Gerald M. Weinberg - Understanding the Professional Programmer

In 1944, when I was eleven, I read a Time magazine article about computers! At that age, my mind was a clean slate looking for a piece of chalk, so the article made a great impression. I recall sitting in the high wing-backed chair in the living room, Time in my lap and time on my hands, deciding I was going to become a "computer person." (The title of "programmer" didn't exist until years later.) Much has happened to computers since 1944. Much has happened to our lives because of computersespecially to my life. But one thing, at least, hasn't changed. It's a lifetime later, and now I'm writing the computer articles instead of reading them. Yet even today nobody understands what "computer people" are, what they really do, and what they ought to be doing.

I shouldn't say nobody knows. The problem today is everybody knowsbut everybody knows something different. After a lifetime of computing, the dust still hasn't settled. Computer people still have the freedom to choose what they might doand with it the freedom to choose what computers might do. Perhaps in another fifty or one hundred years, computer people will be slotted into rigid pigeonholes for life, but today our fate still seems to be in our own hands.

The computing business until now has depended on the free flow of ideas. In the old days you could go to a meeting once a month and talk to at least one person from every important installation in, say, Los Angeles. Now some old-timers go to the XCC and try to reestablish the former environment among 75,000 people from till over the world, but it's not the same.

And it will never be the same. What we once accomplished naturally, by some sort of lemming instinct, now has to be accomplished by more explicit structures. For instance, at big meetings there's no room for little ideas. And at little meetings there's no room for the little shot, who's come to hear what pearls of wisdom the big shots might cast.

In the past, we depended on meetings because little was written down. When I started working for IBM in 1956, I read every piece of technical literature (including the entire SHARE library) in the San Francisco branch office in less than one week! That library-in-a-closet was pretty much all the technical literature IBM possessed in 1956.

Today, we are so swamped with technical literature we have little time for face-to-face exchanges and seemingly no time at all for "informal" reading. So computer people everywhere are losing contact with one another, losing the flow of ideas not sufficiently technical to put in manuals or textbooks. In losing those ideas, we're losing contact with a significant portion of our reality. Our work suffers.

I sense this loss of contact most strongly when I read the letters from readers of my regular columns Stateside, Phase 2, and From Eagle, Nebraska. There are computer people in Dubuque, Dublin, Delhi, and Dunedin who share so much but who will never have the opportunity to meet face to face. If they did meet, they would instantly recognize one another as "computer people"just as they have recognized themselves in these essays. What do I mean by a "computer person"? I mean the kind of person who reads these essays and says now and then, "Yes, I do that," or "I feel that way," or "I wish my manager understood that," or "I can use that technique," or even "This guy Weinberg has lost touch with the kind of environment I work in."

These essays are for people who want a better understanding of computer peopleprogrammers, analysts, managers, designers, trainers, testers, maintainers, operators, administrators, architects, chiefs, or whatever they're called. I've tried to make the essays interesting, so as not to waste any of the very scarce reading time of the average computer person. You can pick up one of my books whenever you have five minutes to spare (like while you're waiting for some website to respond), open it at random, and read a complete idea. It may not be the world's greatest idea, but it's all there and it might do some good. And if not. it might give you some pleasurewhich will do some good in its own way.