In a literary blog I like to follow called The Valve, a recent post asks why the world of public intellectuals is now dominated by scientists like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker rather than by literary critics.

"The culture wars so damaged literature as a source of cultural authority that literary intellectuals lost the public stage. They were replaced by scientific popularizers such as Steven Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker - cf. literary agent John Brockman on the third culture. In this climate of opinion, it is not enough to return to evaluative criticism.

...

"My own dog in this fight is a general academic rehabilitation of normativity (so-called), and not just in literature, as well as a return to generalism, by which I mean “writing for a well-informed non-specialist audience” (and by which I do not mean “writing for stupid,uneducated people who will never really understand the sophisticated stuff we do.")

"This would involved the renunciation of the positivist dream of grounding everything on Science and Truth. It would be a less resolvable, more plural discourse. "

Perhaps it is appropriate that the question of why we don't pay more attention to literary theorists would only occur to other literary theorists.  At the same time, it raises the question of why other professionals don't attempt to grab for this particular ring of public legitimization.  Pundits on TV, not surprisingly, are pulled from the pool of people who decide early in their careers that rather than actually making policy, they want to talk about it.  Moreover, they have decided that rather than taking the somewhat more "legitimate" tack of going into print journalism, they want to do it in the most mediocre medium available -- television.  It actually pays off, since in this case, to paraphrase Marshall MacLuhan, the medium is the messenger.

But my purpose here is not to shoot the messenger.  It is rather to wonder why other professionals don't feel this entitlement to speak for others over matters concerning which they have no expertise.  Tech people certainly feel they have more insight into policy and long-term planning given their unique vantage point upon the ways technology transforms the workplace as well as our very sense of time.  Why don't they chomp at the bit and demand that people pay more attention to them?  Doctors, more than any other profession, take for granted their God-like role in determining who lives and who dies based on their insurance coverage.  Should they not be afforded the opportunity to make oracular pronouncements about the health of the nation?  Lawyers recognize that the only truth is the truth they are able to argue before an appropriate audience.  Shall they be given the chance to argue before the citizenry?

Yet it is only the lit crit folk-- those peculiar scholars who work in the butt cracks of philosophy -- that feel an entitlement about making public declamations.  Moreover, they are in the unusual position of feeling that somehow this entitlement has been taken away from them.  How did this ever happen?

Impedance mismatch is a concept from electronics that is gaining some mindshare as an IT metaphor.  It occupies the same social space that cognitive dissonance once did, and works in pretty much the same way to describe any sort of discontinuity.  It is currently being used in IT to describe the difficulty inherent in mapping relational structures, such as relational databases, to object structures common in OOP.  It is shorthand for a circumstance in which two things don't fit.

Broadening the metaphor a bit, here is my impedance mismatch.  I like reading philosophy.  Unfortunately, I also like reading comic books.  I'm not a full-blown collector or anything.  I pick up comics from the library, and occasionally just sit in the bookstore and catch up on certain franchises I like.  I guess that in the comic book world, I'm the equivalent of someone who only drinks after sun-down or only smokes when someone hands him a cigarette, but never actually buys a pack himself.  A parasite, yes, but not an addict.

The impedance mismatch comes from the sense that I shouldn't waste time reading comics.  They do not inhabit the same mental world that the other things I like to read do. I often sit thinking that I ought be reading Schopenhauer, with whom I am remarkably unfamiliar for a thirty-something, or at least reading through Justin Smith's new book on WCF Programming, but instead find myself reading an Astro City graphic novel because Rocky Lhotka recommended it to me.  The problem is not that I feel any sort of bad faith about reading comic books when I ought to be reading something more mature.  Rather, I fear that I am actually being true to myself.

A passage from the most recent New Yorker in an article by Jonathan Rosen nicely illustrates this sort of impedance mismatch:

Sometime in 1638, John Milton visited Galileo Galilei in Florence. The great astronomer was old and blind and under house arrest, confined by order of the Inquisition, which had forced him to recant his belief that the earth revolves around the sun, as formulated in his “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.” Milton was thirty years old—his own blindness, his own arrest, and his own cosmological epic, “Paradise Lost,” all lay before him. But the encounter left a deep imprint on him. It crept into “Paradise Lost,” where Satan’s shield looks like the moon seen through Galileo’s telescope, and in Milton’s great defense of free speech, “Areopagitica,” Milton recalls his visit to Galileo and warns that England will buckle under inquisitorial forces if it bows to censorship, “an undeserved thraldom upon learning.”

