From: Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com>
To: "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
Cc: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2024 09:00:13 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CALQ0xCDgvYxuQqPOQHf=u55OZ+oC6rBVqGUXY7kFnFECD76YBw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20240703233542.ceq73fqdlbgntrgg@illithid>
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Back in the mid-to-late 1980s I was the ringleader of the UNIX underground
at IBM Research. Interestingly, we were for a couple of years the largest
non-academic customer for Sun Microsystems on the east coast of the US.
When IBM bought ROLM, a maker of telephone equipment, they were confronted
with ROLM's insistence on using Sun equipment (and UNIX in general) for
their software development.
So a stream of IBM executives made their way to my office in Yorktown
Heights to try to figure out whether this demand was for real.
I would show them my development environment (emacs and make plus a bunch
of ancillary tools) and demonstrate how I could edit code, build, test, and
debug quickly and smoothly.
After half a dozen VPs came through, they agreed and placed a large order
with Sun for ROLM. That might have helped the business case for a better
AIX, but I'm not sure.
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
On Wed, Jul 3, 2024 at 7:35 PM G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> At 2024-07-03T08:59:11-0600, Marc Rochkind wrote:
> > Steve Jenkin suggests: "Developers of Initial Unix arguably were
> > 10x-100x more productive than IBM OS/360..."
> >
> > Indeed, this is part of accepted UNIX lore.
>
> That claim reminds me of a more general one. Applied to software
> development writ large, it seems to be lore, not a reproducible
> scientific result.
>
> I refer of course to Sackman, Erickson, and Grant's 1968 CACM paper
> which documented a DARPA experiment that found a productivity range of
> 28:1 in their sample of programmers (with veterans of 7 years'
> experience pitted against "trainees"). Naturally enough, plenty of
> people who make claims about variance in programmer productivity are
> unaware of this paper's existence; it's not actually relevant to them as
> a source of knowledge.
>
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20120204023412/http://dustyvolumes.com/archives/497
>
> Thomas Dickey, better known today as the maintainer of ncurses, xterm,
> lynx, and mawk (all for 30 years or more, and among other projects),
> published a critique of this study in 1981.
>
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20120204023555/http://dustyvolumes.com/archives/498
>
> Bill Curtis published a critique of the Sackler et al. paper in 1988.
>
> I quote (via Dickey):
>
> "Sackman's ... message that substantial performance differences do exist
> among programmers remains valid. Detecting a 20+:1 range ratio depends
> upon having one brilliant and one horrid performance in a sample.
> However the range ratio is not a particularly stable measure of
> performance variability among programmers. The dispersions of such data
> as appear in Table I are better represented by such measures as the
> standard deviation or semiinterquartile range."
>
> https://invisible-island.net/personal/paperstuff.html
>
> We have likely all observed how this 28:1 ratio has bloated in retelling
> over time, like the length of a fish catch, to 100:1 or even 1000:1.
> Similarly we're all familiar with the common practice of presenting the
> mean and sometimes the range of some data sample to support one's
> argument, without mentioning the median or mode, let alone the variance
> (or the standard deviation). (If a member of one's audience is familiar
> with non-Gaussian distributions and inquires whether one's sample may be
> better characterized by one, you invite them to disengage from the
> discussion.)
>
> I assert that this "productivity gap" is a myth, and that it persists
> because it serves the purposes of diverse audiences who adopt it with
> motivated reasoning.
>
> 1. Immature Unix enthusiasts like to reassure themselves, and others
> nearby, of their inherent superiority to rival programmers.
>
> 2. Managers like to contrive reasons for (not) promoting individual
> contributors. It's easy to cite this productivity "statistic" and
> then suggest, without indicating anything concrete, that an employee
> is either a rock star or a mediocrity.
>
> 3. Directors in organizations like not having to further justify a
> "stack-rank and cut" approach to reducing salary and benefits as a
> proportion of operational expenditures.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
>
> 4. Business culture in general is deeply wedded to the idea that
> individual productivity, merit, or capacity for "wealth creation" is
> variable by several orders of magnitude, because this claim
> "justifies" variance in compensation over a similarly large range,
> even among college-educated professionals in an organization,
> setting aside those members of staff whose collars shade more toward
> blue. (Outsourcing is useful in increasing opacity, segregating
> workers, and setting them up to have conflicting interests.)
>
> If people start applying their capacity for critical thought to the
> proposition that the CEO is 40,000 times more productive than a
> "Software Engineer II", nothing good will happen.
>
> _Is_ "productivity" among programmers, however defined and measured,
> nonuniform? Likely yes. Has our industry studied the question in a
> serious way, applying rigorous experimental design and statistical
> analysis? Perhaps not.
>
> And if we did, would any of the people making this claim read or
> comprehend the research if it didn't support their biases?
>
> You already know the answer.
>
> We utter myths about falsifiable propositions not because we care about
> their truth values, but precisely because we don't.
