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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lisp versus C, June 6, 2000
By A Customer
There is an excitement in reading what everyone else is afraid to say---and the software world is full of taboos. I passed up "Patterns of Software" a million times in the stores; because of the title, I thought it was yet another book on software Patterns (capital P) in the vein of "Design Patterns" and other recent missives on high-level design. Then I read Richard Gabriel's essay "Worse is Better," available on the web. Though the tone can be bitter and depressing at times, I was immediately hooked on this rare find: a hardcore Lisp person making honest criticisms of both the philosophy and practice of the Lisp world (i.e. academe and the AI industry.) His book is even more rewarding than the essay, because in it Gabriel offers a social theory of software. He explains the overwhelming success and enduring popularity of the C language, but, refreshingly, he does this without taking the easy way out and simply insulting the intelligence of everyone who is not a Lisp user. Gabriel's lessons come from the real world---documented in this semi-autobiographical book---and he didn't always like the answer. While it does discuss Patterns (more deeply and more critically than almost anything else, in my opinion) it is primarily about some common patterns (lowercase p) in the software industry. Such as: why does the "best product" often fail miserably in the marketplace? After the enormous success of UNIX in the 70's and 80's (and the failure of almost everything else) this became an important question. Especially for those who wished to succeed UNIX. Gabriel's answer turns on what has been perhaps been said best by writer Virginia Postrel: "Quality is not one-dimensional." Sadly, Gabriel's book does not include the aforementioned essay on the LISP vs. C dialectic. In it, he opposes two philosophies of software design, which he calls "Worse is Better", and "The Right Thing." The former is a perhaps bitter acknowledgement that the market does not usually reward the perfect product, if for no other reason that what works for some often does not work for others. In line with Postrel's remark, there simply is no single "right thing." The author's writing is deeply conflicted, which makes for an interesting read. The two philosophies cancel each other out, and the software world chose the other one. It's not hard to see why this is so bad for the Lisp community. In the world at large, Lisp has largely lost its special status as "not just another programming language." And when Lisp is seen to have advantages and drawbacks just like everything else, the one-size-fits-all Lisp enterprise itself is thrown into serious doubt. As the author acknowledges, Lisp's mindshare has all but vanished. Faced with the reality of "worse is better", the Lisp world had no answers---and everyone else knew it. I think it is a very honest thing for someone who truly believes in Lisp to question whether its unpopularity is due to something other than aversion to Lisp's pervasive parentheses, or perhaps to hacker-ish ignorance of "higher-level" concepts in programming. Gabriel has put his finger on what may be remembered as the philosophical "Great Schism" of computer science. The one point of light in Gabriel's honest-but-pessimistic world comes from what this book doesn't include: his Worse is Better essay. After the discussion of worse-is-better, he says that C is *still* not the language for artificial intelligence, despite its success. He is correct, of course. But he's got a real point here: if Lisp is going to succeed, Lisp-the-language must free itself from the shackles of Lisp-the-philosophy, whose broken promises and disappointments led to the near-demise of the AI industry. Excellent book.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good commentary, August 19, 2000
This review is from: Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community (Hardcover)
This book is one of the best personal commentaries written about the Computer industry as a business and culture that consists of people. Richard Ganriel is best known for his essay "Worse is Better" which is available on the web. "Worse is better" has the Corollary to it that is sometimes more understandable to folks: "if it works then it ain't temporary". This book contains that essay as well as others on Gabriels philosophy on computers, artificial intelligence and other aspects of the field. But the book contains more than just his thoughts and views on the computer field. It also contains a what is calls his "Personal Narrative", an autobiography of himself and how he grew up and why and how he ended as a computer scientist. It also contains the story of the AI startup company he founded in the 1980s Lucid. Lucid, if remembered much today, is because of Lucid Emacs, now XEmacs, which was orginally authored by Jamie Zawinki for Lucid, based on the work of Ricard Stallman and GNU Emacs. Xemacs is the remaining gift that Lucid gave to the computer community. Lucid was a company that pretty much failed, in Gabriels opinion, because of bad management and the "worse is better" hold on the industry, because it had great products that sold. This book, along with the somewhat different "Fire in the Valley" by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger. Both explain a lot about the computer industry and how it works, and doesn't work. Building a better mousetrap is not a Guarantee of sucess. Highly recommened book.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A painfully honest look at life in the software business, June 8, 1999
There are many people who can operate a word processor with sufficient skill to create a book about computers and software that someone will publish; there are only a few published authors in our business who are also truly good writers. Richard Gabriel is one of the latter. In "Performance and Evaluation of Lisp Systems," he showed he could create a lively book on possibly the single most esoteric subject imaginable. In "Patterns of Software," he demonstrates his skill in essays ranging from patterns in Turkish carpets to the hard lessons of software startups, from the joys of riding cross-country in a Corvette at 125 mph to the often demeaning life of a graduate student. The last essay alone, "Money through Innovation Reconsidered," would justify purchase of the book. Gabriel does a masterful job of analyzing one of the apparent paradoxes of software engineering: that the "best-engineered" software products can be spectacular failures in the market (e.g. Common Lisp, for reasons Gabriel dissects in depth; and, remember Ada?), while the most successful products have a ball-of-mud-that-just-grew quality (yesterday DOS; today Linux). The more time you have been schooled in "the right way" to build software, the harder this truth is to accept; but it is truth nonetheless, for reasons Gabriel lays out succinctly. The essay deserves a place near Arthur C. Clarke's classic SF short story "Superiority." Read both and you'll see the connection. Speaking of connections: many of the essays in "Patterns of Software" deal with Gabriel's multi-decade fascination with the work of Christopher Alexander on finding the underlying patterns in architecture that make buildings pleasing and habitable, with Gabriel asking the eminently reasonable question whether such patterns also exist for designing software that is pleasing to use. These essays are stimulating, but have a vaguely surreal quality when one notes that Gabriel has spent most of his professional life in Palo Alto, Alexander most of his in Berkeley, but -- according to Alexander's foreward to "Patterns of Software" -- the two have never met in person to discuss their ideas. Should either happen to read this review, I will make Gabriel and Alexander the following offer: pick a place in the Bay area. Make sure it has lots of "the quality without a name" (Alexander's phrase for what other people would call a lived-in quality or sense of rightness). The kind of Italian place in North Beach where the Beat poets used to argue 'til dawn would do nicely. Let's have dinner. I'll pick up the tab. It will be worth it.
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