What if there had been no Civil War?

Alternate histories are a well-known genre of fiction, with "What if the South had won the Civil War" a common topic of speculation.

This was on my mind lately because I live in Alabama and the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War was marked just a few days ago.

I started wondering, though, not what if the South had won, but suppose there had been no Civil War. That when the Southern states began to secede, Lincoln and the Federal government had instead said: We don't like it, we think you're wrong, but we're not going to go to war over it.

What kind of alternate history would this country, these countries, and the world, have seen?

First, we can take as a given that slavery would have continued through the 1860s and '70s. Following these decades, between the Abolitionist movement and the mechanization of agriculture (which drastically reduced the amount of manual labor needed for farming in the predominantly agricultural South), slavery might well have become, well, to put it bluntly, no longer cost-effective.

The following decades of alternate history are ripe with story lines:

• Suppose slavery had been maintained into the 20th century, perhaps then a Civil War did still eventually occur, say in 1905. And with increased weaponry and mechanization, might well have been even more bloody and destructive to North and South.
• If slavery didn't end as a result of later civil war, did it end abruptly, or was it phased out? How does a country and its people manage something like this? Surely more than the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, even if it doesn't approach the full intensity of a civil war. Or maybe it did and happened as a result of a full-scale revolution.
  
• Or at some point in the late 1800s slavery was abolished, but rather than "freedom", the Confederate States of America (CSA) becomes an apartheid state, not unlike South Africa, and perhaps persists well into the 20th century, like South Africa. Perhaps the two nations, both having eventually become pariah states, would have allied out of necessity and common culture.
• How much would the remaining USA's economic and technological growth be stunted?
• Would there have been ongoing friction with the occasional flareup between the two countries, similar to Israel and its neighbors in the Middle East? Would there have been a "Cold War" of sorts? What about immigration issues, legal and illegal, between an industrialized USA and an agricultural CSA?
  
• How would the World Wars have been affected without the unified economic might of the USA? Given that the Civil War affected foreign nations to some degree large or small, what sort of effect on other nations would a separate USA and CSA have had in the late 1800s and into the early 1900s? Would Germany in WW1 have sought alliance with the CSA against the USA, as they attempted with Mexico? That's assuming that something resembling WW1 even still occurred.
• What, if any, effect would a separate USA and CSA have had on the establishment of the Soviet Union? Any? What about the Cold War? The space program? Would the Soviets simply have taken over Europe piecemeal, with no military bulwark to oppose them? Is this what drives the USA and CSA to rejoin into a single United Confederated States of America?

I can't write fiction worth a flip, so...just thinking...

Defensive programming: Fortran, Ada, C++, Java, ???

I've worked in the defense software industry for over 25 years, and lately I've been thinking about programming languages.

I'm concerned.

Now first off, the vast majority of defense systems take a long time to develop and deploy. No small part of that is because of what these systems are intended to do, which is to directly or indirectly destroy an opponent's equipment, infrastructure, and people, and prevent their weaponry from doing the same to you.

This is something you want to get right, and so a great deal of care is warranted.

There are perils endemic to a long, drawn-out, (justifiably) risk-averse development process. Such as working with and deploying old technology, requirements creep, bureaucracy, hierarchies of reviews and sign-offs, and expending lots of effort on a multitude of specification and management tasks and documents, far too few of which really have much to do with actually putting a weapon system in the field.

There's a number of issues that could be gone into about this industry and its development practices, but as a software guy, I want to focus on programming, specifically the issue of the succession of defense software implementation languages.

My characterization of programming language succession within the defense software industry from the early 80s to the present is that this industry lags about 10 years or so behind commercial practices. Sure, there are pockets of development that are concurrent with commercial development, but a programming language doesn't achieve widespread use--which means used on major program starts and upgrades--on DOD (Department of Defense) projects until at least ten years after its use is widespread in the commercial software industry. And the defense industry is pretty cocooned when it comes to programming language practices, i.e. for the most part developers and technical leads don't really realize just how far behind they are. (One software architect expressed shock when I told him that Perl was not considered one of the hottest technologies in software development, and the days when it was cool and leading edge to program in Perl were now many years in the past. Another co-worker was equally surprised to hear that Java is now often considered the language you have to program in for work.)

