Part III: The Ethics

The First Programmer

The profession of software began, inauspiciously, in the summer of 1935 when Alan Turing began work on his paper. His goal was to resolve a mathematical dilemma that had perplexed mathematicians for a decade or more—the Entscheidungsproblem. The decision problem.

In that goal he was successful, but he had no idea, at the time, that his paper would spawn a globe-spanning industry upon which we would all depend and that now forms the life’s blood of our entire civilization.

Many people think of Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada, the countess of Lovelace, as the first programmer, and with good reason. She was the first person we know of who understood that the numbers manipulated by a computing machine could represent nonnumeric concepts. Symbols instead of numbers. And, to be fair, Ada did write some algorithms for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which unfortunately was never built.

But it was Alan Turing who wrote the first¹ programs to execute in an electronic computer. And it was Alan Turing who first defined the profession of software.

¹ Some folks point out that Konrad Zuse wrote algorithms for his electromechanical computer before Turing programmed the ACE.

In 1945, Turing wrote code for the Automated Computing Engine (ACE). He wrote this code in binary machine language, using base-32 numbers. Code like this had never been written before, so he had to invent and implement concepts such as subroutines, stacks, and floating-point numbers.

After several months of inventing the basics and using them to solve mathematical problems, he wrote a report that stated the following conclusion:

“A great number.” How did he know? In reality, he had no idea just how prescient that statement was—we certainly have a great number now.

But what was that other thing he said? “Mathematicians of ability.” Do you consider yourself to be a mathematician of ability?

In the same report, he went on to write:

“Discipline!” How did he know? How could he look forward 70 years and know that our problem would be discipline?

Seventy years ago, Alan Turing laid the first stone in the framework of software professionalism. He said that we should be mathematicians of ability who maintain an appropriate discipline.

Is that who we are? Is that who you are?

Seventy-Five Years

One person’s lifetime. That’s how old our profession is as of this writing. Just 75 years. And what has happened in those three score and fifteen years? Let’s more carefully revisit the history that I presented in Chapter 1, “Craftsmanship.”

In 1945, there was one computer in the world and one programmer. Alan Turing. These numbers grew rapidly in those first years. But let’s use this as our origin.

In the decade that followed, the reliability, consistency, and power usage of vacuum tubes improved dramatically. This made it possible for larger and more powerful computers to be built.

By 1960, IBM had sold 140 of its 700 series computers. These were huge, expensive behemoths that could only be afforded by military, government, and very large corporations. They were also slow, resource limited, and fragile.

It was during this period that Grace Hopper invented the concept of a higher-level language and coined the term compiler. By 1960, her work led to COBOL.

In 1952, John Backus submitted the FORTRAN specification. This was followed rapidly by the development of ALGOL. By 1958, John McCarthy had developed LISP. The proliferation of the language zoo had begun.

In those days, there were no operating systems, no frameworks, no subroutine libraries. If something executed on your computer, it was because you wrote it. Consequently, in those days, it took a staff of a dozen or more programmers just to keep one computer running.

By 1960, 15 years after Turing, there were O(100) computers in the world. The number of programmers was an order of magnitude greater: O(1,000).

Who were these programmers? They were people like Grace Hopper, Edsger Dijkstra, Jon Von Neumann, John Backus, and Jean Jennings. They were scientists and mathematicians and engineers. Most were people who already had careers and already understood the businesses and disciplines they were employed by. Many, if not most, were in their 30s, 40s, and 50s.

The 1960s was the decade of the transistor. Bit by bit, these small, simple, inexpensive, and reliable devices replaced the vacuum tube. And the effect on computers was a game changer.

By 1965, IBM had produced more than ten thousand 1401 transistor-based computers. They rented for about $2,500 per month, putting them within reach of thousands of medium sized businesses.

These machines were programmed in Assembler, Fortran, COBOL, and RPG. And all those companies who rented those machines needed staffs of programmers to write their applications.

IBM wasn’t the only company making computers at the time, so we’ll just say that by 1965, there were O(10,000) computers in the world. And if each computer needed ten programmers to keep it running, there must have been O(100,000) programmers.

Twenty years after Turing, there must have been several hundred thousand programmers in the world. Where did these programmers come from? There weren’t enough mathematicians, scientists, and engineers to cover the need. And there weren’t any computer science graduates coming out of the universities because there weren’t any computer science degree programs—anywhere.

