Category: Book Reviews

Reviews of books featuring a summary of the book and links to related material

Book review: Software Design Decoded by Marian Petre and André van der Hoek

66-ways-expertsSoftware Design Decoded: 66 Ways Experts Think by Marian Petre and André van der Hoek is my next read.

I picked it up as a recommendation from The Programmer’s Brain by Felienne Hermans. It is an odd little book, something like A6 format with 66 pages containing a short paragraph or two on the behaviours of experts in software design. Each page dedicated to a single thought. There are sketches scattered liberally though the book by Yen Quach who is credited in the author biographies.

Although it does not have a contents page or index, Software Design Decoded is divided into "chapters":

  • Experts keep it simple
  • Experts collaborate
  • Expers borrow
  • Experts break rules
  • Experts sketch
  • Experts work with uncertainty
  • Experts are not afraid
  • Experts iterate
  • Experts test
  • Experts reflect
  • Experts keep going

I found this book reassuring as much as anything, and it also gave me some things to think about. Reassuring because it turns out I share habits with expert in software design, which must be a start to being an expert! I write quite a lot of software (for data analysis and data builds) but design tends to come as an afterthought.

I think the things I already do are to build something even if it isn’t the final form, I was interested in the comment about avoiding over-generalisation. The element I am missing here is to learn from this initial form and build something better (potentially discarding what I’ve already done). I also do a fair bit of testing, although in this book testing is wider than just software unit tests or even integration tests, it is about testing preconceptions and testing with the user.

I also liked the comment on focusing on the needs of the key stakeholders where the key stakeholders are the end users, this is a recurring theme – that the end users are the key focus, and them using the product/software are when the job is done.

Always learning gets a recommendation as well as not being afraid to use things in manners other than that intended.

I was interested to note the comments on experts forever sketching since it is something I scarcely do, sometimes a write sequences of tricky bits of code with the odd arrow. I remember learning how to draw flow charts in the late seventies but rarely use the skill (certainly not with all the proper symbols). Software Design Decoded is slightly contradictory on this, in one place experts sketch abstractly as an aid to thought with the sketches meaningless beyond the moment, and in another the sketches are kept for reference later and hence clear and well-labelled.

Notation also gets a couple of mentioned, I take this as a formalised system for naming things – something popular with physicists where the right notation is the difference between a page of formulae and a single line. I’m not really aware of using this in my own practice. Despite repeated attempts at object-oriented design I still tend to be quite "procedural".

I’m still in the "learning" phase of collaboration, for the first time in a while I’m working on code with other people (and it is a bit of a shock for all concerned), I still can’t abide by meetings but the experts can’t abide some of them (the ones with no direction).

I found this a bit of a "feel good" book, I share at least some of the habits of software design experts! I probably wouldn’t buy it for a personal read but if you have a coffee table in your software company this book would fit right in.

Book review: Ask a historian by Greg Jenner

ask_a_historianAsk a historian by Greg Jenner is a bit of a change of tack for me. It is a list of 50 questions to a historian, Greg Jenner. Each answer is conversational in style, a couple of thousand words at most, pitched at a level that my fairly bright 10 year old would understand although the content is such that I would be judicious in just sharing it with him. Jenner works on the TV series Horrible Histories which, amongst other things, puts historical incidents to modern pop tunes. It is highly educational and a firm favourite for all ages in our household!

Fifty questions is more than I can review individual, so I will simply outline the style of the questioning and highlight some of my favourites. They are divided into 12 thematic chapters with 4 or 5 questions in each chapter.

Chapter 1 – Fact or Fiction

2 – Is it true they put a dead pope on trial? Yes, it is true, a subsequent pope dug him up in order to do this! The papacy was a fairly wild institution particularly in the 9th century AD with a total of 24 popes in the period 896-904. Contrasting with a total of 5 in my 50 year life. The 9th century popes did not die of natural causes, their successors helped them along the way.