Beyond the sheer pleasure of picturing the encounter—it’s like those comic-book specials in which Superman meets Batman—there’s something strange about imagining these two figures inhabiting the same age.

There has been a recent spate of posts about authority in the world of software development, with some prominent software bloggers denying that they are authorities.  They prefer to be thought of as intense amateurs.

I worked backwards to this problematic of authority starting with Jesse Liberty.  Liberty writes reference books on C# and ASP.NET, so he must be an authority, right?  And if he's not an authority, why should I read his books?  This led to  Scott Hanselman, to Alastair Rankine and finally to Jeff Atwood at CodingHorror.com.

The story, so far, goes like this.  Alastair Rankine posts that Jeff Atwood has jumped the shark on his blog by setting himself up as some sort of authority.  Atwood denies that he is any sort of authority, and tries to cling to his amateur status like a Soviet-era Olympic poll vaulter.  Scott Hanselman chimes in to insist that he is also merely an amateur, and Jesse Liberty (who is currently repackaging himself from being a C# guru to a Silverlight guru) does an h/t to Hanselman's post.  Hanselman also channels Martin Fowler, saying that he is sure Fowler would also claim amateur status.

Why all this suspicion of authority?

The plot thickens, since Jeff Atwood's apologia, upon being accused by Rankine of acting like an authority, is that indeed he is merely "acting". 

"It troubles me greatly to hear that people see me as an expert or an authority...

"I suppose it's also an issue of personal style. To me, writing without a strong voice, writing filled with second guessing and disclaimers, is tedious and difficult to slog through. I go out of my way to write in a strong voice because it's more effective. But whenever I post in a strong voice, it is also an implied invitation to a discussion, a discussion where I often change my opinion and invariably learn a great deal about the topic at hand. I believe in the principle of strong opinions, weakly held..."

To sum up, Atwood isn't a real authority, but he plays one on the Internet.

Here's the flip side to all of this.  Liberty, Hanselman, Atwood, Fowler, et. al. have made great contributions to software programming.  They write good stuff, not only in the sense of being entertaining, but also in the sense that they shape the software development "community" and how software developers -- from architects down to lowly code monkeys -- think about coding and think about the correct way to code.  In any other profession, this is the very definition of "authority".

In literary theory, this is known as authorial angst.  It occurs when an author doesn't believe in his own project.  He does what he can, and throws it out to the world.  If his work achieves success, he is glad for it, but takes it as a chance windfall, rather than any sort of validation of his own talents.  Ultimately, success is a bit perplexing, since there are so many better authors who never achieved success in their own times, like Celine or Melville.

One of my favorite examples of this occurs early in Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition in which he writes that he knows the book will be very successful, if only because of the title and his reputation, but ...  The most famous declaration of authorial angst is found in Mark Twain's notice inserted into The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

In Jeff Atwood's case, the authority angst seems to take the following form: Jeff may talk like an authority, and you may take him for an authority, but he does not consider himself one.  If treating him like an authority helps you, then that's all well and good.  And if it raises money for him, then that's all well and good, too.  But don't use his perceived authority as a way to impugn his character or to discredit him.  He never claimed to be one.  Other people are doing that.

[The French existentialists are responsible for translating Heidegger's term angst as ennui, by the way, which has a rather different connotation (N is for Neville who died of ennui).  In a French translation class I took in college, we were obliged to try to translate ennui, which I did rather imprecisely as "boredom".  A fellow student translated it as "angst", for which the seminar tutor accused her of tossing the task of translation over the Maginot line.  We finally determined that the term is untranslatable.  Good times.]

The problem these authorities have with authority may be due to the fact that authority is a role.  In Alasdaire MacIntyre's After Virtue, a powerful critique of what he considers to be the predominant ethical philosophy of modern times, Emotivism, MacIntyre argues that the main characteristics (in Shaftesbury's sense) of modernity are the Aesthete, the Manager and the Therapist.  The aesthete replaces morals as an end with a love of patterns as an end.  The manager eschews morals for competence.  The therapist overcomes morals by validating our choices, whatever they may be.  These characters are made possible by the notion of expertise, which MacIntyre claims is a relatively modern invention.

"Private corporations similarly justify their activities by referring to their possession of similar resources of competence.  Expertise becomes a commodity for which rival state agencies and rival private corporations compete.  Civil servants and managers alike justify themselves and their claims to authority, power and money by invoking their own competence as scientific managers of social change.  Thus there emerges an ideology which finds its classical form of expression in a pre-existing sociological theory, Weber's theory of bureaucracy."