I entered the industry just when the defense industry was trying a new approach, at that time trying to deal with a proliferation of industry and system-specific programming languages (Fortran, JOVIAL, CMS-2, and numerous assembly languages). The Ada programming language was the result of a language competition and it was subsequently mandated for all defense system starts and major upgrades. For a variety of reasons, mostly involving politics, organizational resistance, and greed, the initiative failed. There were a few technical flaws in the language, but it was quite capable of meeting defense software requirements at the time (and did and does so in deployed systems today), but by the time the flaws and the greed were dealt with, the window of opportunity for mainstream acceptance of Ada had passed.

Commercial software development, which was starting to become the driver of computer technology innovation (rather than the military) was driving towards C and then C++ at this time, and with the Commercial Off-The-Shelf "COTS Initiative" and "best industry practices" becoming defense industry focuses, the defense industry began looking to the commercial world for its software development technologies.

By the mid-90s many (but not all :-) defense programmers were becoming disdainful of Ada, and it was not uncommon to hear laments about not being able to have C++ on one's resume.

I had the opportunity in the mid-90s to do a clean-sheet redesign of a poorly-designed and implemented command & control subsystem. It had been implemented in Ada, but the developers were skeptical of the language, and barred the use of features of the language that they didn't understand, sometimes very basic features (like subtyping, for those of you familiar with Ada). I had no such qualms, the team now supporting the system was well-versed in Ada (with only one of the original developers remaining), and so the redesign took advantage of Ada's strengths and capabilities, rather than fearing them.

My biggest obstacles were two system engineers, who were adamant that the reimplementation should be done in C++. One even went so far as to surreptitiously add a slide to my presentation the night before a customer review stating that while we were reimplementing in Ada now, the long term plan was to move to C++. It was not, and I had to explain this in front of the customer, because it was too late to pull the slides. (Still pissed about that? Why yes, I'm soaking in it.) These two were not in my management chain, from whom I had full confidence, but they lobbied the Chief Engineer to try to get him to mandate a language change, to no avail, and to his credit.

The point of this whole little rant of mine on this particular career event is what one of those "engineer's" put forth as a primary justification to use C++:

"C++ is where the market is going."

How silly does that sound today? Yes, there's a lot of C++ around, now mostly considered legacy stuff, and my sense is that young programmers seem to hold C++ with about the same disdain that defense programmers had for Ada in the mid-90s. The market changes, and committing large, long-lived system development to "where the market is going", as if that's where it's going to settle at for all time, is ridiculously naive and short-sighted.

Java is now all the rage in the defense software development industry, and while it is probably still the most widely used programming language for commercial software development, there's definitely the sense that it has passed its prime and has begun to wane in mindshare and interest. The reasons why aren't my point, my point is that it's hot in defense, while outside of that industry Java is now "your father's programming language" from 15 years ago.

There's been debate then about what "the next big programming language" is going to be. Javascript? Python? C#? Some other dark horse language (Erlang?) or some new up-and-comer?

I don't know, and that's the part that bothers me about where the defense software industry is heading.

The programming language that's grabbing the commercial industry now I would be expecting to be dominating defense software development in about 10 or 15 years. And, well, first off I don't perceive a dominating candidate yet, and the candidates that I do see lack an aspect I consider fundamental to safety- and mission-critical software systems.

That aspect is an intentional, well thought out, unifying principle, ideally envisioned by an individual or small team of language designers.

Ada was explicitly designed for safety-critical systems and was designed around a "type model". The original version was designed by Jean Ichbiah, and the first and only major revision of the language (Ada 95) was done by Tucker Taft. (Subsequent enhancements are essentially incrementally improving its capabilities.)

C is a "portable assembly language", designed by Kernighan & Ritchie.

While I think C++ is inappropriate for critical software outside of the hands of experts, it was consciously designed by Bjarne Stroustrop as "C with classes".

