguage is nifty, but does it really need to be different from XPath? I mean, aren't they both doing path expressions to select things in the DOM? Jeez!

Am I spouting heresy or common sense here? It depends who you're asking. There are a lot of "web developers" in the world. Lots and lots. And they, my friends, are the last thing holding JavaScript back.

Because nobody wants to be a web developer. No self-respecting, rootin'-tootin', core-dump-debugging programmer wants to be one, anyway. That's sissy stuff. That's what most non-web programmers think, whether they use Java or C++ or C# or Perl or Python or Haskell or what-have-you. There's a deep-seated cultural perception problem in our industry about this, and I think it has a lot of root causes.

One cause, and let's be honest here, is that a lot of web developers were self-taught, weaned from text to HTML to onclick="foo.hide()" and onwards to CSS and DOM and more complex JavaScript, and thence on to CGI and PHP and VB and ActiveX and SVG and Flash and the rest of the gigantic mess of barely-interoperable languages we have to work with for web programming, not one of which covers the whole spectrum the way C++ or Java does. You have to mix and match them (always poorly) in order to achieve some effect that usually would have been trivial using a thick-client framework.

So we really have two reasons at play here: one is that web developers mostly taught themselves, which means they're generally not very good at what "real" programmers of course consider "real" programming, so diving into web programming hasn't been considered very glamorous, nor a very good career move. The other is that the field is so littered with new, ugly languages and technologies (again, not one of which is a turn-key solution) that most folks who do try it wind up fleeing.

I mean, I'm all in favor of MVC, but I think Common Sense and its kissing-cousin Conceptual Integrity will both tell you that M, V and C don't need to be three separate languages. And the manifest and build information needn't be a fourth and fifth, respectively. And i18n a sixth. And the XPCOM system services an effective seventh. And the server-side languages Nth through Zth. It just doesn't make any sense.

Which is in no small part why you keep hearing about Ruby on Rails, even though you really just wish it would go away so you don't have to learn it. Rails has the laws of physics (or at least economics) on its side. Rails is like one of those bizarre tunnel diodes, where the electrons on one side of the barrier tunnel to the other side without traveling the distance in between (at least in the classical-mechanics sense of "traveling"). They just sort of appear on the other side, instantaneously, because being on the other side is a lower quantum energy state, and tough shit if you don't like it.

People want Rails to go away because it has Ruby in the name: you can't use it like a library, nooooo, it has to be in some other language, and other languages are bad by axiomatic decree. Programmers are lazy: they've found that the greedy algorithm gets them there with the least energy expenditure most of the time, and switching languages requires much more energy than integrating a new library, no matter how godawfully complex and ultimately useless the library is. Which is why the Java community is thrashing around with like 50 competing frameworks for server side web programming. Oh, and the Python community too. And, um, all of the rest of them too.

Well, if you happen to be doing web programming, Ruby on Rails defies classical language mechanics by actually being a lower energy state. That's right; it's more lazy to learn Rails than it is to try to get your web framework to be that productive, so people are just tunneling over to it like so many electrons.

This phenomenon will happen in the browser space. I can assure you it will. It's an economic certainty. There's money at play here, lots and LOTS of money; every company in the world wants a cool website. Not just a cool website; they want cool apps. Companies are realizing — glacially, yes, belatedly, yes, but inexorably — that most people with computer access in the world today live inside their browser, and they'd prefer not to leave it.

"Everyone in the world" — that's an awful lot of money at stake.

So as soon as "Scheme on Skis" or "JavaScript on Jets" or whatever comes along, that Rails-like radical simplification of the huge ugly Browser Swamp, the game will change almost overnight.

I'm not sure exactly how it'll pan out. Rails is basically a big code generator, a big compiler, in a sense. The "language" is Rails itself — there's precious little actual Ruby in a Rails app, surprisingly enough, although there's tons underneath — and the target platform is the Browser Swamp. It's not a seamless abstraction; you still need to know CSS and HTML (at least), and you need to know a fair bit about HTTP and relational databases and web servers and all that crapola you need for "Hello, World" on the web.

But maybe that was the right choice. Maybe if DHH had defined an entire DSL for web programming in pure Ruby, with all the DHTML auto-generated, it wouldn't have been as popular. In the long run, I think the pure-Ruby approach (or pure-anything, as long as it's a single language that supports declarative programming, which rules Java out) is economically superior, because there's less to learn, and more purchase for optimizations, error-checking and the like. But in the short term, meaning today, the hybrid approach seems to be doing well.

The alternative to a Rails-like multi-language hybrid is to do the whole ball of wax in a single language. Lisp and Scheme folks have, of course, warmed to this idea, and they all write macros that generate HTML, which winds up being way cleaner than you might guess. But not many frameworks have taken the approach of generating all the JavaScript. The GWT is one, of course, but you'd have to be a pretty doggurn die-hard Java programmer to go that way. I'm sure it'll improve with time, but the biggest stumbling block, amusingly enough, is that it's not JavaScript. JavaScript is still King in the browser space, and ironically it's like programming to the "bare metal" compared to using a Java-to-JavaScript compiler. So JavaScript what the "real" web programmers prefer to use.

And we've come full circle.

Isn't this great? Me, I'm loving it. Yeah, it's a crap sandwich and we all have to take a bite. But it's also a greenfield opportunity, a land rush, a high-energy state just dying to become a low-energy state. Who's going to solve it? What will the solution look like?

One option I haven't really discussed is the incumbent: maybe the standards committees will eventually evolve cross-browser support into a platform that doesn't drive most programmers into I'll-write-my-own-dammit frenzies. I mean, it's a LOT better than it was in 1997. Look at Google Spreadsheets or Writely or GMail or Google Maps (anyone notice a pattern here?) — would any of these really have been possible in 1997? Heck, I doubt it: they're barely possible today. But they make it pretty obvious which way thick clients are headed, don't they?

Hang on — you're not still a thick-client programmer, are you? Oh dear. You'd better get yourself a DHTML book and an AJAX book, and right-quick. Oh, you're above that client stuff, you're a server-side programmer then, are you? Bully for you! I don't blame you. I hid there for many years myself; server-side is a haven of sanity, isn't it? But I think you'll find that adding web programming to your skills lineup will go a long way; you'll be able to wire up those nifty backends you're writing in ways that real-live people will appreciate. Like, say, your family. And real employers too. They like the web. There's money there. So DHTML/AJAX a great Mixin skill; it complements just about anything else you know how to do.

Anyway, I've pretty much belched out the barest outlines of my browser-ish thoughts for today: just enough for a blog entry, so I'll wrap up.

Ooooh, and it's a Blogger's Block entry! This Blogger's Block series has been great for the ol' creative juices. Just write about whatever you want, no worries, and it all flows nicely.

The only thing that could possibly go wrong is me reading the comments.

What?

I had a realization last night as I was juuuust falling asleep. The realization I had was that I have all my realizations just as I'm falling asleep. Or just as I'm waking up. There's something magical about that time, and I think I know what it is.

I think you (or at least "I", but I think maybe "we") are highly creative when we're nearly asleep because all the pressure's off. You can't go to sleep if you're under a lot of pressure — not easily, at any rate. Nobody can follow us into our dreams, so we go there alone, and when you're alone with yourself, you can be yourself. We've put shields in place to prevent us from saying or doing stupid things in public, and those shields come down when we're asleep.

That's why you always have those amazing dreams that you want to write down in the morning, the ones that would make a great movie screenplay or spy-thriller novel. Your mind is in a creative frenzy, and you mostly suppress it during the day.

Well, you can't say stuff in a public blog without getting some criticism, which is why most employees at most companies (that's you, an all likelihood) are reticent to try it. There's not much to be gained, and a lot of potential downside. People have been fired over their blogs, for instance, although those are relatively rare cases, and the blogger in question is almost invariably a jackass. For most bloggers it's more subtle. If you're speaking in a public forum and sufficient people appear to be listening, then it's hard not to be perceived as a spokesperson (of sorts) for the company. Scoble's the canonical example, but you can easily find others who fit the profile.

If your company has an ad-hoc, out-of-band, quasi-pseudo-spokesperson on the loose, the person is a risk. Sort of. I mean, it's lose-lose. If the person is cheerleading, well, nobody likes a fanboy. (It's a truly ugly word, isn't it? "Fanboy" is the new F-word.) If it's badmouthing, well, that's not too cool either. But hey, one person's fawning is another person's badmouthing, right? There are two sides to any interesting opinion (otherwise it's not going to be very interesting), so anything a blogger says in public is going to be criticized by some percentage of the readers. So no matter what, the company the blogger works for is taking some indirect heat, and it's risky to hope that the positive side of the blog, if any, will make up for it.