To become an authority, one must begin behaving like an authority.  Some tech authors such as Jeffrey Richter and Juval Lowy actually do this very well.  But sacrifices have to be made in order to be an authority, and it may be that this is what the anti-authoritarians of the tech world are rebelling against.  When one becomes an authority, one must begin to behave differently.  One is expected to have a certain realm of competence, and when one acts authoritatively, one imparts this sense of confidence to others: to developers, as well as the managers who must oversee developers and justify their activities to upper management.

Upper management is already always a bit suspicious of the software craft.  They tolerate certain behaviors in their IT staff based on the assumption that they can get things done, and every time a software project fails, they justifiably feel like they are being hoodwinked.  How would they feel about this trust relationship if they found out that one of the figures their developers are holding up as an authority figure is writing this:

"None of us (in software) really knows what we're doing. Buildings have been built for thousands of years and software has been an art/science for um, significantly less (yes, math has been around longer, but you know.) We just know what's worked for us in the past."

This resistance to putting on the role of authority is understandable.  Once one puts on the hoary robes required of an authority figure, one can no longer be oneself anymore, or at least not the self one was before.  Patrick O'Brien describes this emotion perfectly as he has Jack Aubrey take command of his first ship in Master and Commander.

"As he rowed back to the shore, pulled by his own boat's crew in white duck and straw hats with Sophie embroidered on the ribbon, a solemn midshipman silent beside him in the sternsheets, he realized the nature of this feeling.  He was no longer one of 'us': he was 'they'.  Indeed, he was the immediately-present incarnation of 'them'.  In his tour of the brig he had been surrounded with deference -- a respect different in kind from that accorded to a lieutenant, different in kind from that accorded to a fellow human being: it had surrounded him like a glass bell, quite shutting him off from the ship's company; and on his leaving the Sophie had let out a quiet sigh of relief, the sigh he knew so well: 'Jehovah is no longer with us.'

"It is the price that has to be paid,' he reflected."

It is the price to be paid not only in the Royal Navy during the age of wood and canvas, but also in established modern professions such as architecture and medicine.  All doctors wince at recalling the first time they were called "doctor" while they interned.  They do not feel they have the right to wear the title, much less be consulted over a patient's welfare.  They feel intensely that this is a bit of a sham, and the feeling never completely leaves them.  Throughout their careers, they are asked to make judgments that affect the health, and often even the lives, of their patients -- all the time knowing that their's is a human profession, and that mistakes get made.  Every doctor bears the burden of eventually killing a patient due to a bad diagnosis or a bad prescription or simply through lack of judgment.  Yet bear it they must, because gaining the confidence of the patient is also essential to the patient's welfare, and the world would likely be a sorrier place if people didn't trust doctors.

So here's one possible analysis: the authorities of the software engineering profession need to man up and simply be authorities.  Of course there is bad faith involved in doing so.  Of course there will be criticism that they frauds.  Of course they will be obliged to give up some of the ways they relate to fellow developers once they do so.  This is true in every profession.  At the same time every profession needs its authorities.  Authority holds a profession together, and it is what distinguishes a profession from mere labor.  The gravitational center of any profession is the notion that there are ways things are done, and there are people who know what those ways are.  Without this perception, any profession will fall apart, and we will indeed be merely playaz taking advantage of middle management and making promises we cannot fulfill.  Expertise, ironically, explains and justifies our failures, because we are able to interpret failure as a lack of this expertise.  We then drive ourselves to be better.  Without the perception that there are authorities out there, muddling and mediocrity become the norm, and we begin to believe that not only can we not do better, but we aren't even expected to.

This is a traditionalist analysis.  I have another possibility, however, which can only be confirmed through the passage of time.  Perhaps the anti-authoritarian impulse of these crypto-authorities is a revolutionary legacy of the soixantes-huitards.  From Guy Sorman's essay about May '68, whose fortieth anniversary passed unnoticed:

"What did it mean to be 20 in May ’68? First and foremost, it meant rejecting all forms of authority—teachers, parents, bosses, those who governed, the older generation. Apart from a few personal targets—General Charles de Gaulle and the pope—we directed our recriminations against the abstract principle of authority and those who legitimized it. Political parties, the state (personified by the grandfatherly figure of de Gaulle), the army, the unions, the church, the university: all were put in the dock."