And I feel that the fundamental feature of James Gosling's Java is that it is designed around the "interface" concept and construct.

I don't get any sense of this kind of intentional, unified, design from the currently up-and-coming languages; they exist to make string handling easier, or programming easier, or Web development easier. That's all great, but is that foundation industrial strength enough that you'd trust it to guide and target a missile moving at Mach 2 that has to take out an incoming nuke?

Like I said at the beginning, I'm concerned. Maybe I'm just being a Luddite here, and VMs and programming language refinements will meet the requirements of the warfighter by the time the defense industry moves past Java.

There's just nothing jumping out at me right now, and given the iconoclasm and cocooning of defense software industry programmers, I am concerned about "where the market is going."

Why Science is Better Than Magic and Movies

I don't really care for those "Making of..." and "How'd they do that?" type of shows and DVD extras. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good magic show and I really like movies, but I find the behind-the-scenes look always ends up detracting from my enjoyment of the original show. So I avoid them.

Now I know "magic" is simply misdirection, deception, and sleight of hand; and movies are rarely shot in the sequence that they appear on the screen, and that film techniques and "tricks" are used to convey a story in a particular way. I deeply appreciate the craft of magicians/illusionists and filmmakers that enable them to entertain me, and, sometimes, to give me new things to think about.

But underneath both...it's all contrivance (excepting documentaries for the most part).

I find that aspect saddening, it's not that I'd hoped that any of this was true, I know what I'm getting into, to me it's just a melancholy aspect of these constructions. So that's why I avoid seeking out any knowledge of what goes on under the surface, and simply rest in my cocoon of delusion :-)

But, when it comes to science, it's a whole different story.

Pick any natural phenomenon--blue sky, planetary and electron orbits, genetic mutation, and so on--and figure out what's going on beneath the surface. You won't find any contrivances or fakery, the higher level observation and behavior is invariably a natural outcome of the underlying processes and participants consistently interacting with one another. Then analyze any of the discovered processes and participants, and you'll find the same thing--causation and consistency. As you go down the stack, analyzing, identifying, and understanding the contributors, the veracity of operation stays the same all the way down (until you hit quantum physics, but there's a whole lot of meandering you can do along your trip there :-).

This is a big part of why science and the scientific process interests and excites me, and I gain a great deal of satisfaction from the act of learning about the natural world (and the universe). There's no contrivance there, it's all honest chemistry/physics/biology, and the story that is uncovered is honest, without artifice, immersive, and energizing.

Even better than a good movie.

All Your Ancestors Survived "at least long enough"

(Since Steve Yegge's back blogging again, it kicked me just enough to take another crack at it :-)

This is in the "ridiculously and totally obvious" department, but still quite astounding when you really think about it.

Every single one of your ancestors lived long enough to either father a child or birth a child. Two parents, four grandparents, eight great-gandparents, sixteen..., etc. Every ancestor of yours, across the centuries and millenia parented a child.

Despite famine, disease, accident, war and every other depredation throughout history that killed off humans, your and my ancestors all survived "long enough".

The human race is tough.

'bama Snows

North Alabama normally doesn't get too much snow. This one has been different, there's been the most snow I've seen since moving down here almost ten years ago.

So a little over a week ago we got about 2 inches of snow in less than 2 hours. No big deal for where I grew up, but impressive here. Enjoy...














The trail through the woods.














Rain, snow, and time have been working on this for centuries.














Look close, there's a couple fossilized crinoid stems visible here, can you spot them?














Cactus? In Alabama? With snow?














Behind the ice. Scale can be deceiving, the overhang is only about 18" above the ground. (Ignore the cactus and the hand holding it aside :-)














Just a boulder stacked on a rock -- again with the eons of erosion.














There are no permanent streams on the hill behind my home, but a lot of "wet springs" that run off into gulleys, some of which can really get roaring during a heavy rain. Here, though, just frozen in place.