Well then. That's why bloggers like me always have to give you the following disclaimer: I don't speak for Google. Not even a little bit. For the reasons I've outlined above, the best I can really hope for is that they choose to look the other way when I blog. It's the best any blogger can hope for. It's what I'm hoping for.

I'm a frigging Google fanboy, though; that's going to be really hard to hide, so I'll just be honest with you. F-word, I hate that F-word. But it fits in this case. I'll try my best to be objective. Google's a terrible place to be when you're on a diet, for instance.

In any case, my sleepy realization has effectively solved my Blogger's Block problem. I couldn't write because I was too worried about what other people (i.e., you) would think. Yeah, I care about you too much. You! I think that gradually piled on resistance, and it was getting harder and harder for me to write past it. You can see it pretty clearly in the "Clothes for the Soul" post, which I don't care all that much about — it was just a thought-exercise, after all, and was supposed to be fun. But then I got all defensive at the end, which made commenters all defensive, and I made a mess, all because I was trying so hard to avoid criticism.

So the solution is simple: I won't read the comments.

ZZZZZzzzzzzzooooooooompf — and just like that, in a flash, I'm alone with my thoughts. Amazing. Really. I can feel a chill; it's like I didn't know I was in a haunted house until all the ghosts left, all at once.

La la la, La la la, I can say whatever I want, and I needn't know 'til I'm dead what anyone else thought of it. Nobody mentions my blog at work, by and large, since it's awkward to do so. (I assume this is the case for all bloggers — we don't have any cultural conventions for it, so it's like the third time you pass someone in the hall and you both carefully avoid eye contact.) So if I don't read the comments, then I really am alone with my thoughts.

That's how I was able to write some of my more interesting things back at Amazon; initially nobody read my blog, so I was writing for an audience of at most about 5 people, and then only if I pestered them to read it, which I almost never did.

So no reading comments. My blogs may not be any better for it, but I'm sure I'll be much happier. Oh, you can bet I'll be tempted. Maybe I won't be able to resist. Must... *pant* ... resiiiiist... augh! But I think I'll be able to hold out. Why? Because for this entire entry I've felt like I'm just about to fall asleep. Well, that's because I was; it's been a long day, and I didn't start until 1am, and it's 4:30am now. So yeah. Sleeeep.

But it's a nice feeling. Much nicer than the Russian Roulette of reading the comments on my blogs. "Uh-huh, uh-huh, yep, *BANG* aaaaah!" <blood pressure shoots up to 190/150>. High blood pressure is a recipe for some pretty questionable blogging, I think, and it's not too good for your health, either.

So! Tell me what you th... er, tell others what you think! I'll be hiding under my desk, hoping the monsters go away.

And learn DHTML! You won't like it, but you'll be glad all the same.

'night.

---

p.s. some light reading:

Blogger's Block #2: Anime for the Nonplussed

Part 2 of an N-part series of short posts intended to clear out my bloggestive tract. Hold your nose! Especially since this is, you know, Number Two.
I discovered much to my surprise, almost exactly 1 year ago, that I like Anime: Japanese animation. What started it was watching Miyazaki's Spirited Away — I think just about everyone's watched that by now, right? Anime for the unwashed U.S. masses? It made mainstream here, more or less, with the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. My wife and I were tired of the same old Hollywood crap, tired of waiting for those maybe two or three really good movies a year, so we gave it a shot.

After we watched Spirited Away (which is, of course, fantastic, hence the Oscar), we went looking for more stuff like it. First we watched some of the other Miyazaki movies, like Princess Mononoke and Kiki's Delivery Service. All Miyazaki films are worth watching, though, so that wasn't exactly adventurous of us.

Then we went to Suncoast in the mall and met this girl, an American girl, 19 years old, who loved Anime but was too poor to watch most of it. Think of that! We were initially astonished that Anime can make you poor, but now some 150 DVDs later, we're starting to re-think that position. On the plus side, it's nice to own them, and I've never been much of a digital pirate. I'm not a rabid anti-pirate; I've just never been part of the "in" crowd that knows how to steal the stuff, I guess. But it's hard to be against it when half the free world is doing it.

It's a bit of a tangent, but Jeff Bezos explained to us Amazonians, some years back, that being the world's biggest retailer of books, music and video was going to get the company buried, and precisely because of digital piracy. I mean, nobody buys CDs in China, and China is soon going to be half the free world if they're not already. Well, they're far from free, alas, but they're big, and they're pirate-y. Books, music and video can all be digitized, so they'll never be safe against piracy. That's why Amazon branched out and started selling appliances and clothes and sports equipment and everything else under the sun: because not doing it would eventually mean their doom. Or at least that's what I got out of his talk that day. Who knows what he was really trying to say. Jeff, sorry if I've misrepresented you.

Anyway, I still buy CDs (I'm such a lamer), and I still buy books and DVDs too. And I can tell you this much: DVDs are frigging expensive when you get hooked on Anime series. It's nowhere near how much I was spending on my golf habit, or even my snowboarding habit, but it's right up there. Rental places in the Seattle area don't usually have a very good Anime selection, so I wind up buying experimentally.

Well, this girl at Suncoast, I forget her name, Ashley or Lauren or some such trendy 19-year-old name, we were chatting with her and we asked her for a recommendation. "What genres do you like?" is always the first question an Anime fan will ask you, because there are in fact many genres, as many as there are genres in US video. Anime seems to be the dominant form of entertainment in Japan, as far as I can tell from a distance. So if you like one kind of Anime, it's no guarantee that you'll like another.

We didn't know what genres we like. They have genres? Isn't it just like, cartoons, like Scooby-Doo and Speed Racer? All we'd seen were some Miyazaki flicks, and we liked those well enough.

So she gave us her first recommendation, and I can tell you this much: that girl cost us thousands of dollars over the next 18 months. If she had recommended something that was total crap (and I can assure you, there's a LOT of total crap to be found in Anime, just like with other movies), then we might have quickly and permanently lost interest.

But she told us she'd been watching this relatively little-known Anime series called Twelve Kingdoms, and even though she was only on the 3rd or 4th disc, she thought we might like it.

Well, she picked a winner. Turns out this series (45 episodes in all) is pretty consistently rated in the Top Ten Animes of all time by actual Anime fans. Most Anime is based on Manga, which are sort of like Japanese comic books. Twelve Kingdoms is unusual in that it's based on a series of epic Japanese novels, basically high fantasy literature.

Ashley (I think it was Ashley) warned us that the main character, Yoko Nakajima, is "a little bit whiny" at first, but that she gets better as the series progresses. Again, that small tidbit contributed to our multi-thousand-dollar spending habit, because Yoko is in fact the most pathetically insecure, whiny, annoying high-school brat you've ever laid ears on, and if it hadn't been for Ashley's warning, Yoko would have killed Linh and I stone-cold dead within the first three episodes, if we'd even made it that far.

But we persevered, night after night, and by the 2nd DVD were were thinking "well, this might at least hold our attention for a while". By the 5th DVD we couldn't talk about anything else. By the 9th we were actually coming out of the closet and telling our baffled family and friends that we had been watching this Japanese cartoon, and by the end of the series, we started dragging our friends home to watch it with us. Again. We've watched it like 4 or 5 times now.

You know how little kids at a certain age like to watch the same movie over and over and over again, for up to a year, and child psychologists say that each time they see it they're seeing it from a new perspective? Well, 12 Kingdoms was like that for us. There's so much for a Westerner to take in. We missed a lot of it the first time around. It took at least 3 or 4 viewings before the patterns started taking shape in our minds. And yeah, we were watching the English-dubbed version. Mostly. On the 4th viewing we watched it all in Japanese, and it was like seeing it again for the first time.

Purists will tell you that you should always watch the subtitled Japanese. But we've kinda grown used to the English voice actors. The studios use the same people, the same maybe 40 or 50 actors (of which maybe 10 to 20 are instantly recognizable) for every Anime series bound for the U.S. It's just a thing with us. We like to hear Blondie (the En-Ki Ki-Rin from 12 Kingdoms), or the King of En, or Klaus and Lavie, or Alex Row. We hear their voices coming back in each series and we've come to love them all. But YOU, you should watch the subtitled versions, before you're tainted like us.