Just because things have been done one way in the past doesn't mean this is the only way.  Just because authority and professionalism are intertwined in every other profession, and perhaps can longer be unraveled at this point, doesn't mean we can't try to do things differently in a young profession like software engineering.  Is it possible to build a profession around a sense of community, rather than the restraint of authority?

I once read a book of anecdotes about the 60's, one of which recounts a dispute between two groups of people in the inner city.  The argument is about to come to blows when someone suggests calling the police.  This sobers everyone up, and with cries of "No pigs, no pigs" the disputants resolve their differences amicably.  The spirit that inspired this scene, this spirit of authority as anti-pattern, is no longer so ubiquitous, and one cannot really imagine civil disputes being resolved in such a way anymore.  Still, the notion of a community without authority figures is a seductive one, and it may even be doable within a well-educated community such as the web-based world of software developers.  Perhaps it is worth trying.  The only thing that concerns me is how we are to maintain the confidence of management as we run our social experiment.

What is SOA?  It is currently the hottest thing going on in corporate technology, and promises to simultaneously integrate disparate applications on multiple platforms as well as provide code reuse to all of those platforms.  According to Juval Lowy, it is the culmination of a 20 year project to enable true component-based design -- in other words, the fulfillment of COM, rather than merely its replacement.  Others see it as a threat to object oriented programming. According to yet others, it is simply the wave of the future.  Rocky Lhotka recently remarked at a users-group meeting that it reminds him of mainframe programming.  In Windows Communication Foundation Unleashed, the authors write somewhat uncharitably:

"Thomas Erl, for instance, published two vast books ostensibly on the subject, but never managed to provide a noncircuitous definition of the approach in either of them."

This diversity of opinion, I believe, gives me an opening to offer my own definition of SOA.  SOA is, put simply, the triumph of the Facade pattern.

In the 90's, Erich Gamma, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides and Richard Helm popularized the notion of the 23 fundamental design patterns of object oriented programming.  I've often wondered why they came up with 23 patterns.  Some, such as the Flyweight pattern, are simply never used.  At the same time, one of the most popular patterns, MVP, doesn't even make the canonical list.  How did they come up with 23?

Here's an article on the significance of the number 23 which may or may not shed light on the Gang of Four's motivation.  In Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts, the characters become obsessed with the number 23, and claim that there are 23 letters in the Greek alphabet and that Vermeer created 23 paintings (both false, by the way).  Perhaps the Gang of Four are Discordians -- Discordians are fascinated by what they call the 23 Enigma.

In any case, they came up with 23 canonical (or "fundamental" or "classic") design patterns, and in the past decade, knowing these patterns has become the unofficial dividing line between the common run of code monkeys (I use the term affectionately) and so-called "true" developers -- the initiation rite that turns boy programmers into men.  Anyone in development who wants to be anybody makes the attempt to learn them, but for whatever reason, the 23 patterns resist the attempt -- sometimes because it is difficult to see how you would ever actually use them.  It helps, however, to remember that the StringBuilder type in C# is based on the Builder pattern, and that the Clone method on most types implements the Prototype pattern.  Delegates are built around the Observer pattern and collections are built around the Iterator pattern -- but since these are both basically part of the C# language, among others, you don't really need to learn them anymore.  In my opinion, the most useful patterns are the Template and the Factory Method.  The Singleton pattern, on the other hand, starts off seeming like a useful pattern but turns out not to be -- a bit like a bad joke one eventually tires of.  It is, however, easy to remember, if somewhat tricky to implement.

The one pattern no one ever fails to remember is the Facade pattern.  It doesn't do anything clever with abstract base classes or interfaces.  It doesn't have tricky implementation details.  It simply takes the principle of encapsulation and goes crazy with it. Whatever complicated code you have, you place it behind a wall of code, called the Facade, which provides methods to manipulate your "real" code.  It's the sort of pattern which, like Monsieur Jordan, once you find out about it you realize you've been doing it all your life.  The simplicity and ubiquity of the Facade makes it an unattractive pattern -- it takes no programming acumen to learn it; it requires great effort to avoid it. It is the dumbest of the 23 canonical design patterns.

And Service Oriented Architecture is all built around it.  In some sense, SOA marks the democratization of architecture.  There are still tricks to planning a good SOA, and securing it may require some sophistication -- but with SOA, anyone can be an architect.  Well ... anyone who can build a Facade.

