I’d have to say that it’s an interesting start to my day when I wake up and find that I’ve been smacked down not once, but twice by Joel Spolsky. And that I just had, by far, the most hits ever in one day on my weblog. Not something that happens every day, you know…

As with the comments a few months ago, many people have asked questions regarding legal aspects of the patent application. And, as with my previous replies to those comments, I’m not going to try and answer those questions because I don’t have a law degree and am not qualified to comment on any kind of legal question. As a general rule, I’ve found it is best to try and not comment on subjects about which I don’t have a fairly substantial grasp of, and that goes double for this case. That said, there are a couple of responses that I have concerning the new round of comments:

First, I would have to say that I’m extremely gratified by everyone’s high estimation of my employability. Were I the type of person to quit a company because it pursues software patents (more on that in a moment), I’m glad to know that everyone believes I’d have an easy time finding a job at a company that doesn’t pursue such patents like IBM… er, Google… uh, Borland… um, Sun… eh, Oracle… oh, well, maybe Fog Creek Software. (After Joel’s comments this morning, though, maybe I shouldn’t count on that one…)

Second, on a more serious note, several people have asked (in so many words) how I square my statement that “I don’t believe software patents are a good idea” with this or that action by Microsoft. With the implication being that if I truly believed in my principles, I’d quit this evil corporation and go find someone more pure to work for. Well, the answer is pretty simple: while I don’t believe software patents are a good idea, I don’t think that they’re such a big deal that I’d quit working somewhere just because of it. As some of you may have guessed (but perhaps found hard to believe) I actually like Microsoft, enjoy working here and believe it is a good company. Certainly, the company has done things at times that I don’t agree with, but none of them have ever risen to a level where I thought that they overrode the basic decency and good intent of the company as a whole. Does this mean that there are things that I would quit Microsoft over? Sure. If, for example, I were to find out that Microsoft was manufacturing its products using Soylent Green, I would quit in a New York minute (and give Charlton Heston a call). But so far that hasn’t happened for me.

I’ll also add that my intent in saying this is not to denigrate those people who feel much more passionately about software patents than I do and who refuse to work for any company that pursues such patents. I may not feel the same way as they do, but I recognize the genuine passion that they feel around this issue and really respect it. And I think that it is really important, as a human being, to know what your principles are and stand up for them. This one just happens not to be such a major one for me that I feel the need to start prepping my resume…

P.S. – As for those who suggest that I’ve sold my principles for stock options, have you seen our stock price, say, in the last few years?

Rocky asks the question “What languages and language families have you been competent in during your career?” and provides his own list. Here’s mine, in order, as I remember it:

1. BASIC (IBM-5100, a precursor to the IBM PC)
2. BASIC (TRS-80 Model III)
3. APL (IBM-5100)
4. AppleBASIC (Apple ][+ and Apple ][e)
5. UCSD Pascal (IBM PC)
6. Unix shell scripting (not sure the machine)
7. C (ditto)
8. Turbo Pascal (IBM PC)
9. GBBS Pro BASIC (a custom BBS language, Apple ][e)
10. Scheme (Mac)
11. C++ (IBM PC)
12. Haskell (Sun)
13. Visual BASIC 1.0 to present day (Windows & .NET)
14. SQL (Access & SQL Server)
15. Java (Windows)
16. MSIL (.NET)
17. C# (.NET)

And there is a small smattering of experience with other languages, but no significant programming experience. Broadly, this breaks down to the following families:

1. BASIC
2. Pascal
3. C
4. Functional languages like Scheme, Haskell, etc.
5. Other

I’ll also add that the entry for “APL” is really a joke. I started programming on IBM-5100s over at Duke University. The 5100 had the distinction of having a switch on the front panel marked “BASIC/APL”. Depending on which position the switch was in, that’s the language you used when the machine booted up. Somehow, my friend Tom and I came into possession of some mag tapes (which is what the 5100 used for storage) with a bunch of games written for the 5100, including an adventure game written in APL. I seem to remember really wanting to learn how to modify the adventure game and so I set about learning APL. Unfortunately, I was probaby 11 years old at the time and had nowhere near the necessary mathematical foundations to be able to understand the language, so the whole enterprise was a bust. So Tom and I fell back to writing an adventure game in BASIC. I think I still have a printout of “Escape from Carr Building” somewhere around here…

Updated 02/17/05: How could I forget SQL?