>
> Regards,
> Branden
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2024-07-04 13:00 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 84+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2024-07-03 4:51 [TUHS] " sjenkin
2024-07-03 5:02 ` [TUHS] " Al Kossow
2024-07-03 6:46 ` arnold
2024-07-03 14:04 ` Clem Cole
2024-07-03 15:22 ` Theodore Ts'o
2024-07-03 15:36 ` Larry McVoy
2024-07-03 14:59 ` Marc Rochkind
2024-07-03 23:35 ` G. Branden Robinson
2024-07-04 13:00 ` Marc Donner [this message]
2024-07-03 9:04 ` A. P. Garcia
2024-07-03 15:17 ` Vincenzo Nicosia
2024-07-03 15:35 ` Marc Donner
2024-07-03 17:39 ` Jon Forrest
2024-07-03 17:49 ` segaloco via TUHS
2024-07-03 18:16 ` Erik E. Fair
2024-07-03 19:58 ` Rich Salz
2024-07-03 23:15 ` Dave Horsfall
2024-07-03 23:23 ` Marc Donner
2024-07-03 23:26 ` Rik Farrow
2024-07-04 23:26 ` Dave Horsfall
2024-07-03 15:37 ` Al Kossow
2024-07-03 16:01 ` Al Kossow
2024-07-03 16:05 ` Warner Losh
2024-07-03 23:29 ` Marc Rochkind
2024-07-03 23:50 ` G. Branden Robinson
2024-07-04 8:23 ` Vincenzo Nicosia
2024-07-04 20:34 ` Nevin Liber
2024-07-04 20:44 ` segaloco via TUHS
2024-07-04 21:41 ` sjenkin
[not found] ` <7AC009E5-C985-44AD-A55E-E0BFC05CDD31@serissa.com>
2024-07-05 9:41 ` Steve Jenkin
2024-07-05 9:47 ` Steve Jenkin
2024-07-05 0:03 ` Stuff Received
2024-07-05 0:12 ` Larry McVoy
2024-07-05 2:24 ` Adam Thornton
2024-07-05 2:42 ` Bakul Shah via TUHS
2024-07-05 7:13 ` arnold
2024-07-05 7:42 ` Bakul Shah via TUHS
2024-07-05 8:20 ` arnold
2024-07-05 8:52 ` G. Branden Robinson
2024-07-05 7:36 ` Dave Horsfall
2024-07-05 10:18 ` Peter Yardley
2024-07-05 21:38 ` [TUHS] Re: mental architecture models, " John Levine
2024-07-05 21:49 ` Larry McVoy
2024-07-05 22:08 ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
2024-07-05 22:24 ` Larry McVoy
2024-07-05 23:17 ` John Levine
2024-07-06 12:52 ` sjenkin
2024-07-06 14:02 ` John R Levine
2024-07-06 15:58 ` Clem Cole
2024-07-06 20:56 ` John R Levine
2024-07-06 21:32 ` Charles H Sauer (he/him)
2024-07-06 23:46 ` Peter Yardley
2024-07-07 17:43 ` James Frew
2024-07-07 1:39 ` John Levine
2024-07-07 3:26 ` [TUHS] Re: PL.8 [was " Charles H Sauer (he/him)
2024-07-07 5:33 ` [TUHS] " arnold
2024-07-05 22:10 ` Dan Cross
2024-07-07 22:00 ` [TUHS] " Dave Horsfall
2024-07-07 23:28 ` Brad Spencer
2024-07-08 6:17 ` Dave Horsfall
2024-07-08 6:27 ` Lars Brinkhoff
2024-07-08 6:51 ` Dave Horsfall
2024-07-08 9:36 ` David Arnold
2024-07-08 6:59 ` arnold
2024-07-08 13:22 ` Larry McVoy
2024-07-08 15:37 ` Al Kossow
2024-07-08 17:22 ` Tom Lyon
2024-07-08 17:04 ` Clem Cole
2024-07-08 15:28 ` Brad Spencer
2024-07-08 15:33 ` Al Kossow
2024-07-08 0:21 ` John Levine
2024-07-08 0:35 ` Dave Horsfall
2024-07-08 12:29 ` Peter Yardley
2024-07-05 16:40 ` Jon Steinhart
2024-07-06 13:20 ` Dave Horsfall
2024-07-05 0:08 ` Marc Rochkind
2024-07-04 1:53 ` John Levine
2024-07-04 2:59 ` segaloco via TUHS
2024-07-04 6:53 ` Rob Pike
2024-07-04 15:07 ` Larry McVoy
2024-07-03 14:46 [TUHS] " Norman Wilson
2024-07-03 15:45 ` [TUHS] " Clem Cole
2024-07-03 15:52 ` Clem Cole
2024-07-03 16:12 ` Chet Ramey via TUHS
2024-07-05 13:20 Douglas McIlroy
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