After a month or two, we ran back to a surprised Ashley and begged her for another recommendation. This was a big deal for her; we were actual paying customers who could afford to buy Anime, and we respected her opinion greatly so far. What to recommend next?

She pondered. She hemmed and hawed a bit. Then she told us: "Well, I guess you could watch Last Exile. I mean, everyone loves Last Exile. Young people, old people...

She sorta tailed off there at the end. I think Linh thought she meant, you know, senior citizens, but that wasn't what she meant at all. AT. ALL. She meant US. Us OLD PEOPLE. It felt like the first time some teenager called me "Sir" (or the first time someone on the 'net called me "Mr. Yegge") — I had to look behind me to see who she was talking to.

But even though I knew damn well who she was referring to, I hardly noticed because I was so excited. We were both excited: a new series to watch, by the famous recommender of 12 Kingdoms!

Well, the rest is history. If 12 Kingdoms hadn't clinched the deal, Last Exile certainly would have. We looooooooooove Last Exile. There's no Anime better than that. Some are as good, almost, maybe, but I don't think there's anything better. We have the posters, we have the plush toys. We went through a Last Exile phase of our lives that lasted at least two months, one of those phases that generates nostalgia for a lifetime. Linh and I decided at one point that we were going to name our kids Klaus and Lavie after the two main characters, and we were dead serious for at least a week, if I'm not mistaken.

Last. Exile.

It still brings chills, a tear to the eye, just to think of it. Even if you're not planning on watching it, you should spend a few minutes and check out the Official Site, if you have Flash and some speakers. It's one of those rare Flash intros you don't want to skip, and if you play with the menu, you can read a little about the characters, storyline, etc.

I'm so jealous of you. You haven't watched it. What I wouldn't give to erase it from my brain so I can see it again for the first time.

Once again we ran back to Ashley, and I don't remember what her third recommendation was. She gave us a whole list, I think. She was running out of ideas because she was too poor to keep up with all the recent series.

So we've forged out on our own, and we've been working our way through many series and movies. Lots. Tons. And sometimes we go back and watch our favorites again.

I've learned to be really careful, because most Anime is either crap (i.e. it's a genre that appeals to us, but it's written and/or executed incredibly poorly), or it's genres that don't appeal to us. Like Mecha. I'm just not into the giant robot suits. I liked that scene in Aliens where Sigourney Weaver fights the Alien Queen in a big mech suit, but that's about the extent of it. And a surprising percentage of all Anime, at least 25% I'd wager, appears to be mecha-oriented.

It's hard to find reliable reviewers, since 10-year-olds are just as likely to post their reviews, and you can't tell them apart from 40-year-olds who never learned their native tongue. But we've found a few indicators. Whenever some Anime-store clerk half-disparagingly tells us a series is "a thinker", we know we'll probably like it. If a bunch of reviewers say it was boring and they didn't understand half of it, we go check it out. Studios make Anime for all ages, from 3 years old to 83, and there's usually nothing apparent on the packaging that distinguishes one from the other.

So after much trial and error, I've put together a Top 10 list of my favorite Anime series (and movies). I tend to like the series better, since you can get more immersed, and I've deliberately left out the Miyazaki flicks because they're all pure genius and they'd take up the whole Top 10 if I let them in.

Keep in mind that I haven't watched a lot of the classics; e.g. I haven't watched Cowboy Bebop (*gasp*). There's a lot of great Anime out there that I've yet to discover. That's actually a good thing, as far as I'm concerned. But I've watched a fair bit now, and I think my Top 10 list will have at least a few titles in it that you'd get a kick out of.

Oh, and I wouldn't necessarily watch them in this order, if you're seriously thinking of checking them out. If you're into action and/or horror-type stuff, I'd start with Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. It's just one movie, a sequel. If you like it, go watch the original Vampire Hunter D (from 1985).

Anyway, here goes:

Haibane Renmei: my all-time favorite. It's in my wife's top 4 or 5, but it really got me. It's a "thinker". Different from all other Anime out there; it's in a class and genre of its own. It's short: only four DVDs. Strong spiritual undertones non-specific to any religion, although there's some definite Buddhist symbolism. A masterpiece.

Last Exile: unquestionably a landmark in Japanese Animation. Amazing animation (mixed CGI and hand-drawn), amazing soundtrack, gripping epic storyline, unforgettable characters. And, like Haibane, it's unique, which really throws many of the reviewers, since it goes off in unexpected directions pretty often. I'd just skip the reviews and watch it.

Fullmetal Alchemist: one of the top-rated Anime series of all time, and argued by many critics as the greatest ever. My wife and I both like it a lot. We're not finished with the series, though; it's still in the process of being released to the U.S. We've made it up through disc 9, and I think they're up to 12 or 13 so far. Long series -- not sure how long it is, exactly. But it's pretty amazing work: great story, great characters, nice animation, great soundtrack. All-around worth watching.

12 Kingdoms: our first big series, and still one of our all-time favorites. It's a total of 45 episodes, and they were planning on doing something like 60, so it leaves a few story arcs unfinished, including one cliffhanger that will drive you nuts. Follows a very clichéd storyline (for Anime): a high school girl is whisked off to another world where she finds out she's royalty. Serious: this happens in about every 3rd Anime series. But Twelve Kingdoms is the gold standard for this kind of storyline, and it takes on increasingly epic proportions as it progresses. It's a must-see.

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust: a neat movie. Lots of action, lots of vampire slaying, and a nice love story in it to get a girl to watch it with you. Heh. My wife loved it too, and yes, more for the love story than for the monster-slaying. It'll have you hooked within 10 minutes. Give it a try! If you like it, be sure to check out the original Vampire Hunter D movie, from 15 years prior, which has older animation but an equally excellent story.

Scrapped Princess: this one just finished being released to the U.S. It's a slightly bizarre storyline, but has everything I look for in escapist fantasy: memorable and occasionally cute characters, drama and humor, some great fight scenes, a sweeping story arc, and good animation. We couldn't help liking it, and we'll likely watch it again soon.

Witch Hunter Robin: another favorite. This one is, regrettably, a bit slow (and strangely episodic) in the first ten episodes or so. It's sort of a mix of a bunch of TV shows I've never seen: CSI, Buffy, and X-Files, maybe. I've never seen a single episode of any of them, but that's what I'd compare it to. However, about halfway through the (6-disc?) series, it changes completely, and it's gripping all the way to its rather disturbing finish. Linh and I both really enjoyed it, even if she had to sleep through a few of the plot-development episodes.

Wolf's Rain: I have to recommend this even though we didn't finish watching it. It was just getting too depressing. Those poor wolves. It's definitely a story of hardship, and it doesn't get easier to watch as it goes. But the weird thing is that it's stayed with me. I still think about it often. I suppose that's a hallmark of great art? I'm 100% sure I'll go back and finish it within the year, because it's been nagging at me. It was a great story with great characters, and just because it wasn't easy to watch doesn't lessen its greatness. It's definitely in my Top 10.

Gunslinger Girl: This was only 3 discs, 13 episodes. A little masterpiece, no question. It was funny and over-the-top as all hell at first, with some La Femme Nikita influences, but pretty soon it's clear that it's more of a psychological/emotional piece. The violence and the setting are totally secondary to the storyline, which is about these little cyborg girls trying to figure out if they're human or not. Beautiful ending. Lovely animation. Well worth watching.

Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo (adaptation). I'm going out on a limb with #10 here, because we just bought the first DVD and watched it this week. Haven't seen the rest; there are 6 discs, 24 episodes total. But the first four episodes already have us thinking it might be one of the greats. Same studio that did Last Exile. This is a newer series that aired on Japanese TV in from 6/2004 through 3/2005. Man, I'm jealous of Japanese people. Their television just blows ours away. Anyway, if you're adventurous, you can watch it at the same time as us! So far we haven't been a bit disappointed. It's lavish and mysterious, and we know we're in pretty good hands.

You might ask what Anime I've watched that I wouldn't put in my Top 10. Well, Vampire Hunter D is the only movie (2 movies, actually) that made my list, because movies generally just aren't as immersive as the TV series.

As for series, I've watched the first N episodes of a bunch of series, including Burst Angel (looks OK), Kuo Kara Maoh (lame), .hack sign (lame), Gilgamesh (pretty interesting so far), Otogi Zoshi (ok), Hellsing (pretty good so far), and several others I've rented but didn't get far into.

