from the pages of...

Guns for Hire and the Moral Imperative

James O. Coplien, Bell Labs
C++ Report 9(5), May 1997, 41-45; 68


1. OOPSLA '96: Patterns come into their own

OOPSLA '96 was held in San Jose, California, October 6 - 10, 1996, the second-largest OOPSLA ever with about 2700 attendees. Patterns made an impressive showing: 1 plenary paper, 5 workshops, 9 tutorials, and 5 posters took up the pattern theme. But, first and foremost, it was the first time that Christopher Alexander accepted an invitation to address the community of software developers who have taken up the pattern agenda. For me, it was also an opportunity to meet and get to know the man we've wondered so much about for the past three years.

Past installations of the Column Without a Name have all offered thoughts on important principles and issues facing the pattern community. This month I'll just tell the story of OOPSLA '96, patterns, the moral imperative, and Alexander the man.


2. First Impressions

I've never been so nervous about anything in my life. To invite Prof. Alexander to OOPSLA was to take a serious risk. He has great influence on our field, but he's an outsider. His outlook is unusual even by the standards of his own field. Prof. Alexander struggled for a long time with the question of the relevance of his work to ours: what could he say to us that would address who we were and what we were doing? There were several complications in the logistics. Would the audience accept him? Would he end discounting us as following a misguided analogy?

I gained my first impressions of Alexander in a phone conversation with him in March of 1996. I had mailed him an invitation to speak at OOPSLA several weeks earlier. In the mean time, he had been working on the foreword to Richard Gabriel's book, which had caused him to think deeply about the relationship between what he had been doing in the field of architecture and what we are trying to do in the field of computing. He called me one day to explore the question further. What could he talk about that would address our needs, and cater to the interests of the object community? I told him that, given the reception his work had enjoyed in the industry, it didn't matter what he talked about. He quickly replied that, no, he didn't want to do that; he wanted to address the needs of the audience.

So this guy really is into human issues, I thought. Wow. It's rare to run into someone like that. Well, he told me he'd think about it more, but that he was certainly interested.

His thoughts would take shape over time, and as time went on, it looked more and more certain that he'd be comfortable addressing us at OOPSLA. There were some logistic complications to overcome, and I became hopeful that we could make everything come together in time for the conference.


3. Of Technology and Aesthetics

I flew into San Jose the Saturday before OOPSLA started. I was to be in a workshop on Sunday (The People Side of Object-Oriented Technologies), and Alexander was to arrive in town on Monday. I tentatively arranged to meet him Monday evening. He asked to see the convention hall Monday night to familiarize himself with the setting so it would appear familiar and comfortable to him the morning of the talk. I asked Richard Gabriel if he'd like to accompany me; that only seemed fitting, as there is probably no one in the software community who has worked more closely with Alexander than he. I also invited a colleague of mine, Dr. Lizette Velazquez, whose thesis work was closely tied to patterns, and whose current work is closely integrated with both the technical and human agendas of the pattern discipline
Still nervous about whether Alexander would arrive on time, I had asked him to call me on my cellular phone when he checked in. The call came while I was walking through the exhibit hall. We made final arrangements to meet that evening. I remember running through the exhibit hall, grabbing everyone I knew and exclaiming, "He's here! He's here!" Part of me was jubilant, and part of me was still scared to death, not knowing exactly what he would talk about, or how he viewed our industry.

When the time came to leave the tutorial reception and head to Alexander's hotel to meet him, I could find Dick, but I couldn't track down Lizette. We hurried to the hotel, about 15 minutes away on foot. We stopped at a rest room on the way--Dick said something about worrying about wetting his pants, and I could empathize. At the hotel, we called up to Alexander's room to let him know we had arrived; he said he'd be down "in two ticks."

Neither Dick nor I had ever met Alexander face-to-face before, and we had only scant interactions with him on the phone. I don't think I've ever seen two grown men harbor more child-like fears about meeting someone. Dick was concerned for the sake of his book. He had brought along an autographed copy of the book which he had written, and for which Alexander had written the foreword. It was just off the press and this was likely the first copy that Alexander would have seen. I brought my aspirations for the conference and for the future of the pattern discipline. We sat there for what seemed an eternity, trying to divine the conversion between British "ticks" and California minutes. The elevator descended, opened, and out walked a man who had to be Alexander.

He was comfortably dressed, unassuming, warm and cordial. He had that stereotypical professorial appearance, longish hair, clean-shaven, glasses, an inquiring and engaging look on his face. He was part academic, part British gentleman, part artiste, and part elf all in one. We shook hands and introduced ourselves. I gave him his conference materials, which I had picked up earlier, and Dick gave him a copy of his book. Lizette rushed into the lobby, out of breath; she had been in a different room at the reception and, not finding us there, tracked us down at the hotel.

We called a cab to take us to the convention center.

