Lately I haven’t been posting as much on this blog. My professional responsibilities have shifted, and much as I still love the issues of file formats, I don’t have as much time to give attention to them. There are still general programming issues that are worth blogging about, though, and I’ll occasionally address these issues here, hopefully along with occasional file format posts.
This weekend I borrowed a book from the company library called Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja. It’s a better book than I expected from the title.
In an inspired error, the cover shows not a ninja but a samurai, with colorful armor, a banner, and a long sword. A ninja is a hit-and-run assassin; he shows up out of nowhere, attacks, and vanishes. A samurai is a dedicated soldier, the Japanese equivalent of a knight, and he follows a code of honor. The software development world has too many ninjas. The samurai is a better, if not ideal, model.
From the title I was expecting a cookbook, one of the many books that provide formulas to follow but no deep understanding. Instead, Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja is about understanding the language. Such books are even rarer for JavaScript than for most programming languages. I’d always tended to think of JavaScript as a half-baked derivative of Java, one where features such as classes, packages, and inheritance were left out to cut it down to a scripting language. This book, though, shows that it’s really quite a different language, a very powerful one in its own right. I still think the language has serious problems, the biggest being lack of standardization, but reading through the book, I’m learning how to think in JavaScript’s terms and to make use of features which other languages don’t have.
It’s not the language I want to talk about here, though; it’s the approach to any language or software technology. Too many programmers don’t have any deep understanding of their craft; they just have a bag of tools that they expect to solve problems for them. The worst can’t do much more than run a Web search for the code they need or beg on Stack Overflow for a solution to their problem. Once I actually had to fix some PHP that consultants from a big-name company had pasted from a website and didn’t know how to adapt to the problem at hand — and I don’t even know PHP! Those are your ninjas.
Even the samurai isn’t a great metaphor. They were a part of Japan’s entrenched feudal culture, and their opposition to capitalism promoted the warlike mindset that culminated in Japan’s role in World War II. Our metaphors should be based on creativity, not war and violence. We should think of ourselves as architects, sculptors, artists. We learn a craft and master the tools that go into it. There’s a real psychological affinity; I know a lot more software developers who are skilled musicians than are skilled fighters.
When I see a book called Secrets of the JavaScript Artist, then I’ll be pleased.
Update: I just noticed that the book itself says: “Ninjas were chosen for their martial arts skills rather than for their social standing or education. Dressed in black and with their faces covered, they were sent on missions alone or in small groups to attack the enemy with subterfuge and stealth, using any tactics to assure success; their only code was one of secrecy.” Just what you want in a programmer, right?
It’s been too long since I’ve had a special discount on FTL. For all of June, you can get 
In honor of the day, I’m offering 
Almost all the published books on digital preservation are academic writing for a very limited audience. My own 
So far there isn’t, as far as I know, a book to promote and explain digital preservation to people who understand computers but aren’t part of the library and archiving world. That’s where I’m aiming this book. If you look at the Library of Congress’s 
Mad File Format Science 
Cookbooks vs. learning books
A contract lead got me to try learning more about a technology which the client needs. Working from an e-book which I already had, I soon was thinking that it’s a really confused, ad hoc library. But then I remembered having this feeling before, when the problem was really the book. I looked for websites on the software and found one that explained it much better. The e-book had a lot of errors, using JavaScript terminology incorrectly and its own terminology inconsistently.
A feeling came over me, the same horrified realization the translator of To Serve Man had: “It’s a cookbook!” It wasn’t designed to let you learn how the software works, but to get you turning out code as quickly as possible. There are too many of these books, designed for developers who think that understanding the concepts is a waste of time. Or maybe the fault belongs less to the developers than to managers who want results immediately.
A book that introduces a programming language or API needs to start with the lay of the land. What are its basic concepts? How is it different from other approaches? It has to get the terminology straight. If it has functions, objects, classes, properties, and attributes, make it clear what each one is. There should be examples from the start, so you aren’t teaching arid theory, but you need to follow up with an explanation.
If you’re writing an introduction to Java, your “Hello world” example probably has a class, a main() function, and some code to write to System.out. You should at least introduce the concepts of classes, functions, and importing. That’s not the place to give all the details; the best way to teach a new idea is to give a simple version at first, then come back in more depth later. But if all you say is “Compile and run this code, and look, you’ve got output!” then you aren’t doing your job. You need to present the basic ideas simply and clearly, promise more information later, and keep the promise.
Don’t jump into complicated boilerplate before you’ve covered the elements it’s made of. The point of the examples should be to teach the reader how to use the technology, not to provide recipes for specific problems. The problem the developer has to solve is rarely going to be the one in the book. They can tinker with the examples until they fit their own problem, not really understanding them, but that usually results in complicated, inefficient, unmaintainable code.
Expert developers “steal” code too, but we know how it works, so we can take it apart and put it back together in a way that really suits the problem. The books we can learn from are the ones that put the “how it works” first. Cookbooks are useful too, but we need them after we’ve learned the tech, not when we’re trying to figure it out.
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