The company I am currently consulting with uses Scrum, a kind of Agile methodology.  I like it.  Its main features are index cards taped to a wall and quick "sprints", or development cycles.  Scrum's most peculiar feature is the notion of a "Scrum Master", which makes me feel dirty whenever I think of it.  It's so much a part of the methodology, however, that you can even become certified as a "Scrum Master", and people will put it on their business cards.  Besides Scrum, other Agile methodologies include Extreme Programming (XP) and the Rational Unified Process (RUP) which is actually more of a marketing campaign than an actual methodology -- but of course you should never ever say that to a RUP practitioner.

The main thing that seems to unify these Agile methodologies is the fact that they are not Waterfall.  And because Waterfall is notoriously unsuccessful, except when it is successful, Agile projects are generally considered to be successful, except when they aren't.  And when they aren't, there are generally two explanations that can be given for the lack of success.  First, the flavor of Agile being practiced wasn't practiced correctly.  Second, the agile methodology was followed too slavishly, when at the heart of agile is the notion that it must be adapted to the particular qualities of a particular project.

In a recent morning stand up (yet another Scrum feature) the question was raised about whether we were following Scrum properly, since it appeared to some that we were introducing XP elements into our project management.  Even before I had a chance to think about it, I found myself appealing to the second explanation of Agile and arguing that it was a danger to apply Scrum slavishly.  Instead, we needed to mix and match to find the right methodology for us.

A sense of shame washed over me even as I said it, as if I were committing some fundamental category mistake.  However, my remarks were accepted as sensible and we moved on.

For days afterward, I obsessed about the cause of my sense of shame.  I finally worked it up to a fairly thorough theory.  I decided that it was rooted in my undergraduate education and the study of Descartes, who claimed that just as a city designed by one man is eminently more rational than one built through aggregation over ages, so the following of a single method, whether right or wrong, will lead to more valid results than philosophizing willy-nilly ever will.  I also thought of how Kant always filled me with a sense of contentment, whereas Hegel, who famously said against Kant that whenever we attempt to draw lines we always find ourselves crossing over them, always left me feeling uneasy and disoriented.  Along with this was the inappropriate (philosophically speaking) recollection that Kant died a virgin, whereas Hegel's personal life was marked by drunkenness and carousing.  Finally I thought of Nietzsche, whom Habermas characterized as one of the "dark" philosophers for, among other things, insisting that one set of values were as good as another and, even worse, arguing in The Genealogy of Morals that what we consider to be noble in ourselves is in fact base, and what we consider moral weakness is in fact spiritual strength -- a transvaluation of all values.  Nietzsche not only crossed the lines, but so thoroughly blurred them that we are still trying to recover them after almost a century and a half.

But lines are important to software developers -- we who obsess about interfaces and abhor namespace collisions the way Aristotle claimed nature abhors a vacuum -- as if there were nothing worse than the same word meaning two different things.  We are also obsessed with avoiding duplication of code -- as if the only thing worse than the same word meaning two different things is the same thing being represented by two different words.  What a reactionary, prescriptivist, neurotic bunch we all are.

This seemed to explain it for me.  I've been trained to revere the definition, and to form fine demarcations in my mind.  What could be more horrible, then, than to casually introduce the notion that not only can one methodology be exchanged for another, but that they can be mixed and matched as one sees fit.  Like wearing a brown belt with black shoes, this fundamentally goes against everything thing I've been taught to believe not only about software, but also about the world.  If we allow this one thing, it's a slippery slope to Armageddon and the complete dissolution of civil society.

Then I recalled Slavoj Zizek's introduction to one of his books about Jacques Lacan (pictured above), and a slightly different sense of discomfort overcame me.  I quote it in part:

I have always found extremely repulsive the common practice of sharing the main dishes in a Chinese restaurant.  So when, recently, I gave expression to this repulsion and insisted on finishing my plate alone, I became the victim of an ironic "wild psychoanalysis" on the part of my table neighbor: is not this repulsion of mine, this resistance to sharing a meal, a symbolic form of the fear of sharing a partner, i.e., of sexual promiscuity?  The first answer that came to my mind, of course, was a variation on de Quincey's caution against the "art of murder" -- the true horror is not sexual promiscuity but sharing a Chinese dish: "How many people have entered the way of perdition with some innocent gangbang, which at the time was of no great importance to them, and ended by sharing the main dishes in a Chinese restaurant!"