3 – Atlantis proves aliens are real? – There questions that make Jenner angry (not at the questioner), this is one of them. Jenner’s concern is two-fold on this, the first is the implication that non-Europeans couldn’t possibly have done all of these magnificent things – it must have been aliens – which is rather insulting. Secondly, the alien conspiracy theories often have their roots in Nazism.

Chapter 2 – Origins and Firsts

6 – When was the first Monday? No historian likes to be pinned down on a "first" but the origins of the days of the week go back a long way. There is some evidence that the Babylonians used a seven day cycle, it fits neatly into the Lunar month, but the seven day week was definitely in place by 2,500 years ago with the Jewish religion celebrating a Sabbath every seven days. There were other options, the ancient Egyptians celebrating a ten day week Etruscans and early Romans following an 8 days week (labelled with letters A to H).  

8 – When did birthdays start being celebrated? It is comforting to realise that we’ve been celebrating our birthdays for at least 2500 years. A birthday party invitation was found at Vindolanda, a Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall.

Chapter 4 – Food

15 – How old is curry? I found it interesting that the heat we most associate with curry, produced by chillies, is the result of an import from South America. Also it is a bit chastening that "curry" is largely an invention of the British, a bastardisation of  a very diverse Indian cuisine.

Chapter 5 – Historiography

19 – Who names historical periods? This turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question, historians don’t necessarily agree on the extents of a period (like the Long Eighteenth Century), periods do not neatly delineate time – they overlap, and vary across the world. Periods like "Victorian" are ridiculously large and encompass massive changes in social and economic conditions. Finally, the inhabitants of a period may be unhappy with where they have been placed – the Tudors would not have liked being called Tudors.

Chapter 6 – Animals & Nature

23 – When did we start keeping hamsters as pets? All I can say on this question is that hamsters are creatures full of rage.

Chapter 11 – Language & Communications

45 – Where names for places in other languages come from? I liked this question, in large part because I remember travelling out of Pisa on a bus wondering why I’d never heard of the obviously large city of Firenze which I kept seeing on signs (it is the city I know as Florence). The names locals give places are endonyms and those that foreigners provide are exonyms. In the days of rapid and communication, essentially since the beginning of the 19th century there has been a tendency for exonyms and endonyms to be one and the same, give or take a bit of pronunciation. Bécs is the Hungarian name for Viennna, known as Wien by the Austrians. Vienna was at the border of the Magyar empire, and basically they called it "gateway". 

Chapter 12 – History in Pop Culture

49 – Why do we care so much about the Tudors? I liked this question because it hints at something I have seen elsewhere about Newton, and it occurs regarding Anne Boleyn’s purported 3rd nipple in an earlier question in this book. These stories were promoted by supporters or opponents in the years after a dynasty or person had died because they supported a preferred narrative and their influence persists for centuries.

The book finishes with a rather nicely crafted Recommended Reading section, and perhaps this is the point of the book – not as an end in itself but an introduction to a range of books for a more in depth view. Ask a historian would be an excellent holiday read, I must admit I prefer something more substantial on a single subject.

Book review: The Programmer’s Brain by Felienne Hermans

programmers_brainI picked up The Programmer’s Brain by Felienne Hermans, as a result of a thread on Twitter. I’ve been following Hermans for quite a while, and knew the areas of computer science she worked in but my interest in Programmer’s Brain was stimulated by a lengthy thread she posted over the Christmas break.

The book is based around the idea of the brain as having long term (LTM), short term (STM) and working memory and how these different sorts of memory come into play in programming tasks, how we can improve our memories, and how we can write code that supports our use of them. It cites a fair number academic studies in each area it looks at.

The book is divided into four parts.

The first part covers the reading of code. We do a lot of training on how to write code but none on reading it, yet as developers we spend a lot of time reading code, either our own code from the past, the code of our colleagues or library code.

Perhaps most traumatic for me was the suggestion that I should learn syntax. Hermans suggests flash cards to learn syntax, as an aid to reading code (and writing it), highlighting that going and looking up syntax is likely to break our flow, by the time we have checked out twitter and some pictures of kittens. Thinking about my own behaviour, this is definitely true. My first flash cards would all be around Python – set syntax, format statements, unittests boilerplate and the options for sort and sorted.

