Posts tagged In The Large

When my friends and I discuss the technological choices that humans make, we often call it “Yahoo Computing” between each other. However, I am careful never to use that word in front of Ngnghm (whose name I pronounce “Ann”) by fear that she would readily view us as Yahoos indeed, as we all yearn to qualify as Houyhnhnms in her eyes (which we pronounce “Hunams”). I have never heard Ann call any human “Yahoo”, either, not even when we describe the most irrational human behaviors; but I strongly suspect that it might be out of politeness, or to avoid triggering an adverse reaction if she told to our face how she really feels about humans.

One day we were discussing how a lot of extremely costly mistakes, some of them deadly, were made in human computing. Ann was particularly interested in these failures. She explained that failure patterns are often a great way to understand underlying structures that are not otherwise directly observable. What patterns were there in those failures? What do they teach us about how humans make decisions? She was interested as an anthropologist. I was more interested as a practitioner: if we can identify some defect in the way humans tend to make some decisions about computing, some kind of myopia, then can we devise systematic ways to correct them? Did Houyhnhnms have similar failings, and how did they address them?

What did Ngnghm (which I pronounce “Ann”) think of Urbit? Some elements in Ann’s descriptions of Houyhnhnm computing (which I pronounce “Hunam computing”) were remindful of the famous Martian system software stack Urbit: both computing worlds were alien to Human Computing; both had Orthogonal Persistence; and both relied heavily on pure deterministic computations to minimize the amount of data to log in the persistence journal (as contrasted for instance with the amount of data to manipulate to compute and display answers to end-users). What else did Houyhnhnm computing have in common with Martian software? How did it crucially differ? How did they equally or differently resemble Human systems or differ from them? Ann took a long look at Urbit; while she concluded that indeed the three approaches were quite distinct, she also helped me identify the principles underlying their mutual differences and commonalities.

In my various professional endeavors, I had to deal a lot with build systems: programs like Unix Make, Common Lisp’s ASDF, or Google’s Bazel, but also package managers like rpm, dpkg or Nix, with which developers describe how to build executable software from source files. As the builds grew larger and more complex and had to fit a wider diversity of configurations, I particularly had to deal with configuration scripts to configure the builds, configuration script generation systems, build extensions to abstract over build complexity, and build extension languages to write these build extensions. Since the experience had left me confused, frustrated, and yearning for a better solution, I asked Ngnghm (or “Ann” as I call her) how Houyhnhnms (or “Hunams” as I call them) dealt with these issues. Could they somehow keep their builds always simple, or did they have some elegant solution to deal with large complex builds?

Once again, Ann wasn’t sure what I meant, and I had to explain her at length the kind of situations I had to deal with and the kind of actions I took, before Ann could map them to processes and interactions that happened in Houyhnhnm computing systems. And her conclusion was that while Houyhnhnms computing systems certainly could express large builds, they didn’t possess a “build system” separate and distinguished from their normal development system; rather their “build system” was simply to use their regular development system at the meta-level, while respecting certain common constraints usually enforced on meta-programs.