See the problem? Really, there are a few ways this can go wrong. To a quick glance, the only clue that line 14 (“interpolate a comma”) is part of a conditional is its indentation. The indentation is important to a human reader — but absolutely irrelevant to the PHP interpreter, which simply treats the next line after the conditional as the conditional’s block. Regardless of how it’s indented, and regardless of what else is around.

The way it looks to a human is not the way it looks to the machine.

What happens if someone wants to add some logging? What if they add it after the comma line?

Now the log claims the code has added a comma, even when it hasn’t. But still, it could be worse! What if you decided to add your logging before the other line?

Now it adds a comma no matter what — even the first time through the loop, when the string is empty. So instead of a string like '123,124,125', $itemId will now have a leading comma: ',123,124,125'. Since this value is getting stitched into a SQL query later on, it means your app will blow up with a SQL syntax error.

This is why Python makes whitespace significant to program flow. The way the indentation makes it look like the logical structure is, is how the structure actually is.

And this is also why Perl — of all languages, one that normally errs on the side of letting you leave out anything that can be inferred from context — Perl insists in its syntax documentation that in cases like this, “the curly brackets are required — no dangling statements allowed.” (It then says, in typically Perlish fashion: “If you want to write conditionals without curly brackets there are several other ways to do it.”)

If you’re working in one of those languages that lets you omit curly braces around a single-statement conditional — DON’T DO IT! The potential maintenance and debugging problems are not worth the fun of saving two keystrokes (or just one, if you work in an editor that auto-closes your braces for you).

We have a private life, a public life. We have a work life, a school life, a party life, a love life and I am sure you can name lots of others. I never understood why.… I always felt that it is hard enough to focus on getting one life right. Why create so many? (emphasis added)

This guy is a startup founder. I expect he may well be typical of the genus. And so, he makes a great example of why so many startups* seem to be promoting the “single identity” model. It’s nice that this guy feels he can have just one life — though even he admits it’s hard! But the rest of us don’t really want to deal with everyone on the same single channel.

Mr. Widrich claims that: “I can walk into a club and speak the same thoughts I have in my head to a girl, as I can to my family. And again I can speak with the same mindset to my co-founder, give an interview or play football.” Personally, I can’t help but wonder if that’s really working out for him. The pitch you use to woo an investor is quite seriously different from the kind you use to woo a woman. The way you talk to your girlfriend is very different from the way you talk to your mother or sister (I sincerely hope!).

In fact, I can’t help but wonder if this is a manifestation of Asperger’s Syndrome, or some other failure (or refusal) to understand social interaction. Regardless, it seems like a very clear example of a geek-specific sort of fallacy that — I’m starting to think — may underlie the various new systems that try to enforce single identities:

Figuring out the rules for social interaction is hard. One of the hardest parts is figuring out which rules apply in what contexts. Wouldn’t it be great to just have one context for everything?

No. No, it would not.

Most of us react with some consternation when our contexts collide unexpectedly — for example, meeting a co-worker (or boss!) at the supermarket (or worse, nightclub or bar!). Most of us don’t want our boss to see us drunk, or trying to pick people up. We don’t even really want to introduce our boss to our friends and have to try to integrate them into the conversation. Of course, being a startup founder, Mr. Widrich (like guys like Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page) doesn’t have a boss, and so doesn’t have to worry about this.

The combination of “boss privilege” and “desire of poorly-socialized people to not have to deal with so many social contexts” makes a powerful one-two punch, and it may go a long way toward explaining the recent spate of apps that try to enforce single identities. In the meantime, I’m happily using Seesmic as my mobile phone’s Twitter client, because it has excellent support for multiple accounts.

* I include Google and Facebook in this category. They still think they’re startups, they still think like startups, and they still have the startup culture and mindset, even if they’ve grown into ginormous corporations. ^back

An Addendum: If you think the desire for multiple identities and contexts is just “an old people issue”, as LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman recently described “privacy” in Davos, then ask any teenager: Would you like to hang out with your parents, in the same way you hang out with your friends? How about your teachers?

If you have any doubt what their reaction would be, you don’t know teenagers very well.

