Practically Perfect

Julie Andrews as the magic nanny

And now, for another movie review -- one of my favorite movies from childhood. When I mention "Mary Poppins", most male acquaintances are dumb-founded. Isn't that the girly movie about a magic nanny? Can you be serious? Yes -- I can be as serious as Walt Disney himself; "Mary Poppins" was his favorite, of all the movies that Disney made up to that time.

The story behind the story is that Walt saw his daughter reading P.L. Travers' story some 20-odd years earlier, and wanted the movie rights. When he finally secured them, and his screenwriters read the Poppins books, they were perplexed. The books were a series of small vignettes, without any clearly defined villains or elaborate plots. Also, Mary Poppins was in some ways portrayed as a middle-aged crone (albeit magical). In fact, Bette Davis was at one time considered for the role. Rather than see these facts as limitations, the screenwriters, Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi, saw them as a chance to enlarge the scope of the story -- a creative carte blanche. The first thing they did was scrap Davis, and pick the lovely, 27-year old Julie Andrews to play the lead. Not many people had preconceived ideas about who should play the part anyway. Miss Andrews' crisp English enunciation, singing voice and physical beauty made her a natural.

Next, there was this problem of no real plot. The handling of this problem was brilliant. The screenwriters presented the Banks household as one experiencing both family disintegration and a battle of the sexes. Both topics were significant for mid-century America, and the handling was witty without being preachy or finger wagging. Mrs. Banks was presented as a militant suffragette, and Mr. Banks was presented as a somewhat arrogant, chauvinistic head of the household. Both parents' zeal had closed their eyes to the fact that the children were without love or supervision. Though Mary Poppins herself was female, little was made of that -- the movie wasn't really a feminist screed. Both parents were held accountable (lovingly so, at the end), and the larger point was that family togetherness trumps money or career goals. All that said, it's interesting that the movie came out shortly after the Kennedy assassination -- a point where it seemed like a world run by men might experience total destruction through nuclear war. There was something altogether charming about a magic nanny who could effect wonderful changes through magic, songs, finger-snaps and changes of attitude most of all. In the fiction world, super powers are normally given to muscled men in capes, and they're gifted with powers of force and coercion. Mary Poppins and to some extent Samantha on TV's contemporaneous "Bewitched" put forth the bold proposition that things like subtlety, kindness and charm might work their own kind of magic.

Lastly, I'll go "out on a limb", like Shirley McClain. The metaphors in the movie are very strong -- the fact that the nanny comes out of the clouds has a highly theological connotation. Some of the songs' lyrics can make you think twice. Amid the treacly sugar-sweet lyrics are wry little ripostes aimed at various targets. "Perfect Nanny" and "Jolly Holiday" merit repeat listening. The Sherman brothers wrote the songs and never did so well before or after “Mary Poppins”. All things considered, the movie about a “practically perfect” nanny is practically perfect itself.

Tower of Babel

And he made them to speak a different language...

When I was a mere lad of 23, I got my first real programming job at a company called Tracor, in Austin. I worked in the Aerospace accounting department, and worked on programs that did updates to sequential tape masterfiles. On-line database transactions were relatively new. My total arsenal of tools was: COBOL, Job Control Language, and training for hierarchical and relational databases. When I moved to Dallas two years later, in 1983, there were many mainframe IBM shops where I could shop my skills: Frito Lay, J.C. Penny's, TI, American Airlines, EDS, etc. The fairly narrow knowledge base availed me of much employment potential at that time. I settled on a job with TI, and happily coded away. Back then, other companies might have done some work in ALGOL, PL/1 or Fortran but COBOL had established itself as the dominant business application language for America's Fortune 500. COBOL was flexible enough to be used for on-line apps, batch and virtually any other processing mode.

By the late 80's, companies started doing the "paradigm" shift to newer platforms and languages. My company made some coy attempts at "Client/Server" computing using languages such as C, Smalltalk and Visual Basic. At the same time, CASE tools such as IEF were making competitive inroads on mainframe applications. These efforts flopped frequently, but some persevered and the systems are alive to this day. They may be small, disjointed or infrequently updated but are still alive -- maintained by a small cadre of "arcane" language experts. Pull forward to 2000, and you have more things thrown into the mix. I could elaborate on browsers and database systems but will keep the focus on languages themselves. We had Java, javascript, ABAP, HTML, DHTML, C++, C #, Power Builder, perl, UNIX shell scripting -- and multiple flavors and releases of most of the preceding. It was and still is a veritable Tower of Babel.

An unsubtle change of the last two decades is the shifting away from code that reads like English or algebraic syntax and over to a highly abbreviated "postfix" syntax used by object oriented languages. Thus,
ADD +1 to total morphs into
total = total + 1 morphs into
total++;

Economy of space, as well as ease of machine translation is sometimes given as a reason for this. But the point of higher level languages was never to make things easier for the machine so much as to make them easier for humans. Unless sub-second response time is critical (as in some type of real-time gaming app) the machine cycles shouldn't figure as importantly as the time it takes a human programmer to read the source code and comprehend what it does.

Some assumptions to make for your next business application:
1) The people coming after you to maintain it will probably be of average not expert abilities
2) They will be very time-limited in fixing bugs or making enhancements
3) Any high-level advantages to the original code (e.g., normalization, abstraction, object reuse) must be readily obvious and well documented or
the advantage will be lost on time-stressed support programmers.

