Sing a Song of Silicon


Modern poetry bores me silly. I find most of it indistinguishable from pompous politicized prose strewn with random carriage returns. It has no rhyme, no rhythm, just an author (usually with a private income or taxpayer’s grant, else he’d starve to death) who suffers from the fatal delusion that he has Something Important To Say. Maybe my feeble mind just doesn’t want to make the effort of parsing his intentional dislocations. Don’t know about you, but I’ve got other things to do with my few remaining brain cycles.

I can’t stand modern poetry.

On the other hand, I love older poetry, especially Rudyard Kipling. He’s not politically correct these days—read his poem “The White Man’s Burden” if you want to know why. In his defense, I’ll say that he was a product of his times, as we all are. And he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, so someone must have liked him then. My grandparents gave me a copy of his Just So Stories. My parents used that book to read me to sleep, and it was one of the first books I learned to read myself. I graduated to Kipling’s poetry in high school English class, where I found reading his section of the literature book far more interesting than listening to the teacher. His poems still sing to me as no one else’s ever have, before or since.

Rudyard Kipling’s poetry is great.

What does this have to do with computer geekery, you ask? The incredible acceleration of technological innovation in the last few years brings to my mind Kipling’s poem “McAndrew’s Hymn,” published in 1894. Most of us think of modern times as different from a hundred years ago and nowhere more so than in technology. Still, I’m astounded at how much of McAndrew’s feelings resonate with me today. The title character is an old oceangoing Scottish engineer musing on the most brilliant technological accomplishment of his day: the marine steam engine. That was the beginning of the death of distance, a process that you and I, my fellow geeks, will complete ere we rest. I like this poem so much that I’ve started every chapter with an excerpt from it. You can read the whole thing on line at http://home.pacifier.com/~rboggs/KIPLING.HTML. You may think of Scotty on Star Trek as the prototypical Scottish engineer, but I’m convinced that Gene Roddenberry based him on Kipling’s McAndrew.

Kipling wrote a poem celebrating a marine engineer named McAndrew, almost all of which applies to programmers today.

Every programmer, for example, knows Moore’s law, right? It says that computing power at a given price point doubles every eighteen months. Many programmers also know its reciprocal, Grosch’s law, which states that it doesn’t matter how good the hardware boys are because the software boys will piss it away. A few even know Jablokow’s corollary, which states simply, “And then some.” But McAndrew figured this out a hundred years ago, way before some plagiarist stuck Moore’s name on the idea and called it a law. I think of Kipling’s words as I contemplate the original 4.77 MHz IBM PC (with two floppy drives and 256 KB of memory) that I use as a planter:

The poem includes an early formulation of Moore’s Law.

[I] started as a boiler-whelp when steam and [I] were low.
I mind the time we used to serve a broken pipe wi’ tow.
Ten pound was all the pressure then - Eh! Eh! - a man wad drive;
An’ here, our workin’ gauges give one hunder’ fifty-five!
We’re creepin’ on wi’ each new rig - less weight an’ larger power:
There’ll be the loco-boiler next an’ thirty mile an hour!

Like Rodney Dangerfield, we geeks yearn for respect and appreciation. Society has looked askance at us ever since the first cave-geek examined a sharp stone and said, “Cool fractal patterns. I wonder if it would scale to spearhead size?” Remember how girls in high school flocked around football players, most of whom (not all, Brian) were dumb as rocks? A straight-A average was uncool (mine would have been if I’d had one), and even my chess championship trophy couldn’t compete with a varsity letter. Even though I knew that in the long run I’d make far more money than the high-school jocks (which my father pointed out is far more attractive to the opposite sex), it still burned. McAndrew cried aloud for the same thing, only far more eloquently (my emphasis added):

Romance! Those first-class passengers they like it very well,
Printed an’ bound in little books; but why don’t poets tell?
I’m sick of all their quirks an’ turns-the loves an’ doves they dream-
Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song o’ Steam!

No Robbie Burns am I, and not even my mother likes hearing me sing. But I’ve done my best to tell the story as I see it today. I hope you enjoy reading it.

“Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song o’ Steam!”




Introducing Microsoft. NET
Introducing Microsoft .NET (Pro-Developer)
ISBN: 0735619182
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 110

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net