Companies therefore drew from the best and brightest of their accountants, clerks, planners, and so on—anyone with some proven technical aptitude. And they found lots.

And, again, these were people who were already professionals in another field. They were in their 30s and 40s. They already understood deadlines, and commitments, what to leave in, and what to leave out.² Although these people were not mathematicians per se, they were disciplined professionals. Turing would likely have approved.

² Apologies to Bob Seger.

But the crank kept on turning. By 1966, IBM was producing a thousand 360s every month. These computers were popping up everywhere. They were immensely powerful for the day. The model 30 could address 64K bytes of memory and execute 35,000 instructions per second.

It was during this period, in the mid-1960s, when Ole Johann Dahl and Kristen Nygard invented Simula-67—the first object-oriented language. It was also during this period that Edsger Dijkstra invented structured programming. And it was also during this time that Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie invented C and UNIX.

Still the crank turned. In the early 1970s, the integrated circuit came into regular use. These little chips could hold dozens, hundreds, even thousands of transistors. They allowed electronic circuits to be massively miniaturized.

And thus, the minicomputer was born.

In the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Digital Equipment Corporation sold fifty thousand PDP-8 systems and hundreds of thousands of PDP-11 systems.

And they weren’t alone! The minicomputer market exploded. By the mid-1970s, there were dozens and dozens of companies selling minicomputers, so by 1975, 30 years after Turing, there were about 1 million computers in the world. And how many programmers were there? The ratio was starting to change. The number of computers was approaching the number of programmers, so by 1975, there were O(1E6) programmers.

Where did these millions of programmers come from? Who were they?

They were me. Me and my buddies. Me and my cohort of young, energetic, geeky boys.

Tens of thousands of new electronic engineering and computer science grads: We were all young. We were all smart. We, in the United States, were all concerned about the draft. And we were almost all male.

Oh, it’s not that women were leaving the field in any number—yet. That didn’t start until the mid-1980s. No, it’s just that many more boys (and we were boys) were entering the field.

In my first job as a programmer, in 1969, there were a couple of dozen programmers. They were all in their 30s or 40s, and a third to a half were women.

Ten years later, I was working at a company with about 50 programmers, and perhaps three were women.

So, 30 years after Turing, the demographics of programming had shifted dramatically toward very young men. Hundreds of thousands of twenty-something males. We were typically not what Turing would have described as disciplined mathematicians.

But businesses had to have programmers. The demand was through the roof. And what very young men lack in discipline, they make up for with energy.

We were also cheap. Despite the high starting salaries of programmers today, back then companies could pick up programmers pretty inexpensively. My starting salary in 1969 was $7,200 per year.

This has been the trend ever since. Young men have been pouring out of computer science programs every year, and industry seems to have an insatiable appetite for them.

In the 30 years between 1945 and 1975, the number of programmers grew by at least a factor of a million. In the 40 years since then, that growth rate has slowed a bit but is still very high.

How many programmers do you think were in the world by 2020? If you include the VBA³ programmers, I think there must be hundreds of millions of programmers in the world today.

³ Visual Basic for Applications.

This is clearly exponential growth. Exponential growth curves have a doubling rate. You can do the math. Hey, Albert, what’s the doubling rate if we go from 1 to 100 million in 75 years?

The log to the base 2 of 100 million is approximately 27—divide that into 75, and you get about 2.8, so perhaps the number of programmers doubled roughly every two and a half-ish years.

Actually, as we saw earlier, the rate was higher in the first decades and has slowed down a bit now. My guess is that the doubling rate is about five years. Every five years, the number of programmers in the world doubles.

The implications of that fact are staggering. If the number of programmers in the world doubles every five years, it means that half the programmers in the world have less than five years’ experience; and this will always be true so long as that doubling rate continues. This leaves the programming industry in the precarious position of—perpetual inexperience.

Nerds and Saviors

Perpetual inexperience. Oh, don’t worry, this doesn’t mean that you are perpetually inexperienced. It just means that once you gain 5 years of experience, the number of programmers will have doubled. By the time you gain 10 years of experience, the number of programmers will have quadrupled.

People look at the number of young people in programming and conclude that it’s a young person’s profession. They ask, “Where are all the old people?”