Even for programs which permit cryptic, abrupt syntax, meaningful variable names and plentiful comments will ease the problem of readability. One could ask, in 2005, is there any move toward 'consensus' languages or programming styles? As I write this, I'm looking at an article of yet another new language called AJAX. The IT community will muddle thru, we can be sure. In all cases, people should say, "Is newer better?". "Is different better?" Not wanting to come across as Amish, I'd say frequently the answer is "yes". But if the answer is "no", you may have yourself a kludgy system in a niche setting -- nice work for a soon-to-retire contractor. But not very nice for the long haul. Better to build a system with readability and maintainability in mind. What language to use? My conservative nature would steer me away from "flavor of the month" unless it has big momentum --- I'll hold off on AJAX for now.

The Power of Myth

Super Heros


In rereading my previous blog, I may have come across as too smug and critical, especially when talking about the Scientologist's mythology involving Xenu. Yes, the story of an evil emperor and his thetans is far-fetched -- it would qualify as imaginative fiction. Such a silly story -- no wonder the Church of Scientology keeps it off their main web site. They don't want to scare a new prospect. You can tell there is a big "BUT" approaching....

BUT, mythology serves a purpose after all. In this wide world there are things bigger than us (some would liken it to God) and things invisible but quite real. Even in the realm of the ordinary, unaided human eyes cannot see atoms, photons, bacteria, radio waves, ultraviolet light or distant galaxies. In fact, our eyesight is rather crude and geared to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of early humans. The powers that made us deemed that seeing a buffalo or an opposing warlord was sufficient for human vision. Many things that exist and are worth seeing don't fall upon your retina without help from an electron microscope or a planetarium telescope.

So how does this tie back to Scientology? IF you have a belief in a superior intelligence, you may want to describe a cosmological or theological model. There may be forces of "good" and "evil" to which you want to ascribe values, characteristics, personalities. And thus, you have mythology. A sampling of mythic beings: ghosts, demons, witches, warlocks, aliens, zombies, vampires, monsters, super heros and the list goes on and on. Using such characters, your story will unfold in a way that is understood by children and yet it may be probed for deeper meaning by adults.

My own cosmology involves a superior intelligence that would be difficult to describe in ordinary terms. Also, the physics of time and space plays a part in mine. The characters are interesting and they play in a world of bizarre physics -- a time-warping, possibly recursive universe. If my cosmology were to steal from any story, it would be "Wizard of Oz". Why? Because there is a little bit of duplicity and duality of characters -- a Carnival Barker who is also a Wizard. Things so familiar have another role, a hidden side, a fantastic other dimension. What you see is only a fraction of what you get.

Crazy? I'm hearing the refrains of a Patsy Cline song. Now I've gone loony, just like L. Ron Hubbard. I still would never endorse Scientology -- I don't buy into their mythology, and they seem to be interested in your pockets more than your soul. But I will respect their right, and anyone's right to mythologize. I won't be sending them to Belleview, but neither will I put money in their hat.

Battle of the Titans

Tom and Matt on Today

The actor Tom Cruise, in his strange attack on psychiatry, brought up an interesting topic. Pragmatist that I am, I always thought that Freud's ideas about oedipal complexes were some type of gross oversimplification. And cognitive therapy always seemed like undiluted bullshit. This type of therapy is best exemplified by Bob Newhart saying, "Follow that thought Mr. Petersen." Certainly there is beneficial catharsis in talking of your inner thoughts and misdeeds. But does it actually cure anything significant in your brain's wiring? Psychiatry redeemed itself some in recent years with the advent of psychoactive drugs that actually do what they say (e.g., SRI’s for depression and obsessive/compulsive behavior). Psychiatry moved ever closer to hard science from that state of soft, psycho-babble mushiness.

Now comes neural expert Tom Cruise. And what is his beef with psychiatry? Those very drugs - Ritalin, antidepressants, etc, that cause definitive changes in the functioning of neurons. And he even personalized the attack by using Brooke Shields’ medication for postpartum depression as an example. Were Tom to come at it from a different direction, I might say "Bravo, Tom". But Tom is coming from a place called Scientology. Tom is parroting the Scientology line -- a stern opposition to shrinks. Psychiatry is so "unscientific". And what does Scientology offer as an alternative -- a series of electronic readings called "ingrams" that say how free you are from thetans. What are thetans? According to L. Ron Hubbard (now deceased), they are extraterrestrial creatures who were deposited on Earth millions of years ago, frozen and dead. An evil galactic emperor, Xenu, put them here. And now the souls of these dead thetans haunt human bodies.

Why is it that both approaches leave me unconvinced? The thetan story would qualify a more average person to a padded cell, mass doses of Thorazine and occupational therapy at Belleview hospital. But it's all in the delivery -- other silly things have gained credence from a good sales pitch: spray-on hair, pet rocks, mood rings, chia pets and most anything sold by Ronco. There are aspects of Christianity itself that would qualify lesser evangelists for a straight jacket. What's that you say? He walked on water, raised Lazarus from the dead, and fed the multitude with a loaf of bread? Perhaps you need a 6-week stay at Club Belleview.

Cynic that I am, I liken the Church of Scientology to a grifter who sees another con artist treading on his turf. Prior to truly effective psychiatric medications, it might be a coin toss between cognitive therapy and scientology – which will make me better? Both are somewhat a crock after all. Now, psychiatry has been supplemented with neuroscience, and there are actual results to be had. Are drugs sometimes over-prescribed and abused? Certainly. Does that mean that all use of these effective drugs should be curtailed? Certainly not. So I’ll now leave it to Brooke Shields to set Tom straight. Matt Lauer went too easy on the guy.