Mir.lu

I think of Oscar Nierstrasz as the most efficient person I’ve ever met. In fact, I told him several times that I think he should organize a tutorial on "How to optimize your life as a computer science professor”. 

One thing that I saw him do is to keep a very comprehensive agenda which tracks all the people that he ever meets. This makes sense because in academia we have so many ad-hoc relationships that it becomes impossible to keep track of all of them with our brains, which seem to be designed to track a small tribe of up to 150 people or so. 

So, inspired by him, and annoyed that I still can’t put faces on the names of several of my students who I have correspondence with, this morning I decided to add them to my agenda together with their pictures. I have 50 students enrolled in the SE course but there’s probably only a dozen of them who are emailing me. 

I went to the store today, and between others I quickly grabbed a kilo of bananas scanned them in a hurry, and dropped them in the basket. I love the self scanners; together with Spotify they remind me like nothing else that I live in the 21st century! No interaction with humans while you’re buying stuff and your soundtrack streams seamlessly straight from Sweden :)

And then it hit me. I have absolutely no feeling of thankfulness when I buy bananas. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. None. And you, my dear reader, probably you also don’t have any such feeling towards bananas. And maybe this serves you right, but for me it should not be like that.

Let me tell you a fragment of a story.

I grew up in communist Romania. The policy of the government was that the country will import less than it exports. They cut all kinds of expenses, including electricity and water, and that was not always pleasant. But in time, the country almost completely got rid of the foreign debt. This is laughable nowadays, when Romania like every government and even every local authority are borrowing money from financial institutions… but that’s another rant for another time.

In any case, because of this policy of not importing too much, and because bananas do not grow in Eastern Europe, we only saw the fruit for Christmas. That was the one time in the year when the government imported and distributed a scant quantity of bananas to the stores. People would queue for long hours to be able to buy. (In fact, I remember that the best strategy at the time was, if you saw a queue, to first sit in line, and then ask what are people waiting for. You would gain several places like this).

The bananas were also green and had to be home-ripen. Everybody knew at the time that bananas should be covered in newspapers, and left somewhere in warm temperature till they would ripe.

An apocryphal story says that once, my grandma received bananas from one of my uncles. And since she never saw anything like that before, she thought those were actually some weird cucumbers gone bad, so she fed the cows with them.

In any case, I’m digressing. The whole point of this time trip was for me to remind myself and to you dear reader to be grateful for being able to have bananas any time we like. (Don’t you find it funny how I am breaking the fourth wall here, like I would be Woodie Allen in Annie Hall, although I suspect I am talking alone anyway?).

So yes, I think we should all remember, every now and then, where are we coming from, and be thankful for it. Sure the bananas are just a very simple example, and metaphor. There are many other things that I need to remind myself to be thankful for, things that I nowadays I take for granted and I could not even imagine having them some time ago.

And if you think that bananas are trivial, then I’ve got news for you: I have an even more basic reason to be thankful. And this one is an actual holiday for me.

Two years ago, in August 2014, I attended a conference in Vienna for one week. Unbeknownst to me, I ended up contacting a terrible pain in my neck. The moment I would try to look up, I would feel this horrible pang in my neck. I could not turn my neck. I could not walk. I could not enjoy anything, because of the pain.

I went to the pharmacy, and described the horrible situation in which I was. The kind lady there, recommended a warm patch, and I think I burned her down with my gaze at that moment trying to convey the following: “i’m dying here woman, and you’re recommending me a warm patch?”. You see, I was convinced that what I got was some injury to my vertebrae or something really horrible. Long story short, with the warm patches, in two days, my neck eventually recovered.

For the remaining two days, my biggest pleasure was to simply walk around and turn my head. Using my neck without the pain was a joy I hadn’t experienced in a long time.

We don’t know what we have, until we lose it. And that’s ok. The thing which really bothers me is that once we get it back, we still too easily forget.

So, to make sure that I don’t forget, or that if I forget, I will remember every now and then of the times when I thought I was doomed to never look up again, I have decided that for me, August 25 will be the “Day when my pain in neck went away” day, which I will observe yearly.

The other day I was reading some code, and I saw a lot of classes named based on the following pattern:

- ContactsOverviewTableViewController: UITableViewController

- AddContactTableViewController: UITableViewControlle

- FindContactTableViewController: UITableViewController

I get it, they are all table view controllers, but do we really have to mention that in their name all the time. Isn’t this like saying HomerSimpsonCartoonCharacters and BartSimpsonCartoonCharacters  every time you talk about the corresponding cartoon characters?

Reading code like this is a drag. Can’t we do something about it? 

Just realized that Swift does not require a semicolon for ending a line.

I’ve been writing a lot of Python recently, I liked this, but never gave it too much of a thought. But today, looking at the pull request of one of my students, I realized that if think about it, this makes a lot of sense from a usability POV. 

Indeed, it optimizes for the most frequent case, which is that a statement ends at the end of the line. I think that more than 90% of the lines in Java end with a semicolon. 

... is a terrible user experience. 

(At least, if you don’t bind your account to a credit card, which I did not want to do this time for various reasons.)

So you charge with EUR 630 your account by making an e-banking transfer.

Try to send EUR 630 multiple times, and get generic error message asking you to ‘try later’ or ‘contact us’. 

You try later. Then later.

You contact them, and get an automatic reply that you’ll get an answer in 24 hours.

Two days later you get an answer: payment is not going through because if you send EUR 630 PayPal won’t have where to cash charges from!

You try different sums, to figure out how much is the sum that you can send send the pal can still cut their share. Turns out that it’s about EUR 623. You send it and remain with EUR 0.87 in your account... a rounding error for you, a source of profit for them probably...

EUR 623 at the current rate is about USD 695. Surely, after the conversion you lose 20 USD more. 

