Idea Foundry

I was trying to explain to someone the other day about what I am doing in computers. I didn’t have a concrete way to explain previously but these days this seems to be a good way -

There are people who need to solve some problem and they use a piece of software to solve it for them. For example someone would wish to buy a flight ticket and they buy it through a website. They are usually called users or end-users. We are all end users. Then there are people who write the software they used to solve their problem. For example the people who wrote the website, all of the complex interactions between reserving your ticket and handling the monetary aspects are handled by these folk. They are the people who developed your software. I used to once do that, or something very similar. Then if you think about it, there is yet another layer - the people who wrote the tools using which the developers of the website wrote their website. These people write tools so that other write tools which you as end users use. The chain of people who write tools which are used to build other tools is a pretty long chain. Its like any services industry – one service is consumed by another service and so – providing several levels of users and tool providers.

Somewhere high up this chain in computers usage are the people who write the compilers and the languages and other infrastructural things which everyone else uses. This is very close to where I am today, except maybe one level of abstraction beyond that. I am in the business of studying and developing languages and programming paradigms. These are the ideas that are made manifest by the folk who create real languages and write interpreters and compilers for those languages.

The business of being in programming languages is a tricky one at best. It is one of trying to create fundamental ideas related to the way people think about writing software. Writing software, designing languages etc are a lot like real languages and cultures. They come with a lot of overhead and inertia and the sort of languages people use tend to affect the way they perceive and express ideas about the world around them. To create new paradigms and approaches for programming usually entails walking upto some very smart people and tell them that you can better the way they think about the world – “See, here is another way, you just have to rewire your brain a bit and it will make perfect sense… “. Tricky business.

If I were to add another line or two of abstraction to my work, I would land up in what is well considered to be mathematics. That is not to say that it is all not mathematical in nature already, but it is only slightly more so than the mathematics that can be expressed in any field of life. I remember one of my last days in Hyd at Microsoft, when I was in the process of leaving for university. It was at the canteen at lunchtime that I was having this conversation with friends and I was trying to tell them how I saw computer science as science and that the fact that there was something called software and the software industry only incidental to its true nature.

Luton

I had been to Luton this weekend to see Jims, my neighbor back at Cochin and an old friend. Luton had a carnival happening that day – good fun! Lots of floats and people dancing and such. If it hadn’t been for the soggy UK weather and the near perfect unpredictability of the rain, it would have been lots of fun indeed.

Since I have been saying this to a lot of people, I might as well write it down: I grew up reading lots of Enid Blyton (yes..). The thing about Famous Five and such is that you actually do believe that they had wonderful summers in the UK and there was always lots of great food around. Not so. The weather is terrible – I expected a summer and came to this country without a single warm jacket – and its been rainy wet and cold in a perfectly unpredictable way. Cycling with numb fingers and a frozen face isn’t what nice south Indian boys like me were designed for (hear! Hear!).

That aside, back to the topic of Luton. I had to write this entry because Luton was a place different from any I had seen in a while. It has a large Indian and Pakistani community and I was genuinely surprised to see streets with urdu and hindi shop names and streets that could have been some part of India. It was also nice to see women in salwar kameez’s – rather fashionable salwar kameez’s at that.

It was all very nice, until it started getting to me. It happened suddenly at a moment when I wasn’t watching – my mind let open a torrent of things which used to disturb me about back home which came screaming back. The mad screaming mediocrity of the place started blocking out everything in my head. Why are these people like this? Why? Suddenly I started seeing the look people’s eyes judging you continuously to see  if you are one of them or one of someone else. The road blocks caused by bad parking and lack of courtesy while driving.  The dirt on the street, the littler, the attitude that I don’t care and it doesn’t matter. The whole overwrought cultural pretentiousness – what was that old phrase “we are like this only”. Indeed. The completely lack of politeness, the constant suspicion at an existential level, the lack of the slightest bit of subtlety. When I was finally in my bus back, part of my head was screaming “No not all Indians are like that, look at me, I am different, I care”. But I don’t think it mattered.

I think our country and the people lack subtlety simply because they are constantly hounded by a constant deafening noise at an existential level such that they are almost deaf to everything else. The noise of being hammered by “you have to be like this” “even if you chose to change it is futile” “this is the system, live in its rules” “don’t think” – everyday, all you life – it eats away large parts of you faculties. These things were upsetting.

Posted late, as usual.