As for movies, I've seen Metropolis (loved it), Perfect Blue (loved it), loved all the Miyazaki I've ever seen (so far: Spirited Away, Mononoke Hime, Howl's Moving Castle, Kiki's Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind, Porco Rosso, My Neighbor Totoro, and the Cat Returns), seen Ghost in the Shell (good), Grave of the Fireflies (a masterpiece, but very very sad), Blood: the Last Vampire (great, almost made the list), Samurai X (liked the first one but not the sequel), and a bunch of others I'm forgetting.

I have a bunch of series on my to-watch list, including Cowboy Bebop, Rayearth, Fushigi Yuugi, Steamboy, Samurai 7, Fruits Basket, and at least half-dozen others. We're talking thousands of bucks, so no rush at the moment. And I don't know if I'm going to like any of them. It seems to be hit-or-miss.

Anyway, if I were going to summarize my learnings from the past year, I'd tell you this:

1. Some Anime is fantastic. You just have to sift a bit and find what you like, but there's almost guaranteed to be something you'll love.


2. Sturgeon's Revelation applies to Anime too. 90% of it is crap.


3. I've been missing out, all these years.

If you have recommendations for me, I'd love to hear them!

Blogger's Block #1: Joelprah

Part 1 of an N-part series of short posts intended to clear out my bloggestive tract. Hold your nose!

Ever since my last entry I've had blogger's block. Haven't been able to write a thing. I've tried, but haven't made any progress on anything.

Partly it's because I hinted I'd be writing about a controversial technical topic next. I was going to, but I can't seem to bring myself to talk about it. I've tried exactly umpteen approaches, many of them over half finished. None of them quite hit the mark. You make a promise like that, and I think you'll find it hard to keep. I know I have.

It's also partly because I was finishing up a long-ish project at work, and then I went on a much-needed vacation for 2 weeks. Of course I just stayed at home and worked on a new Ruby on Rails site, which might not sound like much of a vacation to you, but if you've been working with the web technologies I've been working with lately... let's just say RoR is like having a pillow surgically removed from your face. I can breathe again.

Incidentally, my game-and-blog server has been down for a week, since I decided to shepherd it into our current century by upgrading from RedHat 7.3 to the latest Ubuntu. Wow. Ubuntu rocks. Everything just works, including apt-getting a smp kernel and rebooting. So now I can drag the server back to the dismal concrete bunker in downtown Seattle where my ISP hosts the thing.

I moved the old Drunken Blog Rants, though. They're now all hosted in
pages.google.com. They were (inexplicably, as always) getting a lot of traffic, and it was really eating into the CPU and bandwidth for my game, so I've moved them to a place where they'll presumably have better latency and availability. When my old server comes back online, I've just told Apache to do permanent redirects for the 50-odd articles.

Putting them in Google Pages was pretty easy. I eventually wound up getting to where I could port one in about 90 seconds, so the whole exercise only took a few hours. It really was the perfect place to host them: they're mostly static content, and I just needed a permanent place for them to live. Google has a way of creating things I actually use. Blogger's just good enough. The spreadsheet is just good enough (I use it for my diet log). Google Pages is just good enough. And so on. I'm living more and more in my browser now because of Google.

I work there now, you know. A teeny fish in a big ocean of brilliant people. I'll blog about that a bit in one of my upcoming bloguettes, I think.

So where was I? Oh yeah. Blogger's block. It wasn't just the Mystery Tech Topic that's had me blocked, nor was it entirely the vacation. There are some other weird things going on, and I'm going to have to learn to deal with them or I'll never be able to write anything again.

First, my blog got really popular after Joel Spolsky linked to it. That guy is like the Oprah Winfrey of tech blogging. Yeah, I watch Oprah. I can't help it. When my wife's watching it, I try to ignore it as best I can. But then I sneak a peek, or I laugh at one of her jokes or one of her guests' jokes, and then I'm hooked until it's over. My wife Linh says Oprah is the most powerful woman in the U.S. Linh says that if Oprah told every woman in the United States to go jump off a cliff, they'd do it. Oprah, don't do it!

Well, if Joel told all the techies to go jump off a cliff, I'm sure only a handful of them would do it, probably just the parkour wannabes. But when he tells them all to go read my blog... well, I used to get a max of 8,000 to 9,000 hits a day. After Joel linked to me a couple of times, about 70,000 people came and peered at my blog, most of them newcomers.

After your blog gets that popular, even for a little while, you'd better grow a thick skin fast. I've seen people praise Joel and bash on Joel (more of the former, generally), and I've been able to read both sides with interest but without emotion. Just try doing the no-emotion thing when they're talking about YOU.

I mean 70,000 people is like a stadium-full. Imagine all of them glaring at you. Imagine them wanting to lynch you! Some of them did!

So I'd been planning to write an entry once a week, even a small one, and thanks to the Mystery Topic and Oprah-Joel and my work project and my vacation and whatnot, I haven't posted in over a month.

To help me overcome this block-thing, I'm just going to post small stuff for a while. It's the #1 rule of blogging, you know: when in doubt, spew it out. If you say something incredibly stupid and insensitive, no big deal, everyone will just despise you.

D'oh.

Well, we'll see how it goes. Maybe writing short articles will help. I have a whole bunch of things queued up that I'd like to write about. Maybe just writing about them will clear this whole blog-constipation problem up, and I can get back to pooping out entries with my usual, um, ah... my metaphor has stretched to the breaking point here... with my usual "aplomb". Ahem.

If that fails, I might just start writing under a pen name. Heck, my blogs would probably be a lot better for it, and more frequent to boot.

This is a hard problem. We'll see how it goes!

Clothes for the Soul

I un-published this for a few days because I was so bummed that almost nobody appeared to understand any of the key ideas I'm trying to get across. I've lost sleep over it. Not only did people not understand the main points -- for instance, that notions of "race" and "gender" are going to be obsolete in 100 to 200 years, hence racism and sexism will be roughly equivalent to pants-ism and shirts-ism -- but they didn't understand the meta-point, either: that our current ideas about the world and about ourselves can make it horribly hard to contemplate new ones, technical or not. But I figure, screw it. My blog is already controversial; this won't make it any worse. Don't read this entry if you're a little squeamish. And next time I promise to be both funny and on-topic technically.

---

There's an idea that's gradually taking root in the United States. It'll take about another generation; that's how long this kind of idea takes to permeate. It's already much further along in many other countries, including Brazil, China and Korea, and others.

The idea is simple enough: your body is no longer a prison for your soul. It's become more like a house, one that you can decorate to your tastes. In the fullness of time it may even become more like clothes for your soul, and you'll change it daily.

It's interesting that this idea is having so much trouble in the US. That's not to say, of course, that the US is particularly progressive. We're behind most of the civilized world in cell phone infrastructure, and we never did manage to adopt the metric system (unless you define "adopt" as "shoot km/h signs down with high-powered rifles", in which case: adoption successful.) And we love sports in which an actual ball is in play for under 10 minutes in a 3-hour game. But Americans are as vain as anyone else, so it's strange that we haven't warmed to the idea of customizable bodies.

If you think idly about what the distant future will be like, assuming you don't take the apocalyptic view, then you might envision everyone in the future as being healthy, beautiful, and long-lived. That's the way it is in all the sci-fi movies: take your pick, from Logan's Run to Gattaca. It's not much of a mental leap, though, since from what we know of the Middle Ages, people were comparatively unhealthy, ugly, and short-lived. (By "ugly", I mean that people were more commonly disfigured from diseases or other misfortunes.) If you extrapolate a few hundred years into the future, it's easy to predict improved health and improved looks.

So we're in a strange limbo today, because making changes to your body isn't quite yet socially acceptable, but people assume that it will be acceptable in the future.

You probably think I'm overlooking the plastic surgery craze. Well then: if a 22-year old girl gets a nose job, and she has to wear a bandage for a couple weeks, does she tell everyone she got a nose job? Nope. She fell down some stairs, or maybe had a split septum. If people speculate that she got her nose redone, then she has to deny it, or say it was an accidental by-product of the surgery.

So yeah, there's a plastic surgery craze, sort of. But most people in the US (even in Southern California) aren't comfortable admitting it or talking about it. Instead they have to lie about it.

Let's take stock: what cosmetic changes are acceptable these days?

Tatoos and piercings have gradually become acceptable to everyone except the parents of the person in question. Plus it's hard to lie about them and say you accidentally shoved a steel bolt through your lip and then sat naked on an inverted permanent-ink design.