By the way, a word to Mr. Hoffman: Apparently the new common wisdom is that LinkedIn is also “for old people”, so you might want to rethink your company’s stance on privacy. And quit pissing off your own target market.

So I may be improving… but I’ve still got a way to go. If you’re another man in tech reading this, I tell you what: I’ll work on improving myself, and the tech field as a whole, if you’ll do the same.

It’s now the end of 2011. Looking back over my blog activity this year, I see 24 posts, with only two tagged “gender”. That marks a slight drop to 8.33%. What happened?

I’ve had one in the works for months now. (Maybe more than one; there’s more than enough material.) I started it back in the summer, when I heard about the death threats against Naomi Dunford. In quick succession, before I could marshal my thoughts and words enough, there was the incident where the atheist/skeptic community blew up over SkepChick’s very polite advice on not acting like a scary creep (including Richard Dawkins blatantly showing his ass in a way that also showed off his monumental privilege and the ignorance it’s brought him), followed by the call for a stop to misogynist trolling and the associated #MenCallMeThings hashtag on Twitter. (Yes, it’s still going, and yes, it’s still worth reading if you want to see what women put up with online.)

So, frankly… I just couldn’t keep up.

Because I don’t just want to write two or three opinionated paragraphs about these sorts of things. I want to be able to back up what I say. I know that when people try to call out the sexism (or homophobia, or racism) in the tech world, and point out the privilege and the irrational biases that a lot of these (straight, white) guys take for granted, the reactions are not exactly kind. So if I want to say, “Men in tech are mistreating women, and this needs to stop,” I need to have a shit-ton of evidence to back up the first half of the sentence.

That’s why, in my September, 2010 post “Blame the Men Who Are Behaving Badly“, I threw in one list that had nearly a dozen links to news items and blog posts and other items around the web, showing that the problem of sexism in the tech industry really is rampant. Pandemic, even. And then I followed that list up with four more links in the next three paragraphs.

I figured that if I got any comments to the effect of, “It’s just a few bad apples,” or “People are just whining about nothing,” I could ask what they thought of the content of said links… and probably make it clear that the questioner hadn’t actually bothered to read the supporting material.

But that bunch of links represented a substantial time outlay, in terms of going out and doing research. And finding the ones that supported my point the best (yes, there were probably four or five times as many pages that I clicked into, read for a bit, and decided it wasn’t quite a clear enough example).

And also: There was the time outlay to recover psychologically from all that muckraking. Because this research isn’t like researching, say, product recommendations for a good pair of wireless headphones, or the relative merits of two different books on Medieval calligraphy. Instead, it’s a deep dive into some really disgusting, asshole behavior. It’s shining a light into the dark crevices of the IT and FOSS worlds — and I don’t like what I see there. I don’t like knowing that it’s happening in my chosen professional field. I don’t like wondering if anyone thinks that, just because I’m male, I might condone — or worse, ever participate in! — any of this bullshit.

And I don’t like feeling that other members of my very own species are this venal, this pathetic, this detestable.

So after an hour of this kind of research, I’m beat for three or four hours. It’s a losing battle, time-wise.

I do what I can. I wrote: “I don’t like knowing that it’s happening in my chosen professional field.” Well, that’s why I keep writing and speaking out, in the hope that some day, it won’t happen any more. I wrote: “I don’t like wondering if anyone thinks that, just because I’m male, I might condone… any of this bullshit.” And that’s another reason why I speak up: Not just so people know where I stand, but also so that I can be an example… and maybe let some other folks know they’re not alone in wanting equality, and in deploring the behavior that keeps us from having it.

I do what I can. But “what I can” has not been enough, not yet.

Two minor oddities I should point out:

First off: I wrote an Ada Lovelace Day post about Amy Hoy. That entry was not tagged “gender” — because, honestly, it had nothing to do with gender in any social or political way. It was about Amy Hoy, and her achievements, and how she rocks in areas from coding to teaching to writing.

