Opinion: Tools must be designed for the humans we are, not the ideal brains that we aren't.
Sometimes, fate hands me the perfect pair of news hooks from which to
hang a metaphor. So it is with this weeks combination of the
Eclipse
Foundations move to join the
Java Community Process, the
Object Management Group and the
Open Services Gateway initiative Alliance—in the same week that
Hondas
Asimo robot demonstrated in Las Vegas
that it can
move a whole lot faster than
the
Eclipse group did in reaching this welcome decision.
People whove seen
industrial
robots at work on assembly lines will sometimes regard with
amusement, or even disdain, the affectation—as they see it—of
making robots in human form. To them, I offer the comment of author and
hardware hacker Martin Weinstein in his 1981 book
Android Design: Practical Approaches for
Robot Builders: "We have designed the constructs of the
world around us to fit our own forms, and they will not tolerate a
great deal of variation. … If the Air Force could use nonhuman test
pilots, lives might be saved—but planes are designed for beings with
the shape, reach, and dexterity of a human. So resemblance to humans
becomes significant."
The same holds true for "the constructs of our world" as defined by
code, rather than by mechanisms. Code is written by people, and
languages with something like the verb-noun structure of most human
languages seem to lead to better results for a larger number of
programmers than do radically different programming languages despite
their theoretical advantages.
FORTH
and
Lisp
come to mind as examples of languages that many find hard to approach: I admire both, and even enjoy thinking in Lisp myself, but
my occasional evangelism for that language never seems to gain much ground. (I dont claim to be able to think in FORTH, but Ive seen
some
incredible work done
by
people who can.)
Which brings us full circle, back to the need for cooperation among
the
forces of Eclipse and its new confederates named above. Eclipse, as a
development environment, is the construct in which programmers need to
be able to sit down and reach the controls and operate them with
accuracy and confidence. Java is often the space through which those
developers will be flying, to stick with the test-pilot example: OMG
and OSGi define the landscape where those developers would like to
explore, but not crash.
Meanwhile, robots like ASIMO will just keep getting better, and
developers will do well to look up from their keyboards and their Web
services protocols to think about
yet another
space in which theres great code to be written.
Tell me where you want to run—or fly—at
peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com.
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