The conference hall at the convention center is, well, huge: 50,000 square feet, bigger than a football field. Alexander wanted an air of intimacy in the room, a feeling of contact between himself and the audience. Several times during the evening Alexander would say, "This room is just dreadful." But he didn't say it in exasperation, but with a measured, characteristically British outlook tempered with his own sense of judgement as someone who fixes such things professionally. It presented a challenge for the architect, an experiment, an opportunity to design.

The biggest challenge was lighting. Alexander wanted to walk back and forth on the floor level immediately in front of the audience. At floor level, it would be difficult for people a football field away to see him. The room had three huge projection screens in front, two of which are usually used to project a live talking head image of the speaker, but those would be useless: there was no moving spotlight, so the camera couldn't pick him up unless he stood in the spotlights on the platform. So he went up on the stage and found that the lights were in his eyes and there was no way he could see the audience. He wanted contact with the audience. He speaks without notes, and the contact with and feedback from the audience were important to him.

Fortunately, the audio-visual (A/V) people were there getting ready for the big day. They advised us that, no, Prof. Alexander could not walk back and forth across the front of the audience. The only suitable lighting was on the stage.

Rod Olafson, the OOPSLA A/V chair, was also there that night. We described our dilemma to him, and he went to talk to the A/V people at the other end of the football field. Perplexed about what to do, we all pulled up chairs, or a piece of floor, in about the fifth row, to assess the dismal state of affairs.

Alexander again described the room as "dreadful" and analyzed the unfortunate trade-off that would make either him or the audience invisible to the other. I think that it was at this point that Dick took the A/V people aside and said something like, "Look, it cost us a zillion dollars to bring this guy in, and he's central to the conference. If we don't make him happy, now, he won't speak tomorrow. It's really in our interest to cooperate with him." After Dick came back, and we had a bit more discussion, Lizette brightened and said, "Oh! so you want to feel like you're in contact with your audience?" And we thought that he just wanted to be able walk around when he talked. Cheered that someone had understood his need, Alexander heightened his enthusiasm a bit and said, "Yes!" At that point, Lizette took Alexander by the hand, said, "Come with me, I want to work with you!" and led him up to the stage to assess the lighting situation.

I don't remember the exact order of the remaining events, but lots of things started to happen. Prof.Alexander tried to understand the lamp interactions and the degree to which they could be controlled individually, without much cooperation from the A/V people, who were used to doing things in prescribed ways. The A/V people were trying different combinations of lamps. They claimed that what we were asking for--a low enough light level that Alexander could see his audience--would below the low-light cutoff point for the TV camera. Alexander asked them to try it, to do an experiment. They replied that they didn't need to do the experiment, and repeated their assertion. This exchange repeated two or three times.

Somewhere along here, Dick again got up and went to the back, mounted the audio/visual stage and started operating the video cameras. When he moved toward the video projector, intending to change its parameters, it seemed like he was rushed by a SWAT team of mortified A/V people. Lizette continued to calmly work with Alexander on the stage.

Eventually, we got the A/V supervisor up front, and worked out the possible lighting combinations. It was clearly frustrating for Alexander, but he always managed to speak in deductive tones, asking specific questions, painstakingly explaining the rationale for the things he wanted them to try. We did the experiment that Alexander had asked for (finally!), and found a suitable combination of the podium spot, table spots, and wash lights that would avoid blinding him but provide enough light for the camera (hurrah!). The video projections weren't as sharp as they would have been with full lighting, but they were adequate.

The master designer, with support from a few friends and from the technical folks, had balanced the forces.

Already, in the course of the evening, we had discussed the architecture of the convention center (which he found nice, except for the "dreadful" lecture hall), the importance of human-to-human contact in his presentation, and many other issues that tied his work to the opportunity at hand. We resolved to retire to his hotel and celebrate our success in the bar.


4. Talking about The Quality

Dick drove us back to the hotel in his car, which was parked in the basement parking area of the conference center. The bar was comfortable and quiet, and had few patrons other than ourselves. Suitably enough, the ceiling had intricately carved patterns in the woodwork, a fact which we jokingly pointed out to Alexander. He doesn't strike me as someone who is looking for patterns under every rock, though. He looked around at the bar and, without much deductive explanation of the patterns that made it so, matter-of-factly pronounced his pleasure with the setting. He had earlier made a similar assessment of the conference center as a whole.
We talked about many details of Alexander's career, through stories and anecdotes and his responses to our questions. One thing I learned is that Marvin Minsky was instrumental in signing off at a crucial juncture in the approval of Alexander's Ph.D. thesis, perhaps because "he was probably one of only two people alive at the time who could have understood it," he mused. The thesis, of course, was later published as Notes on Synthesis of Form [Alexander74]. That work will surface again in this article.

We discussed many other details of his career, most of them sad stories of his struggle to overcome the prejudice of the architecture profession against objective beauty. Alexander holds that aesthetics are objective. Though beauty cannot be quantified (therefore, the Quality Without a Name), it can experimentally be verified with human subjects. That is, given two works of art, you can ask people which is the more centered, the more peaceful, the one that most draws them to itself. And he claims--with empirical backing--that most people will agree. (No one believes this when they first hear it, but it certainly seems to be true; see [Gabriel96], pp. 79-95).