But my later Ada Lovelace Day post about Skud was gender-tagged — because Skud’s accomplishments include having started the Geek Feminism wiki, and having been a major fighter in the Google+ NymWars (which include a definite portion of unexamined male privilege on the part of the Google execs setting the policy). So gender was an integral part of that write-up.

The second oddity is: Once I post this, it will bring my numbers to 25, with three of them tagged “gender”. That raises my percentage to 12% — above the 10% bar I set for myself.

But I’m not giving myself any props for this; it’s a last-minute, kind of half-assed post. It isn’t even substantive content; it’s more of an apologia for why I haven’t written anything better, combined with some complaining about how research is hard, but doubly so on psychologically-fraught topics like people’s inhumanity to each other.

So I’m not excusing myself. I’m not letting myself off the hook. Look again at the title of this post.

Maybe I can do better next year.

The Ribbon is introduced in the Help file thus:

And if you’ve used previous versions of Word, you’ll wonder where the menus and toolbars have gone. That’s the beauty of the Ribbon. No longer do you have to wander through the maze of menus, submenus, and toolbars searching for what you want.

No, instead we now have to wander through a bewildering array of Ribbon tabs and drop-down menus. It’s as if the Office 2007 design team didn’t realize that everyone who’s been using Word for more than a year or two already knows their way around Word’s menu structure. It’s as if someone re-arranged my local neighborhood so that I “no longer have to wander through” the streets I already know. Indeed, SecretGeek finds the Ribbon so hard to find things in, he suggests that the Ribbon should include its own search feature so people can find features that are hidden among all those tabs!

It’s not just Microsoft. Check out Qwiki, “the information experience”. It is very clearly optimized to look cool in a demo. A demo, of course, is the ultimate in “aimed at new users” — it’s aimed at people who aren’t even users yet, but might become users. And user interface guru Bruce Tognazzini has been decrying the OS X Dock for years, partly on the basis that “It makes for a great demo, but not a great product.”

Interestingly, while I was prepping this post for publication, I became aware of Paul Miller’s article, “The Condescending UI”. It excoriates many of the very same problems in Apple’s and Microsoft’s recent OSes, saying that “these new tricks are horrible and offensive. They’re not only condescending and overwrought, they’re actually counter-functional.”

It’s as if usability tests and design reviews are all conducted with people who have never used the software in question before… and those who already have some domain knowledge are left out in the cold, forced to discard their knowledge every few years.

Are we really always newbies at everything? Or do developers even believe that we are? Or, heck, do marketers and product managers actually believe that we’re all still newbies? Or that there’s some vast, untapped market of prospective new users out there, just waiting for an even more dumbed-down interface before they’ll buy their first computer?

Just in case anyone out there believes any of those things, please, let me be the one to disabuse you of the notion. Anyone who doesn’t already use a computer is not ever going to. The only exception here is people under about 10 years old, and they’re not scared of unfamiliar UIs — to them, every UI is new, and they’re eager to learn new things. Stop dumbing things down, and stop sacrificing your long-time users’ skills in the name of changing things just for the hell of it.

The idea is that you work really hard for a few years, but then there’s a big payout when your company goes public. In those few years, you can make enough money to live in comfort for quite a while. Or so the story goes. Does it actually happen that way?

Let’s try a quick experiment: Think of all the people you know, or have known, who have worked at startups. If you’re like me, working as a web developer in the Bay Area, this means “think of all your past and present co-workers”, and maybe a fair number of your friends who have worked for startups… just not the same ones as you.

Okay, total that up. Got a general ballpark number, at least? Great.

Now, how many of those people have actually gotten the kind of “big payout” that lets them live in comfort? Even for just a few years?

When I run these numbers for my own circumstances and acquaintances, I come up with roughly two hundred friends and ex-co-workers who’ve “done the startup thing”. None of them have “struck it rich” to the point of being able to take even 5 years off from work. One friend made enough money to buy a house, but wasn’t able to keep up the payments, and wound up back on the rental market again after a few years; he never took more than maybe one year off from working.

That says to me that “striking it rich” as an employee in a startup is a less than 1-in-200 chance. And that’s over the past 15 years, which includes the first Dot-Com Boom. IPOs haven’t exactly been quite so common in the past few years. Even when they do occur, as with Groupon, they’re not the spectacular events that we saw with Netscape and Yahoo! back in the day.