An idea I hadn’t come across before was refactoring code for readability which may be at odds with how code currently stands; you might, for example, inline functions to remove the need to go look them up and potentially lose your place in code. Or replace lambdas, list comprehensions or ternary operators – all of which take a bit more effort to parse – with their more verbose, conventional alternatives.

Two things that aid reading code are "chunking", experts in a field, like chess or programming, don’t learn remember every detail but they know the rules of possibility so they can break up a programme or a chess position into larger pieces (or chunks). They thus have better recall than novices.

The second aid to reading code are beacons, variable names and comments that hint about the higher purpose of code, to enable you to recall the right chunks. That’s to say if you are implementing code that uses a binary try you use the conventional names of root, branch, node, left and right rather than trying to be individualistic.

I suspect a lot of programmers, like me, will be looking at the rote learning exercises that Hermans proposes and starts to think immediately about how to automate them! I think there is scope for IDE extensions that allow you set up some flashcards or little code exercises. Also Hermans proposes quite a lot of printing out code and annotating it, again this was something I’d quite like IDE support for.

The second part is on understanding code more deeply, how it works. I was interested to learn that our natural language abilities are a better predictor of how good we are at comprehending what code does, than our mathematical abilities. In terms of understanding code, Hermans talks about marking up listings of code to highlight the occurrence of functions and variables. And, furthermore, to label variables by role following the work of Sajaniemi that is to say into the categories of fixed value, stepper, flag, walker (like a stepper), most recent holder, most wanted holder, gatherer, container, follower, organiser, and temporary. The co-occurrence of these roles provides strong clues as to what code does – in the same manner as design patterns. If we spot a design pattern we can access our long term memory as to what a design pattern does.

Following on from the idea of labelling roles of variables is the somewhat depreciated "Hungarian notation" proposed by Simonyi. This is where you include some type or role information in a variable name such as "strMyName" or "lb_textbox", Simonyi’s original proposal was to name variables with their roles, rather than just their types which is rather less useful in strongly typed languages and modern IDEs with syntax highlighting.

The third part is on writing code, starting with the importance of naming things. The key here is consistency in naming (i.e. stick with either snake case or camel case, don’t mix), and agreeing a "name mould" – a pattern for compiling parts of a name. Martin Fowler’s "code smells" are also covered in this section, highlighting how they interact with the model and how bad code smells prevent us accessing our long term memories. 

The final part is on collaborating on code, including the developer’s great bugbear "the interruption", it turns out this annoyance is well-founded with research showing that an interruption typically requires 15-20 minutes for recovery. I was also interested to see that we are not very good at multi-tasking, although we might think we are.

Also in this part is a discussion of the cognitive dimensions of code bases (CDCB), these are ideas like the error proneness of code, how easy it is to modify, how easy it is to test in parts applied at the level of an application or library. There is an implication here that the language you use to build a library may change over the course of time, perhaps starting with Python when you are roughing things out quickly, adding in type hinting when the library is more mature and shifting to Scala or Java when the design is stable and better performance is needed.

Finally, there is a small piece on onboarding new developers to a project, here the ideas of cognitive load repeat. Often when we are onboarding a new developer we show them the code, introduce a load of people, draw diagrams and so forth – all very fast. Under these circumstances our ideas about cognitive load tell us anyone will be overwhelmed.

I enjoyed this book, it feels like a guide to getting better at doing something I spend a lot of my time on. It is an area, learning in the field of programming, that I have not seen written about elsewhere.

Hopefully this book will change the way I work a bit, I’ll try to learn more syntax, I’ll not worry about reusing the same variable names, or even using Hungarian notation. I’ll try to remember the roles of variables. And I’ll try Hedy out with my son, Hedy is the teaching language Hermans wrote while also writing this book.

Book review: Natives by Akala

nativesA return to the Black Lives Matter theme with Natives by Akala. Natives is an autobiography which illustrates many of the points made in Why I am no longer talking to white people by Reni Eddo-Lodge and Black and British by David Olusoga. Akala highlights that his working class origins are as much an issue as his race.

