• A key goal of these tools was to allow the business side of the house to write acceptance tests, or at least be able to read acceptance tests and agree that they are reasonably accurate and complete.
• That mostly didn’t happen.
• The tools became increasingly programmer centric, making it even less likely to ever happen.
• This ultimately leads to developers having to support two test streams, acceptance tests and unit tests.
• Developers ain’t keen, so they tend to drop one.
• The one they drop is usually unit tests, which Uncle Bob strongly believes is the wrong one.

I can totally follow this train and see where this can lead to Bad Things. That said, however, I must say that I’ve found tools like Cucumber, Aruba, and Geb very useful in my university classes.

In the simple case, tools like Cucumber and Aruba often great for writing executable specifications for class projects. This is somewhat similar to the goal of having the business team write the tests, but obviously I’m in the fortunate position of being a developer as well as the person writing the specs. It’s very nice for teaching, though, because I can specify what I want them to do without over-specifying how they do it. Unit tests will typically need to reflect all sorts of design decisions, and part of the point is often for them to work through the design, so it’s nice to have tests that both they and I can use to sanity check their solutions without tying us all down to a particular set of design choices.

In the more complex case, our students have often found these tools to be extremely useful for their own tests, especially when they’re struggling with a new problem domain and/or a new set of languages, tools, libraries, etc. In many ways a unit test requires the ability to envisions at least some of the structure of the solution; you have to be able to see where a unit will be. If they’re writing their first web app from scratch, using languages and libraries they’re just learning, it can be really hard to know what the first test might look like. So they tend not to write it, instead doing “spikes” to try to understand how the pieces work. These “spikes” go on and on, get bigger and bigger, and often become the project instead of being thrown away, and none of that development was supported by any sort of tests.

While it can be really difficult to envision units in a totally new space, hopefully they can understand use cases and user behavior. Tools like Geb allow them to specify what the tool should do without (yet) understanding what the insides will look like.

In many ways the two cases are quite similar: A.T./BDD lets us write tests without committing to design decisions yet. In the first I don’t want to dictate those decisions, and in the second they simply don’t yet know what those will look like yet, but either way we get to specify what is hopefully some useful and significant behavior right away without getting bogged down in those issues.

In a perfect world, they’d start writing unit tests for key pieces of internal logic as the design develops, especially for units whose behavior is complex enough that it’s hard to catch all the combinations through the user interface. That doesn’t always happen, but eventually the instability of the UI often drives teams to bring some of the testing from the UI into more stable areas of the code.

So, do I think every project should start with Cucumber tests? No, definitely not. But I do think they’re damn useful in certain circumstances and I’m quite glad to have them.

…a commodity has value and a gift does not. A gift has worth. – Lewis Hyde

Tomorrow (24 June) marks the 24th anniversary of our marriage!

There are so many things I’m grateful for, and no way to enumerate them or document them here, so I’ll settle for an example.

Among her many “strangely inventive” artistic talents, Sue makes books. Wonderful, handmade books, where she cuts and folds all the paper, sews together the signatures, builds the cover, and glues it all together. Some of these are displayed in galleries, while others (such as the one pictured here) are notebooks or journals filled with blank pages inviting us to share our thoughts in word or sketch.

For the past several years, Sue has made such journals as high school graduation gifts for our and, more substantially, Tom’s friends in that year’s graduating class. As he moves on to college, the numbers are beginning to contract, but over the years she’s made many dozens of these books, often for people we didn’t actually know terribly well. That’s a lot of work, constructing by hand an object whose future is far from certain. She is, after all, making blank books, in an age where the future of books is at best unclear, an age where most are far more likely to send a text message or post on a blog [I’M LOOKING AT ME!] than to write a letter or keep a journal on paper.

Thus these are, in the true sense that Hyde means in the opening quote, gifts. As handcrafted pieces of art, they have clear worth, but their value (and how they are valued by the recipients) is quite uncertain.

Yet she keeps making them. In a flurry of activity every May between the end of the University school year and the high school graduation she cuts and folds and glues and frets. She picks out different papers to use as covers, and has Tom give her feedback on which covers would make the most sense for which graduate. She increases the worth of the world (if not its value) through these gifts, each of which is in fact a multiple gift. It is obviously a gift to the graduate, but this effort is also a gift to our son, and a thank-you to the families of these students who have been important to him.

And, to the point of all this, these are also a gift to me. For while each of these books is made by her and is officially a gift from Thomas, her work enriches us all and the glow it casts as it goes out into the world reflects back on our whole family even if it was her hands that did all the sewing.

So I say “Thank You”, for this and the untold gifts large and small that she has shared with me. It has been a truly splendid 24 years together, and I look forward to many more decades to come!