And even if your company does have an IPO, it may not get you much. Consider the experiences of this commenter on TechCrunch, who pointed out that “[E]quity received after dilution is hardly the big exit most people read about. After two exits, the pay out was about equal to 1 bonus check received from big company.” A reply agreed that he’d “been wiped out (ie, diluted basically to bupkiss) three times in 10 years.”

I’m not saying “Don’t work for a startup.” I’m just saying that you shouldn’t count on “The Big Payout” as part of the upside, because it’s probably mythical. Sure, the chances are better than those of winning the lottery — but you give up a lot more to work at a startup than you do to play the lottery.

Addendum: Just as I was getting this article into final shape for publication, I ran across this post by none other than the aforementioned jwz, posted two days ago, making a very complementary point. The whole thing is worth reading in its entirety, but if you take only one thing from it, this is the “money paragraph”:

I did make a bunch of money by winning the Netscape Startup Lottery, it’s true. So did most of the early engineers. But the people who made 100x as much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept under their desk. If you look at a list of financially successful people from the software industry, I’ll bet you get a very different view of what kind of sleep habits and office hours are successful than the one presented here.

But really, read the whole thing. It’ll take you less than five minutes. Many of the comments are worth reading, too, particularly the one by Jet and the second reply to it, by Brandon.

Caller: “My computer is a fire risk.”

Me: “What makes you say that?”

Caller: “It gets hot. There are papers near it.”

Me: “If you’re worried about it, you can move the papers away.”

Caller: “I am moving the papers, but you must send someone to look at it.”

[More back-and-forth, in which caller reiterates that her computer is "a fire risk" and says the situation is urgent. A technician is dispatched, who eventually reports back:]

Technician: “You know that computer that was a fire risk?”

Me: “Yes?”

Technician: “She meant it was on fire.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard about such mistakes, either. Rinkworks’ “Computer Stupidities” sub-site has an entire page devoted to instances of computers smoking or catching fire (or people being worried that they might). One in particular involves a tech telling a college student over the phone, “Unplug the computer right now. Your paper is lost. Your floppy drive is lost. If you’re lucky the Mac will be OK. Unplug it now.” The student doggedly insists, “But I don’t want to lose my paper!” Then the tech hears someone in the background (presumably the student’s roommate) scream. Then the dorm fire alarm goes off.

For those who need to be told, I am willing to state, as a computer professional with 15 years of experience in hardware, software, system administration, troubleshooting, and repair:

If your computer or computing device ever emits smoke, sparks, or flame: Unplug it immediately. Do not bother with “proper shutdown procedure”; simply assume all data on it is completely hosed and start emergency fire-prevention procedures. Unplug its power. If it’s a laptop, also yank out its battery. If signs of combustion continue, use a fire extinguisher or water, as appropriate.

Unplugging it means there’s no more electrical power going to it. Many times, that’s enough to kill the combustion right there — if you were quick about it, the fire may go out on its own at this point. If it doesn’t, it is at least no longer an electrical fire. That means if you haven’t got an ABC fire extinguisher handy, you can still just throw water on the thing, without risking electrocution.

Once it’s been smoking or sparking, the device is ruined anyway. Understand that all your data is gone. (This is why it’s important to have complete, current backups.) The important thing to do is to make sure the fire doesn’t spread. Don’t panic, and don’t waste any time trying to shut down carefully or in the usual manner — that will just prolong the fire.

Remember, where computing devices are concerned, if it smokes, it is toast. Or it is fried; pick whichever image works better for you. If you let it keep running once it’s on fire, all you’re doing is putting yourself at risk. Don’t do it.

And then we hit the Aughts, and for nine long years, we had to start all our year-names with “two thousand…”. By 2006, we were pretty well habituated to it, and I started hearing people project that format onto later years: “two thousand fifty-five” and whatnot.

But starting at the beginning of last year, none of this was necessary any more. We can drop the laborious excess of “two thousand” in favor of just “twenty”. Really, nobody will have any trouble understanding you when you say this is “twenty-eleven”.