Apparently it’s the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s birth, so for a brief period of time the media spotlight is shining again on the founder of Objectivism. Interestingly, there is a way in which Ayn Rand was tangentially involved in the creation of the precursor to this blog. When I received my brand-spanking new 300 baud modem for my birthday way back when, there were no BBSes in my hometown. This led to many long-distance phone bills calling places like Norfolk, VA, which made my parents oh-so-happy. Within a few months, thankfully, some local ones opened up. Most of them were the usual run-of-the-mill (i.e. boring) BBSes, but one of them had an extremely active political discussion group. Being 13 and somewhat naive, I dove into the discussion with my proto-socialist views and started duking it out with all involved. Two of the participants, who went by the names Darkshot and Cardinal Richardson, were dyed-in-the-wool libertarians who were very big on Ms. Rand (and were also usually the most interesting people to argue with). After debating for a few months, Darkshot apparently decided that although I was completely wrongheaded in my thinking, I was intelligent enough to be saved. So he took it upon himself to send me a copy of Atlas Shrugged (and some other books, I think, but I forget which ones).

When I went off to summer camp that year, I took the book with me and ended up reading it straight through. I have to say that it was probably one of the most entertaining books that I’ve ever read – it’s sort of like a comic book in fiction form. A bit of mystery, some really good good guys, some really bad bad guys and the end of the world – what could be better? It didn’t turn me into an Objectivist as hoped, but it did help sharpen my own views on things. Sadly, Darkshot passed away a few years ago but the book still has a sentimental place on my shelf. (I later tried reading The Fountainhead, but I found that it lacked the zip of Atlas Shrugged.)

The whole point of this is that in many ways the fact that, at the tender age of 13, I could go online and argue politics with adults and be taken seriously was a seriously formative experience. (As they say, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.) The egalitarian nature of online discussion had, I think, a lot to do with my desire to run my own BBS and helped spark my interest in online communities that continues to this day. So, thanks, Ayn, and happy birthday!

(As a footnote: Atlas Shrugged also holds the distinctive honor of being the only book that I’ve finished where I didn’t read the whole book. Those of you who’ve read the book know what I’m talking about. I can still distinctly remember getting about 3 pages into Galt’s diatribe before I thought “How long does this thing go on?” and started flipping ahead. When I realized it was, like, 40 pages, that was it…)

It’s mid-year review time again, and this year I’m resolving to do my review by the date that it’s actually due instead of when I usually do it, which is maybe two days before the actual review discussion. I’m generally positive about the review process but, I have to say, the part that gets old the longer you work here is the “Top 3 Strengths and Weaknesses” section. Back in the “old days,” when I had only been at the company, say, three years, this section was actually a very useful opportunity for me to reflect on what I did well and what I could improve on at a more general level. For example, in 1995, a new weakness showed up on my list – delegation – that reflected my move towards owning more areas in the product and beginning to have some management responsibilities. That was a good opportunity to think about why I had issues with delegation and what I could do about it, above and beyond the more targeted goals that I had for the next year.

But, c’mon. This is my 13th mid-year review and I’m running out of things to say. It’s not that I don’t have strengths and weaknesses to talk about, it’s just that they looks suspiciously like last year’s strengths and weaknesses. And the ones from the year before that. In some sense, over the course of 13 years I’ve managed to work my way through the easy weaknesses and now am engaged in the long twilight struggle against my more intractible weaknesses. I mean, I expect that I’m going to be working on my weakness concerning “dealing with ambiguity” for the forseeable future – I’ve improved a lot in the last year, and I expect to keep improving, but this is the kind of thing that is as much a part of my personality as anything else. Over the course of, say, the next ten years of my life I expect it to continue to improve, but it’s probably going to sit there on my “strengths and weaknesses” list for most of those years (assuming I’m still at Microsoft in 10 years, you never know…).

So this year I’m probably going to end up just copying last year’s list, but I’m not feeling particularly good about it. Nobody likes to feel like they’ve plateaued. So I’m choosing to view it as a sign of maturity. Yeah, right. I guess we’ll see what I come up with next year…

So Andrea and I were talking on Friday about learning to cook and, in particular, how I used to really drive her nuts with stupid questions when I was taking my first culinary steps in the kitchen. Now, when I say “stupid questions,” I mean really stupid questions not “emperor’s new clothes” kind of stupid questions. The latter kind of stupid questions are understandable and have a certain aura of respectability. For example, while the question “Hey, honey, this recipe says that I need to ‘julienne’ the carrots. What does that mean?” might seem like a stupid question to someone who already knows their way around a kitchen, for the novice it’s a perfectly understandable question. My wife was always more than happy to answer those sorts of questions (provided that she knew the answer, of course…).

