Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

When I was young, U.S. books sold in Canada for the U.S. price, paid in Canadian dollars, and stores in tourist spots in Maine would take Canadian dollars as equivalent to U.S. dollars. Then the Canadian dollar started to sink against the U.S. dollar. Stores started putting up signs saying that they took the Canadian dollar at, say, 90%, and books started to get two prices. After a while U.S. stores stopped taking Canadian money at all, but books still had two prices.

Now the Canadian dollar has again reached parity with the U.S. dollar. This has happened mainly because the U.S. dollar has dropped in relative value, because the U.S. has become a huge importer of goods and because U.S. interest rates are fairly low. But book prices have not adapted. This means that when I’m in a Canadian book store, I could buy a U.S. book for 11 Canadian/U.S. dollars, or I could wait until I go home and buy the same book for 8 U.S. dollars.

There is obviously a big arbitrage opportunity here–I could buy books in the U.S. and resell them in Canada for a significant discount. I don’t know the arrangements that bookstores have with publishers, but clearly somebody is making a great deal more in Canadian money here. Book aren’t easy to transport or sell, so it would be hard for me personally to take advantage of the arbitrage. The company which presumably is taking advantage is Amazon. Amazon can sell books at U.S. prices, so it is now in the economic interest of Canadian consumers to buy their books from Amazon rather than from a local bookstore.

Amazon already puts huge pressure on local bookstores, so if the currencies remain similar in value, and if book publishers take a couple of years to adjust their pricing, then it’s hard to see how local Canadian bookstores can survive. At least, that’s the theory. In practice, I saw more and better bookstores in Canada then I see at home in the U.S. In the U.S. all the bookstores other than specialty stores or mass chain stores are dying. Their credit with the publishers is drying up, their shelves are getting emptier, and that is a downward spiral with only one ending. I didn’t see this in Canada, but that may also just be because I’m not familiar with the bookstore landscape.

I’m back from vacation following the GCC summit.

Since I was on vacation, I wonder: why are science and technology museums so often aimed at children, and art museums so often not? It’s as though science is naturally presented as educational, whereas art is something you simply appreciate.

To me it would seem more natural to do it the other way around. Art museums should show you information about the artist, the milieu, the technology used, how it developed. Science museums should show you the results, and should drop the interactive exhibits and the kid stuff. No doubt I feel this way because I know more about science than about art. Presumably museum curators tend to be the other way around.

There are certainly excellent science museums aimed at adults, like the New York Natural History Museum. A surprisingly good museum is the Transportation Museum in Owls Head, Maine. I’m sure there are many others, but somehow most of the ones I’ve been to are disappointing.

I’m at the GCC Summit in Ottawa, and short on time. I gave a double presentation today, on gold (slides) and on writing gcc in C++ (slides).

No science fiction writer ever predicted what actually happened when we went to the Moon: we came home and never went back. Why did that happen? It happened because 1) going to the Moon is expensive and dangerous; and 2) after we got there once, there was nothing to gain by going there again.

There are lots of advantages to putting machines in space around the earth: nearby satellites have lots of uses. And indeed there is a thriving business in sending those satellites into orbit. There is very little advantage to putting humans into orbit around the earth, but it is close enough that we do it anyhow. There is a market for space tourism, but it is not clear how large it is. There are enough multi-millionaires to fill up the available tourist launch capacity for now, but how many of them will want to go into space twice?

I think that people should move off Earth permanently (not everybody, just those who want to go). It’s the ultimate environmentalist position (Earth—love it or leave it). It’s the best way to ensure the continuation of the human species. I’d love to go into space myself (but I expect that by the time I could afford it, I will be too old).

The problem is that space is an insanely dangerous environment. You might think that it would be unpleasant to be in a blizzard in Antarctica, but that’s peanuts compared to space. It will never be easy to live in space—it will always be dangerous, and it will always be expensive. That means that people will never move there unless they see some significant benefit.

The benefit might be science, but very few people will risk their lives for science. The benefit might be living space, but the people who are short on living space are not the people who can afford to move to space. The benefit might be exploration, but explorers tend to want to come home.

This is an area that is full of unknowns. Right now, though, I don’t see any potential benefit to moving to space that is nearly sufficient to overcome the risk and expense. I hope I’m wrong.

Although it hasn’t been my habit to track other blogs closely, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote an interesting post about Programmer Insecurity. The gist of the post is that programmers need to share code early in the development process. They should not develop code in their own cave, and then unleash it on an unsuspecting world.

This is particularly an issue for the case of modifications to an existing free software project. And it’s particularly true for design rather than code. It’s most important to do your design in the open, and let other developers comment on it. Unfortunately, there can be a catch-22 here: a design without code can be vaporware, so people won’t necessarily pay attention to it. But a poor design supported by good code will also not receive a good reception.

The flip side to public development is that free software programmers can be quite harsh. This is magnified by the nature of the medium used to communicate, e-mail, and it is magnified by the fact that people from different cultures have different expectations. It’s very easy for people to send an e-mail message which is intended to be friendly criticism but which is received as an attack. I’m sure that many free software projects have permanently alienated new developers through this sort of mistake.

So my advice for new contributors is to design in the open and to learn how to read e-mail to extract the useful information while ignoring the attacks. These are two separate skills which need to be developed by aspiring free software programmers.

And my advice for people who want to become maintainers is to develop the skill of making helpful comments which are not disparaging. This requires the use of euphemisms and careful attention to language, which are not characteristics of all good programmers.

I’m not a particularly nice guy on the inside, but I’ve learned to play one by applying a set of transformation to my thoughts. A few examples:

• You’re wrong => That turns out not to be the case.
• This is stupid => I think you need some more thought here.
• Learn to use the indent program => You should add spaces there, there, and there.
• We already know this is a terrible idea => You may want to review this e-mail thread.
• Have you heard the word “portability”? => You need to consider other types of processors.
• What idiot told you to do it this way? => Here are some good examples that you may want to follow.

You get the idea. The point is two-fold: developers should try to extract facts from e-mail while ignoring the language, and developers should try to use friendly language to put across their points.