Akala is a rapper, poet, journalist, songwriter, author and activist – see their wikipedia page here. I don’t know what the etiquette is for using someone’s "birth name" when they publish under a pen name. Although I had not heard of Akala previously, I am familiar with the work of his older sister Ms Dynamite.

Akala has a white Scottish-German mother and a black Jamaican father. He grew up in Camden in the late Eighties. As he points out this is as some of the overt racism in Britain, which his fathers generation had experienced, had started to recede. He went to Jamaica once as a child but subsequently has visited many times. Alongside Black America, Jamaica and Shakespeare are his major cultural influences. He visited also visited the family in the Outer Hebrides, finding Scotland less racist than England.

He clearly remembers the occasion on which he realised that his mother was white, talking about coming home school having been racially abused at the age of five by another child. For racists there is no mixed-race, no being a little bit Black – for them it is all or nothing. This is reflected in the South African apartheid era laws. So although Akala is mixed-race this is pretty much meaningless since he is considered Black by the white world. Interestingly there are gradations in the Black community where in the Caribbean the paler skinned are seen as a higher social class (I think the same may be true in India), and in South Africa being successful is "acting the white man". At secondary school a teacher once stated to him in an argument that "The Ku Klux Klan stopped crime by killing black people" – this incident gets a whole chapter, you perhaps won’t be surprised that there were no adverse consequences for the teacher.

As a child Akala was academically gifted, going to various extra classes and a pan-African school at the weekend. This was a result of his mother’s drive but does not seem to have been uncommon for Black families.

I think the thing that really hit me was that when my (white, middle-class) son, aged 9, demonstrates his academic ability we get an email from his teacher praising him. When Akala achieved academically at school he was criticised (and was actually in a special needs class at one point). A recent incident with a friend of ours suggests this attitude for children who are not white has not completely gone from the teaching profession.

Despite these academic talents he still fell into something of the gang culture for a period, as he describes it he simply snapped out of it at the age of about 25 – something he says is typical. His less fortune cohort were either imprisoned or killed by this point. This is an odd juxtaposition of someone who has friends who are classical music composers and hospital consultants, but at the same time know people who are in prison or have been killed in street violence. 

Why was Akala and his cohort susceptible to gang culture? He sees it as a working class problem, rather than a race problem – citing the high levels of gang violence elsewhere in the UK where the black population is small. A second factor is the utter distrust of the police in the black community, driven by years of prejudice. They simply don’t see the police as there for them (with pretty good reason).

You can see this happening today in the UK. There is a steady stream of stories in the press of successful black people stopped in their cars (car not registered here, this car looks too expensive for you to own it), and stopped in the street (crime by a man matching your description). As a middle aged white man I don’t get stopped by the police because I don’t look right.

Tony Blair was happy to talk about "black on black" violence, although he would never describe violence in Northern Ireland or in Glasgow or Newcastle as white on white violence.  In fact I was surprised to learn that violence in Glasgow is a bigger problem than in London but the media like to report the violence in London and imply it is about the black population. The Labour party are happy to talk about the difficulties of "white working class boys" ignoring the fact that this is largely down to class not colour.

Akala talks a bit about South Africa and Cuba, it’s interesting the emphasis that he puts on the role of Cuba in ending apartheid with their military support against the South African regime in neighbouring countries. Overall his view of Cuba is more positive than mine. I think I have been corrupted by 50 years of anti-Castro propaganda. On Mandela and the ANC he is not quite so positive as your average middle-aged white man.

I found Natives a useful complement to Black and British by David Olusoga and Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race by Reni Eddo-Lodge because it talks of the individual impacts of what these other books described in a more abstract way.

Book review: Index, A history of the by Dennis Duncan

I came to indexIndex, A History of the by Dennis Duncan via a review in New Scientist. It is broadly a history of the book centred on indexes.