Symmetries on a Trike

My neighbor recently bought one of these:












He probably is literally the only one in the county that owns a Thoroughbred Stallion. I can only imagine the DMV person's response when he went in and said he needed to register his thoroughbred stallion.

Then yesterday I was picking up some oil for my 4-wheeler at a local power sports dealer and saw this on the showroom floor:













That's a Can Am Spyder Roadster.

Ehhh, neither of these are really my thing. Though I grant they're eye catching.

What-a-do, everyone...

This just makes me happy:

The Futility of Eclipse Based Development

I'm a fan of Eclipse when it comes to Java programming -- I've never had a bad experience with it. I'm sure this is due in no small part to the fact that Eclipse is written in Java, and was initially targeted for Java development. ACM Queue magazine (which I highly recommend), when it still did dead tree distribution, had a regular feature called "What's On Your Hard Drive?" In it developer's would briefly list and comment on the development tools they loved, and those they hated. Eclipse would show up on both lists. At the time I'd used Eclipse only for Java development, and had only positive experiences, and so couldn't understand how a developer could find Eclipse so onerous as to be a tool they hated. Heh, not so mysterious any more...

When it comes to utilizing an Eclipse plugin-based application for doing pretty much anything other than Java, I invariably find it monumentally frustrating and soul draining. I'm not exaggerating.

I've used Eclipse-based applications for XML, XSL, modeling, diagramming, report generation, etc. Eclipse is ridiculously brittle--getting a consistent installation of all the application's required plug-ins is so problematic that Eclipse distributions are provided as pre-built bundles so that you can at least have a fighting chance to just get something started. Upgrading to newer versions of plug-ins is a recipe for breakage, and Eclipse is nearly impenetrable when it comes to figuring the cause and fix of any non-trivial problem that arises.

Yet at exhibits you'll see these whiz bang demos of powerful, productivity-enhancing Eclipse plug-in and Rich Client Platform based applications. Makes you just want to go get them and start producing. There's so much power in that platform, and here you're seeing that power being harnessed right in front of your eyes, so what is the problem??

I read an article about "Wolfram Alpha and Hubristic User Interfaces" that concisely makes a point about the the "hubristic UI" of Wolfram Alpha, and that applies equally well to Eclipse:

The actual developers (a) have enormous experience with the hubristic UI, (b) have enormous patience with its flaws, and (c) most important, know how it actually works. So their internal model can be, and typically is, orders of magnitude better than that of any naive user. So the product actually seems to work for them, and does.

I'm not interested in becoming an Eclipse developer, or a plug-in developer. I'm looking for tools to help me do my job. Occasionally I'll still get seduced by the functionality of an Eclipse plug-in and think that may be this time it will be different, and it'll just work as advertised to the point that the platform "disappears" into the background and all I'll need to concern myself with is the task I'm trying to accomplish.

Still getting burned.

Every time.

98% of Human Irrationality Explained

"Why are they doing 'X'?"

"Because they think it causes 'Y'."

"Does it?"

"No."

"Then why do they do it?"

"Because they think it does."

Democratic Scandals vs Republican Scandals

I noticed some time ago that there was a distinction in the nature of the scandals American politicians tended to get caught up in that seemed to depend on their party affiliation.

Generally speaking, Democrats have economic fairness as one of their foundational issues. There's a lot of focus on poverty, the minimum wage, unions, the "safety net", and so on.

And so what's often the nature of their scandals? Money-oriented. They take bribes, neglect to pay their own taxes, or don't pay the required taxes for their hired help.

Republicans of course are the "family values" party, with the big emphasis on the moral issues. (You can see this coming, can't you... :-)

Their scandals? Larry Craig, Mark Foley, David Vitter, Ted Haggard, and today's latest addition: conservative GOP governor and (now former) prospective presidential candidate Mark Sanford of South Carolina.

Interesting, eh? Like I said, this is just a general observation, it's easy to find Democrats in sex scandals, and Republicans in financial ones, but there just seems to be a party-dependent bias in the nature of scandals.

Those principles to which a party most strongly clings seem to also be the ones on which their weaker members seem most likely to stumble.