The discussions we had around these matters is deserving of an entire essay some day; it involves social, cultural, and legal battles that I found incredible. The objectivity of patterns really scares artisans whose livelihood depends on the belief in their "magic" insights into aesthetics and taste.

I'd often told myself, "If I could ever ask Alexander a question, I would ask him..." So I asked him: Was he conscious of the ties from his work to the Tao te Ching (Lao Tsu's classic of Chinese philosophy) and to Feng-Shui (the Chinese (now Japanese) practice of harmonizing the energies in architecture, which has become a very yuppie thing in the U. S. in the past two years). As for the Tao te Ching: yes, of course. As for feng-shui; no, he never took any ideas from it. But he did relate that during a trip to a remote outpost in Japan, he discussed the art with some local feng-shui advocates late into the night after many drinks. He had been there to lay out a major project and had spent part of the day, using his own patterns and principles, to decide where the facility entrance should be. The feng-shui masters would have chosen the same location. It intrigued Alexander in this case, as in other cases where he has observed the same synchronicity, that he has found absolutely no correlation in the underlying principles or rationales in the two approaches.

He told us a bit of his plans to return to England, to a lovely house he had found in the Sussex countryside after years of searching. We talked about good places to live. He loves the West coast of the United States, an area he describes as being one of the most intellectually tolerant places in the world. These are clearly the words of a man who has fought hard battles to have his work accepted.

Those four or five hours of experience took Alexander out of the realm of distant idealist for me, and helped me see him as a warm human being


5. Hired Guns and the Moral Imperative

On Tuesday morning, I met Alexander for breakfast. Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham joined us, as did Dick and Lizette. I sheepishly asked if he'd autograph my copies of some of his books. We took some group pictures. I asked him if he got this celebrity treatment everywhere he went, and he replied, "No, just when I go to speak to groups where I have no idea what they do." We all laughed. I took a little comfort and a lot of sympathy in the remark: he was probably ten times as worried about how his speech would be received as I was.
The time finally came for the keynote: the opening session of the OOPSLA technical program. I was still worried about how the talk would go over with the audience. OOPSLA has a mixed history with keynotes from outside our discipline. Some of them have been so bad that they stand out to me as the most memorable parts of past OOPSLA programs.I confided in Lizette that introducing Alexander would certainly be the high point of my career, that I was scared to death of how things would go.

John Pugh and Lougie Anderson made their welcoming remarks, and then I went to the podium to follow with my own overview of the technical program, and to introduce Prof. Alexander. I introduced him as someone who had garnered many architectural accolades but, more to the point, as an individual whose influence over our discipline had been unparalleled by any single person from outside our discipline in the past decade. I noted that his work has long been cited as a model for software engineers, starting with this delicious quote from the Proceedings of the NATO Conference on Software Engineering in Garmisch in 1968 [NATO68]:

... software designers are in a similar position to architects and civil engineers, particularly those concerned with the design of large heterogeneous constructions, such as towns and industrial plants. It therefore seems natural that we should turn to thee subjects for ideas about how to attack the design problem. As one single example of such a source of ideas I would like to mention: Christopher Alexander: Notes on the Synthesis of Form.

Thank you very much. This is a pretty strange situation I find myself in. I hope you sympathize with me. I'm addressing a room full of people, a whole football field full of people. I don't know hardly anything about what all of you do. So, be nice to me.

I want you to help me. I want you to realize that problem of generating living structure is not being handled by architectural planners or developers or construction people now. There is no way that they are ever going to actually be able to do that, because the methods they use are not capable of it.

The methods that you have at your fingertips and deal with everyday in the normal course of invents are perfectly designed to do this. So that if you have the interest, you have the capacity and you have the means. I heard a rumor at breakfast that some of the people in the room begin to worry about their jobs. I have no idea if that's true. But I was told there was an undercurrent of unease as to where is all this going. There is this huge expanding phenomenon--programming and so forth; and yet an uneasiness about, well, where is it all headed? What is it going to do?

Please forgive me. I'm going to be directly blunt for a horrible second. But it could be viewed that the technical way in which you look at programming at the moment is almost like guns for hire. In other words, you're the technicians. You know how to make the programs work. Tell us what to do, daddy, and we'll do it. And what I am proposing here is something a little bit different from that which is a view of programming as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you are capable of creating, managing, making available. And which could then have the result that a living structure in our towns, houses, work places, cities, is an attainable thing which it has not been for the last 50 to 100 years. That is an incredible vision of the future. I realize that you probably think I'm nuts! Because this is not what I'm supposed to be talking about to you. And you may say, well, gosh, great idea, but we're not interested. But I do think you are capable of that. And I don't think anybody else is going to do this job.

The QPW development team has chronologically mature membership by industry standards. "We have professionals, not hired guns" noted one member of the development team. People are brought into the team for their recognized expertise in domains of central importance to the project: spreadsheet engines, graphics, databases, and so forth. No one is viewed as a warm body, or general engineer, or interchangeable employee: Each brings special talents to the effort.