Duncan starts by talking about alphabetical order, and how it first came about – people have been writing their ABCs for approaching four millennia. The first catalogues or subject indexes date to the 3rd century BCE by Callimachus in the Great Library of Alexandria. The Greeks were more keen on alphabetisation than the ancient Romans. At this time writing was in scrolls, so there were no page numbers – making indexing somewhat difficult. An interesting language aside, the Greek "sittybos" was a parchment tag used to indicate the contents of a scroll from which we get the word syllabus, index is the Latin word for the same thing.

The next phase of evolution of the index was driven by the Church during the Middle Ages. Monasteries and nunneries valued reading, and the pope decreed that cathedrals should teach in 1079 which led to the creation of universities. The codex (essentially a book) had displaced the scroll as the primary format for writing by 600AD. Reading and teaching, and preaching, led to a need to find specific parts of large volumes of text hence the index.

The Bible was divided into chapters around 1200, verses were added in 1550. This is important because in the age of the handwritten manuscript pagination is variable – chapters and verses are a substitute for page numbering. Distinctios were created which drew together Bible references to make a theme for a sermon as well as more complete subject indexes, and word indexes.

A word index, or concordance, lists every occurrence of each word in a document. Here we are seeing the struggle to find the right size for an index, a concordance is too big, a table of contents, a sort of index, is not big enough. Hugh at the Dominican friary of St  Jacques in Paris produced the first concordance of the Latin bible in around 1230. The subject index is in between the concordance and table of contents in size but finding the right size is a job for skilled humans to this day.

At the same time as the Bible was being indexed and concordance-d Robert Grosseteste was creating a great index which spanned multiple books. It is always a bit difficult to determine whether historical figures have been enormously before their time, or whether an author is casting that historical figure with the present very much in mind. This struck most firmly with Grosseteste’s great index which looks to us very much like Google’s index of the internet.

Although there were a couple of experiments with page numbers on manuscript pages prior to the invention of the printing press in around 1440, it was a while before they were commonplace. Page numbers are a bit awkward to print because they fall outside the main body of the text, so there was some experimentation with using the folio marks used by the printer to compile a book properly. Sometimes in the 15th century readers were instructed to write the page numbers into the index themselves!

A recurring theme is whether reading an index is "cheating", whether it takes away from the activity of reading fully a book. Duncan also cites Socrates’ Phaedrus where it is argued that speaking is superior to writing/reading. We see a similar argument today as to whether Google has replaced our ability to read. Thinking of my own reading of non-fiction, I don’t make much use of indexes but I do have an Evernote of books like this with page number references – as you can see here – I use them when writing these reviews, so in a sense they are my own index.

In the 17th century the index as satire was invented, it was a time when political pamphlets were all the rage, and a format was found for the satirical index. I was entertained by the story of William Bromley, and the election to Speaker of the House in 1705. Just prior to the election his enemies published an index of his travelogue Remarks in the Grand Tour which cast him in a poor light, highlight errors of fact, statements of the obvious and hints of popery. He subsequently lost the election.

A genre I’d never seen before is the fictional index, that is a work of fiction which features a fictional index or even a work that is entirely a fictional index such as Nabakov’s Pale Fire or The Index by JG Ballard. Erasmus started this in 1532. Although there were experiments with indexing fiction, ultimately these never really took off.

Universal indexes in the manner of Grossetestes’ made something of a return in the 19th century, with Jacques-Paul Migne’s collected works of the Church Fathers. Later in the century there was an abortive attempt to index everything stemming from J. Ashton Cross’s presentation to the Conference of Librarians in 1877. A longer lasting effort was William Poole’s An Alphabetical Index to Subjects Treated in the Reviews and Other Periodicals perhaps this worked because its scope was smaller.

The final chapter covers the impact of computers on indexes, so far computers have been more dumb companions rather than creators in making indexes. They are able to generate concordances very quickly but even the best software struggles to identify appropriate subjects: what to index and what not to index. The problem is that computerised search provides and adequate index, so publishers are less inclined to spend money on an index – which is a separate, specialised activity to the authoring of a book.

I was worried that a history of the index would be a bit dull but I really enjoyed this book.