No, the stupid questions that drove her nuts were ones along the lines of “Honey, the recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of cooking oil. Where’s the cooking oil?” Questions that, even in my novice state, I should have been able to answer easily if I had just stopped and spent five seconds thinking about it. I mean, it’s not like I hadn’t seen her get the oil out of the cabinet a hundred times. Heck, it’s not like I couldn’t have, through the process of elimination, figured out what cabinet it was in. I was just having a momentary brain lapse, one that occurs less frequently now that: a) I know my way around the kitchen, and b) my wife’s standard answer was something along the lines of “Well, have you looked for the cooking oil?”

The point of the conversation, ultimately, was that no matter how hard one tries it’s sometimes impossible to avoid asking stupid questions like this. The best we can do is draw up a little social contract: I, the undersigned, do solemnly agree to think before I ask a question so as to minimize the chance of asking a stupid question; you, the other undersigned, do solemnly agree to not call me an idiot when I do ask a stupid question, understanding that such things do, occasionally, happen. As long as each of us keeps up our side of the bargain, everyone gets along just fine.

I was reminded of this conversation today when, in response to a technical problem I’m having, I sent out an email to a large email alias describing my problem and asking if anyone was aware of it. About 30 seconds later, I got responses from several people (including Dare) pointing out that my exact problem had been discussed four days ago on the exact same alias. Fortunately, everyone was very nice about it and no one said anything to the effect of “here’s the answer, you moron.” As they say: sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug…

(As a side note, the one indispensible aid I have found in my quest for culinary mastery is the updated The Joy of Cooking. Besides having lots of good receipes, that thing has saved my rear more times than I care to think. Highly recommended.)

Via Slashdot, an article on the problems with patents and possible solutions. Interesting to see that it’s not just the software side of things that’s had issues. I especially liked the patent on “swinging on a swing.”

In the wake of the IsNot patent brouhaha, aside from the “you are scum” comments, people have had several reasonable questions about my own feelings about the situation. So let me pause and talk about software patents for a moment. Lest there be any question about this, what follows are my own personal feelings about the matter and have nothing to do with official Micorosoft policy.

Personally, I don’t believe software patents are a good idea. I realize that algorithms lie in that grey area between a mechanical process (which is patentable) and an abstract idea (which is not), but at a purely practical level I think that software patents generally do much more harm than good. As such, I’d like to see them go away and the US patent office focus on more productive tasks. I have nothing but contempt for any company that tries to use patents to achieve what they could not through purely competitive means. This includes Microsoft, should they ever choose to do so or have they ever chosen to do so. (I’m not aware of any such situation, but I’m hardly omniscient.)

However, software patents do exist. So while the good fight goes on to get rid of them, I also believe that it would be dangerously naive to not play the game as best we can in the meantime in as principled a way as possible. There are a lot of people who would love nothing more than to just take a piece out of Microsoft either because they can or because they want to get rich and not for any better reason than that. I’ve been around long enough to see the kind of trouble that patents can cause us, and so I believe the best defense is a good offense. While I don’t believe in using patents in an unprovoked way, I do believe in having a robust patent arsenal with which to defend ourselves should someone get it in their head that they want to hold our products hostage for money or just to cause trouble.

One of the most unfortunate aspect of the software patent system is that there is a distinct advantage, should you have the money to do so, to try and patent everything under the sun in the hopes that something will stick. If someone has a patent on “a biological system used to aspirate oxygen gases to fuel biological processes” (i.e. lungs), I wouldn’t be surprised. (If there isn’t, no fair submitting the patent before me!) This is bad both because it jams up a system that’s not really equipped to handle software patents well in the first place and because it increases the likelihood of broad, random patents slipping through the system. Microsoft has been as much a victim of this as anyone else, and yet we’re right there in there with everyone else, playing the game. It’s become a Mexican standoff, and there’s no good way out at the moment short of a broad consensus to end the game at the legislative level.

So that’s how I feel about software patents in general. As far as the specific IsNot patent goes, I will say that at a personal level, I do not feel particularly proud of my involvement in the patent process in this case. Beyond that, there’s not much to say: many comments addressed legal questions which I am woefully unqualified to comment on and for which speculation would be very unwise on my part.