We’re all still here! We haven’t gone anywhere. There just weren’t that many of us to begin with.

The problem is that there aren’t enough of us old guys to teach the new programmers coming in. For every programmer with 30 years’ experience, there are 63 programmers who need to learn something from her (or him), 32 of whom are brand new.

Hence the state of perpetual inexperience, with insufficient mentors to correct the problem. The same old mistakes get repeated over and over and over again.

But something else has happened in the last 70 years. Programmers have gained something that I am sure Alan Turing never anticipated: notoriety.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, nobody knew what a programmer was. There weren’t enough of them to have a social impact. Programmers did not live next door to very many people.

That started to change in the 1970s. By then, fathers were advising their sons (and sometimes their daughters) to get degrees in computer science. There were enough programmers in the world so that everybody knew somebody who knew one. And the image of the nerdy, twinkie-eating geek was born.

Few people had seen a computer, but virtually everyone had heard about them. Computers showed up in TV shows such as Star Trek and movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Colossus: The Forbin Project. All too often in those shows, the computers were cast as villains. But in Robert Heinlein’s 1966 book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,⁴ the computer was the self-sacrificing hero.

⁴ Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (Ace, 1966).

Notice, however, that in each of these cases, the programmer is not a significant character. Society didn’t know what to make of programmers back then. They were shadowy, hidden, and somehow insignificant compared to the machines themselves.

I have fond memories of one television commercial from this era. A wife and her husband, a nerdy little guy with glasses, a pocket protector, and a calculator, were comparing prices at a grocery store. Mrs. Olsen described him as “a computer genius” and proceeded to school the wife and husband alike on the benefits of a particular brand of coffee.

The computer programmer in that commercial was naive, bookish, and inconsequential. Someone smart, but with no wisdom or common sense. Not someone you’d invite to parties. Indeed, computer programmers were seen as the kind of people who got beaten up a lot at school.

By 1983, personal computers started to appear, and it was clear that teenagers were interested in them for lots of reasons. By this time, a rather large number of people knew at least one computer programmer. We were considered professionals but still mysterious.

That year, the movie War Games depicted a young Mathew Broderick as a computer-savvy teenager and hacker. He hacks into the United States’ weapons control system, thinking it is a video game, and starts the countdown to thermonuclear war. At the end of the movie, he saves the world by convincing the computer that the only winning move is not to play.

The computer and the programmer had switched roles. Now it was the computer that was the childlike naive character and the programmer the conduit, if not the source, of wisdom.

We saw something similar in the 1986 movie Short Circuit in which the computerized robot known as Number 5 is childlike and innocent but learns wisdom with the help of its creator/programmer and his girlfriend.

By 1993, things had changed dramatically. In the film Jurassic Park, the programmer was the villain, and the computer was not a character at all. It was just a tool.

Society was beginning to understand who we were and the role we played. We had graduated from nerd to teacher to villain in just 20 years.

But the vision changed again. In the 1999 film The Matrix, the main characters were both programmers and saviors. Indeed, their godlike powers came from their ability to read and understand—“the code.”

Our roles were changing fast. Villain to savior in just a few years. Society at large was beginning to understand the power we have both for good and for bad.

Role Models and Villains

Fifteen years later, in 2014, I visited the Mojang office in Stockholm to do some lectures on clean code and test-driven development. Mojang, in case you didn’t know, is the company that produced the game Minecraft.

Afterward, because the weather was nice, the Mojang programmers and I sat outside at a beer garden, chatting. All of a sudden, a young boy, perhaps 12, runs up to the fence and calls out to one of the programmers: “Are you Jeb?”

He was referring to Jens Bergensten, one of the lead programmers at Mojang.

The lad asked Jens for his autograph and peppered him with questions. He had eyes for no one else.

And I’m, like, sitting right there. . . .

Anyway, the point is that programmers have become role models and idols for our children. They dream of growing up to be like Jeb or Dinnerbone or Notch.

Programmers, real-life programmers, are heroes.

But where there are real heroes, there are also real villains.

In October of 2015, Michael Horn, the CEO of Volkswagen North America, testified before the US Congress regarding the software in their cars that was cheating the Environmental Protection Agency’s testing devices. When asked why the company did this, he blamed programmers. He said, “This was a couple of software engineers who put this in for whatever reasons.”