(I know, this is not exactly a pressing issue. But it bugs me. Like many geeks, seeing excess effort expended is a pet peeve, even when I’m not the one expending it.)

While we’re at it, there are a couple of TLAs in the tech world that really can and should be said as acronyms, without having to be spelled out every time.

FAQ is “fack”. It rhymes with Iraq. If someone asks you lots of them in a rapid-fire manner, it’s a FAQ attack. If you’re into goth fashion, you may like the Dye It Black FAQ — doesn’t work so well if you spell out the last word, does it?

And why does anyone pronounce APIs as “ay pee eyes” when they could just say “appies”? Honestly, I always thought it was pronounced “appies”, until a co-worker got confused by it. I was surprised to hear that most techies actually take the excess time to spell out “ay pee eye” — nobody ever bothers to spell out “en ay ess ay” or “ay jay ay ecks”, why should the just-as-pronounceable API be any different?

She has been, or is currently, a contributor to projects ranging from Eureka to Perl to Xen to HTML::Mason.

Way back in 2007, I saw that a company named Metaweb was looking for coders for a project called Freebase. Tim O’Reilly said the Metaweb people were “building new synapses for the global brain” and the project looked cool as hell. I looked at their hiring criteria, and was scared off by the problem that involved writing some code to populate a directed graph without allowing closed cycles to form. I wish I’d at least tried; maybe I might have gotten hired.

In which case, I could have met Skud when she started working there, later in 2007. And now maybe I’d have an “I know Skud” button. Regardless, I was totally unsurprised to learn, recently, that Skud had worked at Metaweb. She’s got the kind of talent and skill that I expect would make her a natural there. (And I confess to a certain bit of envy, that she got to work on such a cool project.)

But that’s not all. She also founded the Geek Feminism wiki and built it up into the self-sustaining thing it is now. That wiki has been an invaluable resource in various things I’ve needed to write, and the Who is harmed by a “Real Names” policy? page was a superlative argument in the NymWars discussion on Google+ — back when I was still there.

Of course, Skud herself was also a major player in NymWars. Aside from writing about her experience, and noting when Google started gagging its own employees, she also performed an informal survey of people suspended from Google+, thus providing some solid data to add to the discussion.

And now she’s moving into music, which may take her outside the Ada Lovelace Day’s “women in STEM” boundaries… but when I think of women in tech, Skud is still one of the biggest names that comes to my mind.

We’re currently moving away from paper printing, replacing physical books with e‑books and text readers. We need to look at what we’re giving up in the process.

Lev Grossman recently wrote an article for the New York Times‘s Sunday Book Review, “From Scroll to Screen”. In it, he points out how our current book format, the codex (multiple pages bound in a rectangular shape between two covers) took over from the scroll (a single long sheet of paper wrapped around a rod or roller). He cites easy random access as the codex’s chief benefit, and an absolutely critical one.

We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e‑books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It’s no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That’s the kind of reading you do in an e‑book.

Not to use too much of Grossman’s text, but another section near the end of his essay points out a critical aspect of the sacrifice we’re making as we move toward e‑books:

[I]f we stop reading on paper, we should keep in mind what we’re sacrificing: that nonlinear experience, which is unique to the codex. You don’t get it from any other medium — not movies, or TV, or music or video games. The codex won out over the scroll because it did what good technologies are supposed to do: It gave readers a power they never had before, power over the flow of their own reading experience.

Except that’s not the only sacrifice involved. That’s simply the technological, UX sacrifice — but we’re also making a societal sacrifice, and it’s one that may be even worse. We’re sacrificing a huge number of readers, many of whom become writers and boosters of text as a mode of communication.

Recently, Seanan McGuire wrote “Across the Digital Divide”, in which she talks about what it’s like to be poor, and about how the current (official, U.S. government) measures of poverty are based on what was available in 1955. Noting that computers and e‑book readers didn’t exist then, and so aren’t even noticed in modern-day poverty measurements, she then unleashes her main point:

[E]very time a discussion of ebooks turns, seemingly inevitably, to “Print is dead, traditional publishing is dead, all smart authors should be bailing to the brave new electronic frontier,” what I hear, however unintentionally, is “Poor people don’t deserve to read.”