So you probably have to plan another transfer to arrive to the originally intended sum...

In the meantime, you get an automated email from PayPal asking for 5 minutes of your time just to fill a survey which is part of their “commitment to excellence”. 

Seems to me like this company is doing everything it can to self-destroy. 

Hiring Goldman Sachs to help you after they brought the entire economy into the ground... Selling everything else to be able to focus on search which is “the most promising direction” in a world where googling is a verb... Separating from Alibaba to increase cohesiveness of values... 

For some reason, our society is obsessed with science. In fact, any domain that wants to have some respect nowadays, needs to append “science” at the end of its name. Computing science. Social science. Behavioral science. Climate science. Economical science. Food Science. etc. The good news is that once we’ll append science to every human endeavor, we’ll be able to drop it again.

Thus, no wonder that Matt Damon in The Martian gets declares that he’s going to “science” his way out of the red planet... And even Neil deGrasse Tyson likes that. 

Now don’t get me wrong. Science is an important aspect of society. But we should stop putting it above everything else. Too often I hear the dismissive observation: “bah, that’s only engineering”. So here’s the catch. It’s not “only” engineering. It’s ENGINEERING. What I mean is that not only science without engineering can’t exist, but rather, for most of the human advances, it was the other way around. Henry Petroski, professor at Duke: 

Throughout history, a full scientific understanding has been neither necessary, nor sufficient for great technological advances. The era of the steam engine, notably, was well into its second century before a fully formed science of thermodynamics had been developed. [...] Had Marconi believed his physicist contemporaries, he would have “known” that wireless telegraphy signals could not be sent across the ocean around the earth curvature.

I hear that those astronomers that get huge amounts of money to look very far into the universe spend two thirds of their budgets on software engineering. 

So why the obsessive fascination with science? There are probably many reasons, but one that comes to my mind right now is our individualism. We live in a society which is highly individualistic. We find thus very attractive the simplistic story of the scientist, who alone fights with disease and unveils the secrets of the universe. Just as we admire sportive, the singer, the startup creator. Zuckerberg, Shakira, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Serena Williams are much more enticing to us as story protagonists than the team who was working on the Boeing 747 wing design. Or the people at the Xerox PARC who invented the Ethernet. 

But we should remember that without the team work of the engineers at Xerox PARC we would have not heard of any of the other ones. 

I guess I’m thinking about my software engineering course that’s starting soon. And about my software engineering research, which evidently has to be scientific if I am to get grants. Because after all, grants are the fundament of a career in science. 

Update: A few weeks ago, after writing this rant  I attended a meeting of the SE research community in the Netherlands and could not stop smiling when one of the speakers said this: 

These days I’ve taken upon myself to do some Swift code review for one of my students, even if I personally don’t write Swift. My idea was that after you know several programming languages, it should be easy to read yet another one.

Swift, on the other hand, has a bunch of surprising features up it’s sleeve. I’ve marked this post with (part I) because I plan to come back with some more examples when I’ll find more time.

One surprising feature is the keyword convenience which specifies that a constructor is not the main constructor, but instead:

Convenience initializers are secondary, supporting initializers for a class. You can define a convenience initializer to call a designated initializer from the same class as the convenience initializer with some of the designated initializer’s parameters set to default values. You can also define a convenience initializer to create an instance of that class for a specific use case or input value type.

Today I had a meeting with the future staff of the software engineering course. Looks like an awesome team. I’m eager to be working with them. 

Between others, we were discussing tools for team communication. I’m already using Slack for Zeeguu, and am very happy with it, so I proposed that. 

Somebody proposed Telegram. They have been using it already for one of their team projects. Telegram? It’s not the first time I hear students that use that or Whatsapp for team-communication. For some reason, it feels awkward for me. I’ve always used those tools for personal communication. 

And then I remembered that I’ve been meaning to try Basecamp for a long time. I quickly created an account and from the first 5 minutes of use: I am  impressed. Clean signup process. Intuitive user interface. Seems to be a tool at the intersection of Trello and Slack.

Puzzled this morning at Google Translate translating the German word zerreisen into the Romanian lacrimă which means tear as in the little droplet of salty water that travels down the cheeks. 

Why would Google do that? The original word is clearly a verb. Moreover, the meaning is very far from anything that has to do with crying. It means to break, to rip, to tear... Ooops! I think I see it now :) Do you see it?

Code Quality is the Holy Graal of software analysis. And developers seem to agree that good code is readable code. Or at least, this seems to be the overwhelming consensus between several dozen developers interviewed by the people at IntentHQ [1].

At the beginning, I thought: wonderful! I like readability. It is an beautiful concept and it will be easier to define, and maybe automatically detect, than quality, which is a very abstract concept after all. 

But maybe I got too easily excited. It is evident that what’s readable for an expert is not readable for a novice, right? And what’s readable for a novice, is boring for the expert. Although nobody said that boring code was bad. Maybe we’re onto something here...

But I suspect that boring code might not be the full answer, and we will have to work a bit more to define what readable code is. In any case, one thing that I find exciting is that if we switch our discussion from “code quality” to “code readability” we also shift our focus of attention: while the former is about the code, the latter is about the people. 

And it is people that matter.

Putting the lstlisting environment inside of a minipage will box the content making it unbreakable.

Gmail is a tool for organizing communication.

Inbox is for when you have given up trying to organize anything. 

I tried, but I can not give up trying to organize my own information...

Google has decided to pull all the birthdays of my Google Plus contacts into my calendar. I found this a bit annoying... although there is something nice about it...  still, it's annoying. 

I hear MS does the same with the info from Skype which now gets pulled into the Outlook or whatever other MS software one uses. 

Das ist mein erste Blog auf Deutsch.