Of course, he was lying about the “whatever reasons.” He knew what the reasons were, and so did the Volkswagen company at large. His feeble attempt to shift blame onto the programmers was pretty transparent.

On the other hand, he was exactly right. It was some programmers who wrote that lying, cheating code.

And those programmers—whoever they were—gave us all a bad name. If we had a true professional organization, their recognition as programmers would, and should, be revoked. They betrayed us all. They besmirched the honor of our profession.

And so, we’ve graduated. It’s taken 75 years. But we’ve gone from nothing to nerds to role models and villains in that time.

Society has begun—just begun—to understand who we are and the threats and promises that we represent.

We Rule the World

But society doesn’t understand everything yet. Indeed, neither do we. You see, you and I, we are programmers, and we rule the world.

That may seem like an exaggerated statement, but consider. There are more computers in the world, right now, than there are people. And these computers, that outnumber us, perform myriads of essential tasks for us. They keep track of our reminders. They manage our calendars. They deliver our Facebook messages and keep our photo albums. They connect our phone calls and deliver our text messages. They control the engines in our cars, as well as the brakes, accelerator, and sometimes even the steering wheels.

We can’t cook without them. We can’t wash clothes without them. They keep our houses warm in winter. They entertain us when we’re bored. They keep track of our bank records and our credit cards. They help us pay our bills.

In fact, most people in the modern world interact with some software system every waking minute of every day. Some even continue interacting while they sleep.

The point is that nothing happens in our society without software. No product gets bought or sold. No law gets enacted or enforced. No car drives. No Amazon products get delivered. No phone connects. No power comes out of outlets. No food gets delivered to stores. No water comes out of faucets. No gas gets piped to furnaces. None of these things happens without software monitoring and coordinating it all.

And we write that software. And that makes us the rulers of the world.

Oh, other people think they make the rules—but then they hand those rules to us, and we write the rules that execute in the machines that monitor and coordinate every aspect of our lives.

Society does not quite understand this yet. Not quite. Not yet. But the day is coming soon when our society will understand it all too well.

We, programmers, don’t quite understand this yet either. Not really. But, again, the day is coming when it will be savagely driven home to us.

Catastrophes

We’ve seen plenty of software catastrophes over the years. Some have been pretty spectacular.

For example, in 2016, we lost the Schiaparelli Mars Lander and Rover because of a software issue that caused the lander to believe it had already landed when it was actually nearly 4 kilometers above the surface.

In 1999, we lost the Mars Climate Orbiter because of a ground-based software error that transmitted data to the orbiter using English units (pound-seconds) rather than metric units (newton-seconds). This error caused the orbiter to descend too far into the Martian atmosphere, where it was torn to pieces.

In 1996, the Ariane 5 launch vehicle and payload was destroyed 37 seconds after launch because of an integer overflow exception when a 64-bit floating-point number underwent an unchecked conversion to a 16-bit integer. The exception crashed the onboard computers, and the vehicle self-destructed.

Should we talk about the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine that, because of a race condition, killed three people and injured three others by blasting them with a high-powered electron beam?

Or maybe we should talk about Knight Capital Group, which lost $460 million in 45 minutes because it reused a flag that activated dead code left in the system.

Or perhaps we should talk about the Toyota stack overflow bug that could cause cars to accelerate out of control—killing perhaps as many as 89 people.

Or maybe we should talk about HealthCare.gov, the software failure that nearly overturned a new and controversial American healthcare law.

These disasters have cost billions of dollars and many lives. And they were caused by programmers.

We, programmers, through the code that we write, are killing people.

Now, I know you didn’t get into this business in order to kill people. Probably, you became a programmer because you wrote an infinite loop that printed your name once, and you experienced that joyous feeling of power.

But facts are facts. We are now in a position in our society where our actions can destroy fortunes, livelihoods, and lives.

One day, probably not too long from now, some poor programmer is going to do something just a little dumb, and tens of thousands of people will die.

This isn’t wild speculation—it’s just a matter of time.

And when this happens, the politicians of the world will demand an accounting. They will demand that we show them how we will prevent such errors in the future.

And if we show up without a statement of ethics, if we show up without any standards or defined disciplines, if we show up and whine about how our bosses set unreasonable schedules and deadlines—then we will be found GUILTY.

The Oath

To begin the discussion of our ethics as software developers, I offer the following oath.