Before I get to the column proper, let me say that I am appalled at the Republican annointee's choice for a running mate. Richard Cheney, known as Dick -- as if this country hadn't had enough of the other one in the seventies -- is a conservative's conservative. He served, you may remember, as the Secretary of Defense under George Senior, but before that George he worked for the other Dick and for Dick's successor, Gerald Ford. Scared you Democrats, didn't that?
Cheney was a six-term Congressman from Wyoming and consistently voted along a line that veered somewhat to the left of Genghis Khan and to the right of Newt Gingrich -- another blast from the past -- and so it seems his Republican credentials are in order. But, so is his draft dodger portfolio. Cheney didn't have to get shot at because he took student deferments until the risk was over.
I guess he couldn't get into the National Guard like Dubya. And, yes I know that Mr. Bill was deferred. He shouldn't have been either. If we look, we'll see that good ole Newt and "Pitchfork" Pat Buchanan wiggled out of that nasty business overseas too, so that should put to rest any suspicion of a personal bias on the draft dodger issue. But, I happily digress.
What I wanted to write about is the debt we owe to the computer science people out there toiling under florescent lights and the cold blast of air conditioning. This idea was triggered by the unbelievable torture I must undergo three times per week in my computer science class. I'm not taking Computer Science 5 or any upper level course. We're talking CS4, "the fluff" as one CS professor described it to me. Well, the fluff is booting my behind all over campus.
Now that I've whined in public about my academic shortcomings, I'll get to the point. There are people out there who bemoan the impersonal technology so important to our daily comfort. This is not a new idea. Listen to this voice from the past: "a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating power of the mindto reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor."
That ranting voice could belong to almost any technophobe out there and they could be talking about the effects of the TV culture, or the Internet's admittedly lowbrow offerings. In fact, it was William Wordsworth who wrote that complaint in 1802. Not only did he write incredibly dense, allusive and illusive poetry; he didn't like the pace of civilization in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many have since followed in his rhetorical footsteps. Don't listen to them. We need those computers. Torpor me.
I don't want to go back to typing these words on an IBM Selectric, using carbon paper or, horrors, actually writing and mailing a letter. I want those folks who like writing code to keep on doing it. Do more, I say. Spend more time in the sickly glow of the florescence. Give me more code. Make my life easier.
I think we should pay those gals and guys more money. Any IPO based on the output from programmers should give at least half of it's obscenely inflated value to the people toiling to write the code in the frigid air of computer laboratories or the dim recesses of their pizza box and soda can littered homes. More money to the workers. Keep those fingers thumping the keys.
Of course, this is purely selfish reasoning. I don't want to have to actually use any of the HTML or JavaScript that I'm learning, although it will go on my resume. I'm not that dense. The idea that I might have to sit and write an algorithm for a problem, then write the code to implement the algorithm is enough to drive me screaming onto the Green tearing at the remaining hairs on my head.
Some people have a particular vision of hell. For Milton it was a burning lake and Pandemonium. For me it is, first, a windowless building. Next, air conditioning colder than that in Filene Auditorium, and that is cold, meat locker cold. Last in the list of tortures for my own private hell would be JavaScript. That's right, the fluff of computer programming. I wouldn't even have to deal with C++ or any other high-level language. It would be sufficient to have to design pizza delivery pages and number calculators all day.
Pay those programmers more. They deserve it. I want my life to be easier. More computers. More code. More air conditioning. Less sunlight.