Anyone who's not going gray is allowed to color their hair pretty much any color they want without exciting much comment. A woman can color her hair to cover up gray. It's less acceptable for a man to do this, but he can more or less still get away with it. Wigs and toupes, however, can't be talked about openly: they're taboo.

Getting a wart or a mole removed: fine. In fact people will be mildly surprised if you don't go to the trouble to remove them. Getting a scar removed or hidden: also definitely OK. In fact, any and all kinds of reconstructive surgery to help recover from injuries or disease are perfectly acceptable, and you can talk about them without shame. Little blue pills, oddly enough, have to be taken in secret.

Getting your legs extended by a doctor who saws through your bones and adds metal extenders: that's one you don't advertise. The procedure is incredibly (and increasingly) popular in China, by all accounts. Heck, in the US you can't even tell people that you wear platform shoes.

Getting your teeth bleached: fine to talk about, though most people won't advertise it. Getting your anus bleached (a popular new procedure discussed to death by such luminaries as Howard Stern and Adam Corolla): not so much. You don't send before/after pictures around to your friends, to the best of my knowledge.

How about a boob job? Unlike nose jobs, breast implants are now more or less acceptable to talk about and, yes, even brag about. Everyone's getting them, and nobody seems to think it's a big deal any more. What about butt implants, which are super popular in Brazil? I don't know anyone in the US who brags about their butt implants, so I'm guessing no, that one's still taboo here.

Cosmetic vaginal surgery is all the rage these days, in case nobody's told you yet. You're practically the last person to find out. The two most popular variants are restoring the hymen, and removing the labia. You can bet your implanted butt that neither of those procedures gets a lot of coffee-table discussion with the relatives and co-workers. I think we can safely add them to the taboo list. Same goes for penile anything, with the possible exception of reduction on account of elephantiasis.

Eyelids: it's very popular in Asia to get your eyes "cut", referring to a procedure that introduces a fold in your upper eyelid, which allegedly looks nicer, albeit at the cost of no longer being able to close your eyes fully when you're asleep. My understanding is that you're not supposed to admit to having had this surgery.

However, changing your eye color via contacts is popular and non-taboo, so presumably if there were a surgical procedure to change the color permanently, it would also not be taboo. Lids, taboo. Color, not taboo. Lash extensions, taboo. Lasik, not taboo. Got it.

Liposuction: shouldn't admit to it. Artificial tanning: fine. Hair implants: don't admit to it. Veneers for your teeth: OK, for the most part. Lip implants: keep 'em secret.

And so on. There's a vast economy around cosmetics and cosmetic surgery, but only a handful of changes are socially acceptable in the US. By "acceptable", I mean they're things you'd talk about openly at work, like going to the dentist to get your teeth cleaned. For most procedures, even the most popular ones, you have to pretend you didn't do it.

In case you hadn't figured it out, I think the whole taboo-ness of cosmetic changes is pretty lame. I think the girl shouldn't have to say she fell down the stairs. People should be able to complement her on her pretty new nose the way you complement someone on a new haircut. Same goes for all the other procedures I've mentioned, although I confess even I might have trouble complimenting someone on their newly-bleached anus.

Generally speaking, though, I think it's pretty obvious to most rational people that the trend is towards having control over how you look, and there's nothing wrong with making yourself look better. If a change makes you happier, then it will almost certainly make the people around you happier too.

And for that matter, changes can make you healthier -- you can already get your eyesight upgraded and your teeth upgraded, so in some sense our bodies are becoming like so much hardware. What if you could get a new set of synthetic lungs, or a new heart, to put you in better shape and increase your life expectancy? It's an open question, since organ replacements aren't readily accessible, and they have to come from other people. But if you could grow them in vats, then would it be socially acceptable to purchase them for yourself? I sure hope so.

But futuristic upgrades aside, the fact remains: most permanent cosmetic modifications still too embarrassing to talk about openly. Why is that? And why is the US in particular so far behind many other countries in how open we are about discussing them?

I don't know. Maybe there isn't a simple answer. But my suspicion is that it's a byproduct of our puritanical heritage in the US. Cosmetic surgery is closely tied to vanity and pride, which are proscribed by any number of popular religions, presumably on the dubious grounds that if God made you ugly, then it was just "meant to be" and you have to live with it.

I'm not sure how many people actually think that way today in the US, in those exact terms -- probably no more than one percent of the population: a few million. But it was likely the majority opinion 100 to 200 years ago, and it takes a long time for a culture to shake off the often ridiculous ideas passed down from our forebears.

However, I also think that cosmetic surgery has the evolutionary advantage: beautiful people get better treatment in the world, whether the world is conscious of it or not. So being beautiful gets you, on average, better jobs, better pay, and a better lifestyle. It pays to be good looking. It seems like this is going to drive cosmetic surgery towards becoming more or less completely acceptable, up to and including changing your apparent race, roughly as fast as these things become technically feasible. Economics will drive it.

In the meantime, feel free to treat yourself. You deserve it. Don't let stupid, old-fashioned social mores (the same ones that keep the mall from being open late on Sunday, the one day when you actually have time to go shop) hold you back. And if you ask me, you shouldn't have to lie if someone asks you about your hair or your nose or your love handles or whatever you changed. Your body is your very own, and it's just clothes for your soul, nothing more. Decorate it however you please, and be proud of your decor.

Why did I write about this?

Believe it or not, today's rant was inspired by technical problems, which is why it's here in this mostly-technical blog. The technical problems (and I won't bore you with details) are the direct result of cultural problems related to the dissemination of ideas.

When you put two people together, they're smarter than one person. Ideas bounce around and settle in faster. A group of two acting in concert can learn faster and respond faster than a single person can: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. But a group of three or four is back to being about as smart as a single person. A group of ten to twenty people acts about as smart as a lost child, and a group of fifty is only about as smart as a dog. It takes a while to teach a group of fifty people any new tricks. A group of a hundred people? A sheep, of course. A thousand or more? Lemmings. When we're in big groups, we just follow what everyone around us is doing. The bigger the group, the dumber we get.

Unfortunately, this means that getting radical new ideas across can be tricky. Imagine sitting in front of a sheep, trying to explain to it that new ideas have a hard time penetrating big groups of people, especially if they fly in the face of so-called conventional wisdom. I can tell you this much: the sheep will be unimpressed.

One of the many techno-cultural problems I've encountered is going to be the subject of my next blog. A lot of people are going to react very negatively to the ideas I present in this upcoming blog, and oddly enough, their reactions aren't really coming from them as individuals. The strongly negative reactions stem from membership in a group that thinks very differently about this technical subject than I do. But when you're in a group, even a virtual group comprised of people who subscribe to some technical belief, you're only as smart as a sheep. Happens to all of us.

I have various technical ideas in the oven that aren't ready to serve yet. They're in all stages of preparation, from still-mooing to raw to nearly ready to eat. In each case I'm looking for a way to break it to you easy, to explain it in just the right way.

That can be hard, because ideas embody change, and someone is always profiting from the status quo. The profiting isn't always money -- sometimes people simply have their self-image tied up in the status quo. If your idea threatens to change it, they feel you're threatening them directly.

Sometimes the time is just ripe for an idea, and everyone seems to have it at the same time. Other times, it's pretty clear where we're headed, but even so, people aren't willing to let go of some of their cherished old ideas that conflict with the new ones. That's where we're at (in the US, anyway) with plastic surgery. And sometimes an idea is so different and revolutionary that people either don't get it at all, or they're naturally inclined to misunderstand and criticize it. When that happens, you have to attack it from different angles, and try to use tricks like metaphor or analogy to help people make the connections you want them to make.

I think the plastic-surgery problem is well-positioned as a educational tool: it seems pretty obvious (to me, anyway) that a twenty-something girl with a bright future who's unhappy with her nose should be able to get the surgery without having to lie to everyone about falling down the stairs. You'd think everyone would be full of complements about her wonderful new nose, but instead we treat it like the Emperor's clothes. It's sad. And the situation won't change, not quickly enough at any rate, unless some sort of social miracle happens, in which trend-setters with charisma to spare start bragging about their new noses and lips and buttocks... who knows! Stranger things have happened.

Hopefully I've planted a seed with this non-technical article, one that will take root, grow, and flourish into a beautiful tree, which I can then yank a branch from and whack people over the heads with when they choose to resist ideas simply because they fear change.

If that doesn't work, and people still want to lynch me, well, I can always disguise myself with a fake moustache.