She notes that this isn’t due to malice; it’s just hard for those of us with lots of money and bandwidth to see across the divide that (at least) 1 in 5 Americans are still on the downside of. But she also points out that seemingly-simple “remedies” like a low-cost e-reader program for poor kids, or even giving them away free, will not solve the problem. That doesn’t address concerns ranging from bandwidth to theft.

Even if we assume that print is about to die, that it is inevitable and the most we can do is make our peace with the oncoming new technology, there are still things we can and must do to ensure that it doesn’t impoverish our society by taking literate expression with it. As McGuire says:

We need paper books to endure. Every one of us, if we can log onto this site and look at this entry, is a “have” from the perspective of a kid living in an apartment with cockroaches in the walls and junkies in the unit beneath them. A lot of the time, the arguments about the coming ebook revolution forget that the “have nots” also exist, and that we need to take care of them. (emphasis in original)

Jennifer Brozek’s “Poverty and Books” covers a lot of the same territory, describing how she got her love of reading and words from library books and second- and third-hand books. Note that Ms. Brozek is now an award-winning author and editor, and like Ms. McGuire, is a rising talent in the genre fiction scene. If we ignore their advice, we risk throwing away 20% — or more — of the next generation of excellent writers.

That’s not a price I want to pay.

Finally, Dreamwidth user Elf points out that the social contract being promoted by e‑book publishers is essentially and profoundly selfish. In “The Selfishness of Ebooks”, she tells a tale that she tags as “potentially triggery for bibliophiles”, which turned out to be a good warning in my (bibliophilic) opinion. Her tale involves something you can mouse over to read, but don’t say you haven’t been warned – stripped of the gruesome details, it involves someone who would habitually destroy books while reading them, obliterating each page as soon as he’d read it. Elf sees a parallel with e‑book publishers’ attempts to ensure that we never, ever share our books with others — we might as well destroy them completely once we’re done with them.

Read it. Read it again if you want. Download & read it later, on a different device. But don’t pass it on. As soon as you’re done with it — forever-and-truly done, never going to read that book again (and really, how many times am I going to re-read Harlequin romances)… destroy it. Delete that file, blank that space on the memory card. (emphasis in original)

Elf’s basic point, and it’s one I can’t find any flaw in, is: “Books are social. Ebooks are selfish.”

In the online version of Little Brother, in the section called, “The Copyright Thing”, Cory Doctorow writes: “I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, “Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free — because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash.” Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they’d discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift.” Again, books are social: We don’t just read them, we also want to share them with others.

E‑books and readers have many wonderful features, from easily-enlargeable text for people with poor eyesight to a lightweight form factor that makes it so people with weak wrists or arthritis can absorb the latest Neal Stephenson tome without struggling with a door-stopping hardback edition. Oh, and of course it’s easier to Ctrl‑F the thing to find text you’re specifically looking for.

But what are we giving up? And, more importantly, is there any reason why we have to give it up? Or are we just getting herded along by circumstances, and forgetting to actually look at where we’re going, and exert some decision-making willpower of our own?

We have the power to decide what kind of future we want. But we have to stop and think long enough to use it. McGuire and Elf have been doing some thinking, and the points they make are important ones.

At that point, pronounceability falls apart, because their logo bills them as ExchB. How the heck do you say that? “Ecks-ch-bee” is the best I can think of, and that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. (Note that I’ve studied Russian, and so I consider words like znakomstvo only moderately difficult to pronounce.)

This BetaBeat story also calls them ExchB, and says in part: “‘ExchB customers can walk up to any of over 15,000 locations nationwide and make a cash deposit at any Chase or Wells Fargo branch,’ president David Sterry wrote last week.” No kidding he wrote it; if he’d tried to say it, I’m not sure what would have happened.

If anyone can tell me how to pronounce this place’s name, I’d be quite interested. I don’t mean to slag on them too much, but I’m honestly curious how their employees refer to their company in casual conversation.