[1709] in Humor
HUMOR: A Confession
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew Bennett)
Thu Nov 21 12:44:51 1996
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 1996 12:22:02 -0500
To: humor@MIT.EDU
From: abennett@MIT.EDU (Andrew Bennett)
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 09:05:01 -0500 (EST)
From: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com>
Forwarded-by: Greg Rose <ggr@Qualcomm.com>
Forwarded-by: Peter Gutmann <pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz>
From: Marcus Ranum <mjr@v-one.com>
Standards? Let me tell you about Standards.
This is a true story.
When I first got started on standards, it was a pretty simple thing. I
was coding a smallish program working in a hospital informatics group.
There were several programmers, and to make the code look good and
presumably work, we all agreed to a 'standard' programming layout. I
admit, it was peer pressure. I didn't want the guys to all laugh at me
and throw empty cans of Coke at me, so I went along with it and I
standardized a bit. It was easy -- I felt like a part of the team. Once
you standardize on a little thing, like where the braces go after your
if() in C, it gets easy to start to want to standardize on other stuff.
Soon I was no stranger to standards. I guess they were starting to
consider an ANSI standard for C around then -- more peer pressure to
standardize.
"It's OK -- *EVERYONE* is doing it! Even your competitors!" That's what
the standards dealers would tell us. Years after that first little
standardization effort, I was working for a Big Vendor, and the
competition was pretty fierce. All the guys used to stoke up on standards
before going out on a sales support call. I was in a sales support unit
-- pretty soon I was learning about 2, maybe 3 new standards a week.
Before going out with a sales rep to talk to a customer, I'd slip copies
of the standards our product contained in my briefcase, so I could sneer
at the other vendors who had less standards than I did. It was hip. I was
happening. I was dancing on the cutting edge of the crystal wave, with
POSIX, XPG3, MOTIF and OSF. Those were the good years. Everything was
coming up in this golden glow on the horizon, shipping Real Soon Now.
After the standards -- habituation set in. I was compliant with just about
everything. I started dipping into the really strong stuff, mainlining
vendor consortia and free-basing vaporware. Each day before I went into
the office, I'd believe 2 or 3 wild press releases about new initiatives
that were going to solve all my customers problems. Some days, I'd even
believe as many as 5, until my head was a swirling mass of incoherent
commitments to plan to agree to standardize to eventually produce
SOMETHING, SOMEDAY, if there was customer demand for it. Things started
to get ugly.
I'd go to a customer site, and between flipping up pages of glossies of
new consortia and initiatives to solve problems that hadn't been
identified as interesting yet, I'd catch myself suddenly trembling. My
liver fell out, and my hair got jaundiced. Instead of writing good clean
working code, I found myself writing reams and reams of stuff about how
great the code would be when I got around to actually writing it. Whenever
I saw something ugly about my user interface, I just put another wrapper
of goo around it. I even experimented with OOP and C++. My hacker buddies
all started looking at me funny. Finally, I woke up in a gutter, after
staggering in a drunken daze through downtown Palo Alto with Paul, and I
realized that I'd lost control of my problem.
Nowadays I'm a reformed Standards-aholic. Somehow, providence saved me
from falling into the endless abyss of the Working Groups where I still
see some of my old buddies wandering around like zombies, waiting for the
consensus that'll never come. It was tough, but I can walk again. My cat
has stopped trying to kick dirt over me when I lie down. I don't feel the
need to conform anymore. I write K&R C. I laugh at termios.
=======================================================================
Andrew Bennett MIT Department Ocean Engineering
MIT Room 5-424 77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139 <Standard Disclaimers Apply> Phone: (617) 253-7950
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