Get Famous By Not Programming

Here at Whiny Blog Central, we frequently receive email from Alert Readers who tell us: "THANKYOUSOMUCH for you're latest blogg entry! Youve saved my BABY from becomeing an evil manager or a VIM user or whatever! Heres a personal check for $500!" And we can appreciate that sentiment, although we wish it would come from people who realize holding the check up to their screen so the email program can "see" it doesn't actually send anything to me. To us, I mean. We mean.

It is nice to hear that some people like what you write, though, since anyone who does anything noteworthy in the world will have critics, and criticism can really sting, even if you have a thick skin, or even a cephalothorax like some bloggers out there. But then, the critics are often critical because your writing stung them in some way, so I guess it's an eye for an eye in this writing gig.

Almost Famous

Earlier this week, my coworkers and I were astonished and more than a little amused to hear that I'm one of the ten most famous programmers in the world. Yup. That was the rumor, anyway. (Some versions of the rumor even had the number right.)

See, this guy named Jarosław "sztywny" Rzeszótko (he also goes by "Stiff", even though it clearly contains a vowel right there in the middle) sent me a nice email about six weeks back, saying, well... here's exactly what he said. You be the judge:

Hello!

I'm an 18-years old programmer wannabe from Poland and I run a blog in my native language. As an interesting (at least to me) experiment I'm trying to ask some questions I always wanted to ask the programmers I admire most, but never had the occasion to do that... The question and answers would be later translated, and published in Polish on the weblog. If You don't have time, find the question stupid, whatever - just answer a part of them, or simply throw out the email and forget that I bothered You. So, here we go:

(10 questions)

Because his mail was nice (not to mention flattering) and his questions looked interesting, and also (I think mostly) because he'd offered to translate it into Polish, it piqued my curiosity. So I told him I'd give it my best shot, and answered them.

Jarosław's idea was brilliant, of course, and I see a lot of people are kicking themselves for not having thought of it. Because who knows how much goodwill he used up from the seven other actually famous people who responded. There may not be another chance like that one for a long time.

But he didn't tell any of us who the other interviewees were, nor did he set any expectations around how much to write in response. In retrospect it's somewhat amazing that he got eight replies, but it's certainly no surprise that they varied so much in their tone and level of detail. We didn't know what to write, nor who we were writing for.

Seven famous people, plus me. Pretty cool interview.

So how did I get in there? I haven't done anything amazing.
Wyvern's pretty cool, but you probably wouldn't know, since (a) it's mostly young teenagers playing it, for the most part, and (b) I haven't published most of the source code, since I'm frankly embarrassed to have anyone see how bad it is. The game only works as well as it does because I spent seven years of my life on it, NOT because I'm a great programmer, or even an especially good one.

So I'm guessing Stiff didn't really choose me for my programming ability. What could it be, then? HMMMmmmmm... I'll give you two guesses.

Yup, you got it, on the first try I'll bet: it's because I'm a damn loudmouth. We're all using the same media here in BlogLand, but my volume is turned way up. "Blah, blah, BLAH," I'm known to yell semi-incoherently. BlaaaaAAAAAahhh!!! Gets their attention every time.

You know how after you watch a new X-men movie, you come out afterwards and ask whoever watched it with you which superpower they'd want if they could be an X-, ah, -person? You do ask, right? C'mon, you do. I know you do! Everyone does. Which superpower would you pick? Invisibility? Flying? Unstoppable momentum? Walking through walls? Telekinesis?

Well I'll bet you a dollar you'd never have picked 'Loudmouth Jerk'. But I guess beggars can't be choosers.

In any case, evidently due to my loudmouth superpowers, I got to be in the list, and my friends laughed at me a lot, and that was that. But it was fun.

Thanks for including me, Jarosław!

Famous programming heroes

Do you have any programming heroes? I do! Oddly enough, though, I've never really seen much of their code. Most of the famous-ish programmers I respect have actually made their impact on me through writing, and it's usually just prose, with maybe a little code interspersed.

There are programmers I admire who've built things that I use a lot. But when I try to come up with a list of programmers I admire (and I specifically mean people I don't know personally), I find they almost always fall into one (or both) of just two categories:

1. People who wrote a useful programming language, an operating system, or an especially important framework.


2. People who wrote a really neat book about programming.

Any sufficiently flexible and programmable environment — say Emacs, or Ruby on Rails, or Firefox, or even my game Wyvern — begins to take on characteristics of both language and operating system as it grows. So I'm lumping together a big class of programs that have similar characteristics. I guess you could call them frameworks, or extensible systems.

I've developed a personal distaste for the word "framework" because it's used to describe so many technologies that are unbelievably cumbersome and overspecialized. You know which ones I mean. But realistically, framework might be the best word for the kind of system I'm talking about. Unlike libraries, frameworks are hard to learn and hard to reuse, so for any given framework you probably love it or hate it.

If someone builds a library that I find useful, I might notice their name, but I'm not likely to remember it or think of it when I think of great programmers. Ditto for most applications or utilities, even highly useful ones. I'm thankful, sure, but that's a far cry from eternally grateful.

But when someone builds a framework — any environment that we live in and actually enjoy programming in — and there's one person who's chiefly identifiable as the primary author of that framework, then I think we tend to admire that person, and unlike other programmers, the person starts to become famous.

Even if they're a crappy programmer.

Not that we'd really know, because how often do we go look at the source code for the frameworks we use? How much time have you spent examining the source code of your favorite programming language's compiler, interpreter or VM? And by the time such systems reach sufficient size and usefulness, how much of that code was actually penned by the original author?

Sure, we might go look at framework code sometimes. But it just looks like, well, code. There's usually nothing particularly famous-looking or even glamorous about it. Go look at the source code for Emacs or Rails or Python or Firefox, and it's just a big ball of code. In fact, often as not it's a big hairy ball, and the original author is focused on refactoring or even rewriting big sections of it.

I suppose an individual who manages to get a big system built and marketed and adopted by lots of people can't really be a crappy programmer, by definition. Some people (e.g. Richard Gabriel) have argued convincingly that writing crappy code has evolutionary advantages. I know it's easy to despise someone who's written obviously ugly, unmaintainable code. But our industry is still figuring out how to do software engineering properly, and a lot of very important code was written before modern software engineering ideas were widely disseminated.

And even then, sometimes the schedule just gets you. Given a choice between having significant impact by getting something out the door, and spending a bunch of time up front writing every line of code to be beautiful and high-performing and robust, which would you pick?

I'll pick impact. You can always fix the code later.

I know on my last project (at work), I wrote a lot of quick and dirty code. I mean, it's not terrible, not the kind of code that you'd fire someone for. We have coding conventions that I adhere to, and I tend to organize and document and refactor my code pretty conscientiously as I go, out of habit. But it's been this incredible six-month race to the finish, and I've made a lot of decisions out of expedience that I knew I'd have to revisit later, stuff I wouldn't exactly be proud to show off.

Anyone who looked at my real-life code, without knowing anything else about me, would probably conclude that I'm an ordinary programmer. And I'd guess that if you looked at random chunks of code from your favorite framework, written by your favorite programmer, you'd conclude that it had been written by mortals.

So what makes a programmer famous? Apparently not programming! Or at least not their actual code.

You can try the experiment yourself. I'm actually curious. Go through the list of programmers you admire most (people you don't know personally), and decide why you admire each of them.

I think you'll find the same thing I did: each person either wrote a framework you like, or they write about technical topics really well (or at least in a way that keeps you coming back for more.)

Get Rich By Not Programming, Too

Can programming make you rich? Well, let's figure it out: think of all the fantastically rich programmers you know. Not a very long list, is it? And did they get rich by virtue of being incredible programmers?

Tough question! In practice, virtually all the wealthy programmers you know (or even know of) got rich via startups. They were early employees at a company that became phenomenally successful, either through a public IPO or through a high-dollar acquisition.

Were these early-bird programmers great, or just lucky? It's not easy to separate the two, because their quality as programmers (however you choose to measure that) probably had at least some direct impact on the company's ultimate success. But some may have been average (or even bad) programmers who wound up in the right place at the right time. I know I've seen it happen. And some successful programmer-entrepreneurs might attribute their financial success to (their own) great programming ability, when it may be wholly due to their keen business acumen, or to their great decision-making and execution skills.

Most programmers aren't rich. It's a good job, no question, and it pays pretty well in most places. But most programmers are a far cry from "wealthy". Is it even possible to get rich by programming?

