Technical Debt

Like many software developers in the 21st century, I use the term “technical debt” in a negative way: it's the ever-accumulating cruft in your system that stands in the way of adding new features. As technical debt increases, the work takes ever longer, until you reach a point where forward progress ceases.

This view of technical debt equates it to a credit card: unless you pay your balance in full each month, you're charged interest. If you only make the minimum payment, that interest accrues and it will take you years to pay off the card. If you make the minimum payment and keep charging more, you may never get out of debt. Eventually, after maxing out several cards, you'll have to declare bankruptcy.

But that's a very puritanical view of debt, and it's not a view shared by everyone.

For a person with a business-school background, debt is a tool: if you can float a bond at 5% to build a factory that gives you a 10% boost in income, then you should do that (usually — there are other factors to consider, such as maintenance and depreciation). More important, you're not going pay that bond off before it's due; doing so would negate the reasons that you issued it in the first place.

Which means that the term “technical debt” probably doesn't have the same connotations to your business users as it does to you. In fact, using that term may be dangerous to the long-term prospects of your project. If you say “we can release early but we'll add a lot of technical debt to do so,” that's a no-brainer decision: of course you'll take on the debt.

I think a better term is total cost of ownership (TCO): the amount you pay to implement features now, plus the amount you will pay to add new features in the future. For example, “we can release this version early, but we'll add three months to the schedule for the next version.”

Which may still mean that you cut corners to release early, and probably won't stave off demands to release the next version early as well. But at least you'll be speaking the same language.

The Uncanny Valley of Programming Languages

The uncanny valley was a term coined by Masahiro Mori to describe human interaction with robots. He posited that, “in climbing toward the goal of making robots appear human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley […]”. Things in this valley (robots, but also artificial limbs), by being humanlike but cold and unmoving, evoke a visceral negative reaction. If you found The Polar Express creepy, you've experienced this valley.

I've been thinking about how the idea of an uncanny valley might apply to programming languages. On the one side of the valley, you have the (unattainable?) perfect language. On the other, you have an array of languages: some are missing features, some have inconvenient structure, some have inconsistent behavior. But we accept those quirks, find them charming even. It's easy to imagine a Lisp programmer on this side of the valley, surrounded by adorable little parentheses.

And in the middle of the valley are those languages that come close to perfect but aren't quite there. If you read my last post, I think you know at least one of the languages that I see in that valley. It has many features that I desire, but they're … not … quite … right.

A Journey to the Kingdom of Verbs

HRH, DGR Terra Nominem, greetings

Your Grace. In furtherance of your desire to establish diplomatic relations with our neighbors, I have traveled to the Kingdom of Verbs to meet with Queen Repl. I fear that our potential for commerce is limited. They follow exceedingly strange customs, which I shall attempt to relay by anecdote.

To all appearances Queen Repl is the sole permanent inhabitant of the land. She creates minions from pure thought, and these minions exist solely at her discretion. The queen will create complex hierarchies of these minions to fulfill a task, and when the task is complete, the minions disappear. While some of the minions are given names, those names describe but do not define them; each minion is a unique entity, created for a single purpose.

The method by which these minions interact is also exceedingly strange; it took me months to understand it. While we follow the dictum of “tell, don't ask,” they abide by “ask, and you shall receive.” And while we use diverse techniques such as Queues and Busses to decouple Producers and Consumers, they know exactly whom to ask for a service and do not look elsewhere.

Data is a topic that is rarely discussed in this land; indeed, at times it seems almost a taboo. In some cases, when asked for data, a minion will go so far as to create another minion to provide the answer, rather than speaking directly. I can only imagine this as dedication to Platonism: there is an ideal, and there are forms of that ideal, and minions work with the forms while the ideal remains unknowable. Again, it seems uncommonly strange to us, but appears to work for them.

However, this attitude toward data left me with a question: whence comes inputs to the land, and where goeth outputs? Or is the land truly inward facing, minions performing actions without effect? The answer to this question, as you might surmise, was critical to my ability to engage the Queen.

I found the answer to this question in the monadii. They go by various names, but their role is to provide minions with an ultimate source and sink for data. At first, I thought they were like the Flappers of Laputa, standing in the background to make their masters aware of the outside world. As time passed, I realized that they also were bound by the dictum of the land, and only spoke when spoken to. It was my great fortune to learn that there was a minion responsible for listening to the monadii and asking the Queen to interpret their words.

To bring my story to a close, and not waste more of your precious time, I was able to establish contact with two of these monadii, who then provided my bona fides to the Queen and returned her reply to me. While I do not know what form of intercourse our two countries can engage, I am hopeful that Nouns and Verbs will find common ground.

I look forward to my next assignment, the Land of Inference. Your most humble servant,

(signed) Reginald, extends Diplomat, implements Plenipotentiary