Sure, if you take a risky pay cut, and you pick the right product or service, and you bust your ass like nobody's business for at least 12 to 18 months, and you do a great job of marketing your product, and you find a buyer, and you do a great job of negotiating, and you get a little lucky. If all those things happen, you can get rich as a programmer.

But we didn't list "be a great programmer" or "write great code" in there anywhere, did we? They may not be essential ingredients. If your code just barely works, then it's good enough. A startup that manages to get acquired doesn't have to have had great code; they simply had to either establish a lead in a new market, or put on a damn good road show.

If not rich or famous, then what?

I've spent a lot of time thinking about improving my productivity, and advocating in my blogs that engineers should work to improve their own productivity, skill set, and knowledge base.

But what do those things really get me? Apparently it's not going to make me rich -- certainly not on its own, anyway. And it's not going to make me famous: a small amount of code (something that thousands of people could look at) isn't going to be impressive, and a large amount of code won't be digestible.

So why bother getting better?

Well, there's personal satisfaction, I guess. It does feel nice to be able to crank through stuff quickly. It feels related to why I prefer biking to running -- the scenery changes faster. But if you're more the type who likes to sit on a bench and admire static scenery, then staring at the same function for six days might be more rewarding for you.

And personal satisfaction just blows compared to being filthy rich. Right? Well, they do say money can't buy happiness, but every time someone's tried to buy me some happiness by giving me money, it's worked on the first try. Never fails, in fact. So I think "they" may be full of it.

I love programming, don't get me wrong. But I'd love it even more if I were a fat old dragon sitting on a big pile of gold, because then I could buy a zillion-inch monitor and work on programs I like, rather than the (only occasionally intersecting) set of programs that my boss tells me to work on.

In the meantime, I keep working on improving my skill set, on the off chance that my skills will actually matter, should the ideal startup scenario ever present itself. And it feels nice to learn new stuff, at least after you've gone through the pain of learning it.

Until then, all I really have of my own is my Mouth of Great Volume, which I'll keep on applying in my blogs so I can continue to reap the benefits of being mistaken for someone famous.

BlaaaaAAAAAahhh!!!

Wizard School

It's hard to believe it's only been eleven years since they opened the first Wizard School. I hear they just opened new campuses in Singapore and Istanbul. That's, what, sixteen or seventeen locations now? And enrollment is already backlogged five to ten years at the new campuses. The money involved just defies the imagination. Mine, anyway.

In retrospect it seems pretty obvious. Who'd have guessed they'd make so much money, though? We were all there, all programming in the same industry, but somehow the two founders saw an opportunity there that the rest of us missed.

I think it's worse than that, actually. I mean, I thought it was a joke when I first heard about it. Didn't you? But I'm such a late adopter. I didn't know about Napster, not really, not until they were being shut down. I didn't buy a DVD player or a CD player or an iPod until they'd been out at least six or seven years each. Stuff like this always feels like it happened overnight, but I guess they've been building to it for a quite a while.

I mean I'd heard about the Wizard Academies, sure. But it was this subculture, this thing interns and high school kids were buzzing about, should they go to college or wiz school, blah blah blah. I wasn't really paying attention. Then suddenly it was this mega-phenomenon, growing faster any educational institution in history.

It's not just that we didn't think of it. Face it: we would have scoffed if someone had suggested the idea. C'mon... "Wizards"? It sounded like someone was just jealous of J.K. Rowling. Especially the more you hear about the campuses.

Some people have been mailing me lately, random people asking me if their kids should go. It's expensive. Way expensive. Tough choice to make, even now, with Wizard Academy grads making anywhere from a quarter million to a million a year, while the rest of us plod away in 5-figure territory. I'm not exactly going to make that decision for them, but I threw together some notes — most of it old hat for anyone who hasn't been living under a rock — to help them make their decision.

I'm dumping my notes here until I think of a better place to put them. For now, I can just forward this stuff to anyone else who asks.

None of it should be new to you.

Why Not College?

It's still an honorable thing to get a Ph.D. I think that'll hold true for another twenty years, at least, because people like to hold on to their traditions. And even an undergrad degree in CS can still get you a job. If you can't afford the Wizard Academy, or you can't pass the entrance tests, or you just got on the waiting list too late, then a CS degree from a good university is still probably the best way to prep for a job in the tech industry. It's not as if the Wiz Schools have killed CS at universities. Not yet, anyway.

Besides, CS degrees are changing now. A lot of the more progressive universities have been overhauling their CS curricula as fast as they can, in response to the Wiz Schools. I mean, my God. The Wizards are coming in with significantly higher computer science scores than the CS grads, and theory isn't really what the Wizards are known for.

Heck, the wiz schools themselves are the newest fad in research departments (sociology and education departments, mostly) across the country — all over the world, even. Everyone has different hypotheses as to why Wizards are so damn good. Nobody seems to know for sure. But they are good, that much at least is indisputable. And they're in unbelievable demand now.

You hire a Ph.D., it's hit-or-miss. Some of them are brilliant. But then some subset of virtually every educated group is brilliant. The problem is that the notion of a Ph.D. has gradually been watered down for the last century. It used to mean something to be a Doctor of Philosophy: it meant you had materially advanced your discipline for everyone. Von Neumann, Nash, Turing — people like that, with world-changing dissertations, they just don't happen that often anymore, at least not in CS. Well, they probably occur at the same frequency, but it's one in a thousand at best.

Instead, what usually happens is a bright young Ph.D.-to-be chooses a school based on expedience: finances, or location, or parental pressure. There might be a dozen or so advisors to choose from, and the department as a whole has only one or two really big, prestigious areas of focus, areas for which the school is known (and hence funded). So if a kid goes to a school that does a lot of X, chances are pretty damn good the kid's going to do her Ph.D. thesis in X. But it's probably specialized to death, and the kid will wind up working for years on some tiny slice of almost-nothing: little prototype mobile doodads that track forest monkeys or something. And the kid will lose faith, stop hoping their thesis will ever mean anything, and they'll go through the motions until their advisor pities them and lets them defend.

I'm not saying it's a rubber stamp. These kids have to work hard for their Ph.D., and a lot of them never quite finish. But too often they finish without having written more than a few hundred lines of code in the past five years. Or they've over-specialized to the point where they now think Big-O is a tire company; they have no idea how computers or computation actually work anymore. They can tell you just about everything there is to know about SVM kernels and neural-net back propagation, or about photorealistic radiosity algorithms that make your apartment look fake by comparison. But if you want a website thrown together, or a scalable service written, or for that matter a graphics or machine-learning system, you're usually better off hiring a high-school kid, because the kid might actually know how to program. Some Ph.D.s can, but how many of them is it, really? From an industry perspective, an alarming number of them are no-ops.

The bigger, better-known companies — Yahoo!, Google, Amazon.com, Microsoft — those guys can spot a dud a mile off, over the phone even. Credentials don't matter, not strictly even for Wiz Academy grads with eight OWLs and five NEWTs or whatever the hell they're called. (I still can't believe how closely they copied Rowling's design.) What matters is what you know, and what you can do, and a Ph.D. laureate in CS these days, even from a "top" university, has about an 80% chance of failing interviews at one of these companies.

It's still honorable to get a Ph.D. But it's no guarantee of a job. Not a high-paying one, anyway, not at a company with a bright future. It is a lot cheaper than Wiz School, though, and it's easier to get in. So I'd consider it a pretty good fallback option.

Wiz School Tour

Well, you know all about the campuses; you can't watch the news for two hours nowadays without getting some sort of virtual tour, or hearing about some company's stock soaring after they won the first-round draft picks from the Nassau campus, or Kauai, or Chardonnay. They're half Google and half Hogwarts, seven-year boarding schools complete with Great Houses, robes, the whole works. Wizard Schools. Just like you'd expect, I guess.

They're always located out in remote, beautiful areas. No expenses spared. Full-time staff, like you'd find in a hotel or a cruise ship. Rich kids and scholarship kids alike, but only the brightest. Reminds me of Ender Wiggin's Battle School. Not just anyone gets to go. You've got to be a prodigy, a kid genius, and not just at math or science. They look for kids with spark, with personality, and their interviews are famous for being both gruelling and quirky. Interviews can last for up to 2 weeks. There's no guesswork involved; they keep you there until they know everything about you, or at least enough to know if you're Wizard material.

Just getting invited to the interviews is a big deal, something to brag about; being selected probably qualifies you for any early-entrance program at any school in most countries. Only 20% make it to the third day, and only one in fifty interviewees gets an offer to attend the school.

I hear they're giving more and more scholarships now. At first it was all rich foreign kids: kids whose parents couldn't get visas, due to the stupid U.S. immigration regulations at the time, which were later relaxed after the big Brain Drain hit. That's another story, of course, and one you already know about. But it explains why there were so many kids from countries like Indonesia and Thailand and Hong Kong in the first graduating classes: insanely brilliant kids from rich families who wanted the best education money could buy, and who were willing to take risks and be early adopters for what even today sounds like the craziest stunt (or scam) ever pulled.

It wasn't crazy, though, and it was no scam. Those first kids that graduated, seven years later, all of 18 years old, they're the youngest crop of CTOs and senior architects and company founders our industry had ever seen, and maybe that any industry had seen since, I don't know, the Gold Rush. Wiz Kids. A well-deserved pun.

Are They Really Better?

Oh, man. You have no idea. A fifth-round draft pick (companies bid for draft picks, of course; you can't just hire any Wizard Academy grad you want, and the process is now independently regulated to ensure fairness) comes "stock" with a skills lineup that would make any hiring manager drool uncontrollably. Probably with fear, since a kid like that will obsolete anyone with the title "hiring manager".

They type 140 to 160 words a minute, almost soundlessly, and always bring their own keyboards. They disdain mice, although recently I hear they've been using pointers attached to their foreheads. No idea how they control them so easily — makes my neck hurt just to think about it. Lots of practice. Hours of drills. Start 'em young, and they all say it's a snap, just like you'd tell your grandmother that using a mouse is a snap, when it's pretty obvious it really isn't.

They know their discrete mathematics and CS theory cold, of course, although I hear it's at the expense of more traditional disciplines like trigonometry and physics, unless they choose those subjects as electives. They're in class for 8 to 10 hours a day, and their homework load is at least equivalent to a full-time college degree, but they're starting it all at 11 or 12 years old.

But all that aside, they're probably most famous for their coding. Just plain, basic coding. I mean, we all think of ourselves as good coders, but the Wizards do it as easily as we breathe air. While a "normal" programmer is puzzling over design patterns, or trying to simplify complex code paths, a Wizard is blasting out code at the rate of hundreds of thousands of lines a year. And it's all amazingly high quality. Numerous studies have shown their code, on average, to have 80% fewer bugs and at least 100% (2x) better performance than the industry average. It's safe to say the Wizards graduating at the bottom of their class are still safely in the top 1% of industry grads.

Of course, blasting out hundreds of thousands of lines a year is missing the point. If a Wizard is given complete technical control over a project (which is usually the smartest thing to do, but companies are rarely very smart), the Wizard will typically write in one of the super-succinct "folding languages" they've developed on campus, usually a Lisp or Haskell derivative.

They call them Folding Languages because they write code that writes code that writes code... Wizards swear by it, and there's no question that they can produce amazingly compact, fast, clean-looking code. But 90% of the devs out there claim they can't read it, and whine a lot about it to their bosses. Given that most companies can only afford a few Staff Wizards, the Wizards are usually forced to capitulate and use Java or C++. They're equally comfortable in any language you throw at them, though, and if you force them to use a verbose language, well, you get what you ask for. It still amazes me that companies are bragging about how many lines of code their Wizards have produced. Potential startups take note: your competitors are usually idiots.

Will My Kid Be Normal?

Good question. It's not exactly "normal" to be a millionaire by age 22. But if you're worried that your kid is going off to join some strange Scientology-like cult, just go visit the campus. Online, of course. You can't actually get onto one of the campuses unless you're press, family, police, a guest speaker, or a Personage of Note like, say, the President of some country. They don't want you bothering the students. But you can take online tours, and they're all quite amazing, using technology largely developed at the campuses themselves. And it's pretty much what you'd expect: a carefully monitored boarding school. The robes and Wizard stuff is mostly there to make it fun, and to imbue it all with a sense of seriousness that always comes of wearing uniforms.

The professors are uniformly entertaining and brilliant. They're always seasoned industry pros, usually famous names. Everyone knows Larry Wall as the Head Wizard of the Aspen campus, the first campus they opened on U.S. soil. Most young folks don't realize Larry was the inventor of a language called "Perl" that was really popular in the 1990s and 2000s, up through 2010 or so. He was independently famous in his own right before taking the job, but these days he's famous entirely because of the Headmaster gig. He's won the Dumbledore Award for three consecutive years, so he's obviously popular with Wiz Academy students worldwide. And I hear Jamie Zawinski just left his S.F. club to take the second-in-command and Tools Master position in the Christchurch campus. Wanna be a prof at Wizard School? Gotta be famous, funny, proven, brilliant, and seriously committed to the students' success.

The kids do more physical education and activity than at most other schools. No, it's not Quidditch — that would be a neat trick — but they have soccer and golf and archery and horseback riding, and they're graded on physical fitness and physical dexterity. They also have to learn a musical instrument and a significant amount of music theory, as the schools claim it makes them better programmers and designers. They all do tons of electives in the arts and sciences. And they all come out fluent in at least 3 languages (one of which must be English) chosen from a list of nearly 100 possibilities. The students are pretty well-rounded by just about any objective standard.

In addition to their math, computer science, and unrivaled coding skills, Wiz Academy grads all seem to know how to draw. At least I've never known one who couldn't. They're not all great artists, of course, but they all receive a substantial amount of training as artists, and seven years of practice at anything, even part-time, can really add up. This puts them at a natural advantage when they're creating UIs and documentation, since they rarely need to wait around for a UI designer. Or at least they can whip up a sketch that a full-time designer or artist can use as starting material. The rest of us programmers have to pantomime what we want until the artist finally draws something that looks like what we (vaguely) had in mind. I'd never have guessed basic drawing skills would be so useful, but now that I see Wizards using them all the time, I've had to change my mind about it. I think we all have.

All the Wizards I've ever met personally have seemed nice enough. I'm sure you can find a few who are arrogant jerks, but you can find people like that anywhere and everywhere if you look hard enough. Most Wizards I've known have been ordinary, nice people. Sort of like Olympians, or Cirque du Soleil performers, or any other elite group of people who've trained since childhood to do what they're doing as adults. They're just people, and a lot of their personality is probably a function of how well you raise them before sending them off to boarding school.

So yeah, I'd say they're pretty normal. I sure wish I'd gone to Wizard School.

What's Next for Wizards Worldwide?

Wizard Schools are the darlings of the press. Who knows how long it'll last. The idea that started as a half-joking blog entry in 2006 has rapidly turned into the biggest phenomenon of the past decade, with no end in site. It's possible that Wizard Schools could eventually obsolete "regular" schools, with lower-end competitors (Fairy School? Somehow I doubt it...) stepping in to siphon off unmet demand.

It's equally possible that traditional schools will continue to borrow ideas from the Wizard Schools, in much the way that big companies circa 2006 started copying Google's philosophy of massages, free food, and other amazing perks in order to attract and retain top talent. That stuff was innovative back then, but it's fairly commonplace nowadays. Once Google had proved it worked better than frugality, everyone else had to follow suit: economics demanded it. Everyone who didn't got the second-best (or more commonly, the nth-best) employees.

One thing is clear: regardless of whether you think the Rowling-style environment is strictly necessary for producing Wizard-quality grads, the enrollment backlogs have shown that there's a huge, worldwide craving for improvement. People were only going to college because there was nothing better out there. But universities aren't really there to produce superstar programmers; their primary job is research, not education, and at least until recently they hardly focused on the students at all. Some profs even considered it beneath them to teach undergrads; it's no wonder so many CS students were graduating without knowing the fundamentals of their discipline: compilers, operating systems, algorithms, computation theory, and other key areas. Let alone Unix, the Web, and the tools of the trade.

Now that the Wizard Schools have proved the market exists, it's hard to imagine that competitors won't appear. Right now it's hard to get first-rate professors, since of course they all want to go off and teach at the existing Wizard Academies. But with a suitable thematic marketing twist, or a sizeable investment from a charitable billionaire, just about anyone could become the next hot education destination.

I'll tell you this much: I'm sending my kids, if they can make it in. In fact, maybe I should start a Wiz Academy Prep School... I'd better not tell anyone about this; it sounds like an idea worth going after. Yeah... I'd better look into it. There are an awful lot of people in this world who care about improving their skills and knowledge, and they want to do it as fast as humanly possible.

I wish I'd thought of it back in 2006. I guess we all do.