With all my love,

     – Nic

Richard team taught the intro physics course I took my first year at Reed (where I learned that I was decent but not great at physics). On the strenuous recommendations of two good friends and physics majors (Peter Shirley and Neil Alexander) I later took the classroom part of second year physics from Richard. It was, as Peter had said, the best applied math course on campus, and Richard was a total genius with colored chalk, leaving the board covered with true works of art at the end of class. This was one of the most profound examples of the difficulty of capturing certain kinds of process in one’s notes, an issue I still struggle with as a teacher. Richard’s lectures were amazing to watch, but near impossible to wrestle into a notebook. I tried all sorts of things, including using colored pencils, to try to capture the glory of his board work, but it all failed. I suspect the only other person I had who’s lecturing was both as beautiful and as frustrating was Edsger Dijkstra.

More important than the classes I had with Richard, however, was his impact on me as a budding computer scientist. I’d taught myself BASIC in high school, but had never had any kind of instruction on programming or computing before my first semester at Reed, when we learned PASCAL in a series of labs in that intro physics course; labs which clearly owed their existence to Richard’s grasp of the growing importance of computation in math and science. Richard was friends with Steve Jobs, and it was through that connection and Jobs’ fond memories of his time as a quasi-student at Reed that Reed got an early Lisa, and then some of the first Macintosh computers. I remember playing with MacPaint on that clunky Lisa (I think with Peter Shirley again) and just being blown away – it was totally clear that we were seeing the future.

It was in significant part through Richard that I got to spend the summer of ’84 working at Reed designing fonts and programming for the earliest Macs. This was a very exciting opportunity, and I really felt like I was contributing to something. Probably my most notable achievement was the design of a bitmap math font (we’re just a little before PostScript here). Richard was very excited by the bitmap graphics on the Mac (taken for granted now, but still a novelty in the early 80’s), and as a scientist and mathematician he recognized the potential and value of not being tied to the ASCII character set that dominated computing at the time. So as a math nerd with computing interest and calligraphy experience (I was fortunate enough to take one of Robert Palladino’s last calligraphy courses at Reed in 1983), I was tasked with making a math font. This mostly consisted of designing a set of Greek characters, along with other common math symbols. It was hardly LaTeX (which would have been a nightmare to run on those boxes), but it was useful and widely used, and available for several years in big free font packs that you could get on a set of floppies from a fellow in (I think) Utah that had taken on the task of coordinating the distribution of free fonts. Those early bitmap fonts were, however, supplanted in short order by the much better PostScript fonts, and when I wrote my undergrad math thesis in MacWrite a year and a half later, I used the PostScript Symbol font instead of my own work. Sigh.

I also did some programming (I think I worked some on GriffinTerm, an early Mac terminal emulator), but my regret is that I didn’t make more of that opportunity. Richard was a strange guy who I at least found hard to read, but he was also clearly visionary and well connected. It’s hard to know what might have happened if I’d pushed myself more and made more of that opportunity. Sadly, I didn’t really understand the value of making things, and was mostly focused on “learning things” by taking courses and doing homework. I compare that to Thomas, who has done more extra-curricular “making” in his first year than I may have ever done at in my time at Reed, and it reminds me of why it’s so important to support our students at UMM in their “making”.

So farewell and thanks to Richard Crandall, a fellow who certainly made things, and who helped give me a great opportunity to make things.

StackSort connects to StackOverflow, searches for 'sort a list', and downloads and runs code snippets until the list is sorted.

Internet nerdom being fairly OCD, someone (Gregory Koberger) of course went and implemented this, and it works!

As Gregory says, this is potentially a security nightmare waiting to happen, so it’s not clear that you should actually run his code. Being a brave and foolish (and somewhat careful) soul, however, I’ve fallen on this sword so that you don’t have to, and I can confirm that it works. After trying several dozen StackOverflow pages (most of which yielded either “Could not extract a function to run” or “Contained potentially bad code”), it stumbled across a working version of Quicksort in JavaScript.

Ta Da!

The success of this approach, however, does suggest interesting things about how people approach certain kinds of problem solving these days. Where “old people” like me would have bought a book to learn something new, my students are much more prone to assemble a patchwork understanding from tons of Googling. While I think this often leads to a quite fragile and incomplete understanding of the topic at hand, it is often sufficient to get them through what is assigned. In other words, they’re very skilled at answering the question that was posed, which was itself often somewhat shallow because that’s what we all have time for. So while faculty would like to think that we’re creating experts (whatever that means) in certain topics, we rarely have the time to give them assignments and tasks that require a deep level of expertise.

In the land and time of books, we might have believed that everyone read and understood the 8 assigned chapters, but the assignments almost certainly didn’t strictly require that. In fact I’m willing to bet a whole lot skimming actually went on that was not so different from the Googling that happens now. The difference is that when I skimmed a book, there was a reasonably coherent thread connecting the dots that were touched on. “Skimming” the Internet, however, is a much less coherent experience. The authors, examples, and assumptions aren’t the same from search result to search result. Worse (in computing) the versions aren’t necessarily the same, so we often end up with inconsistent and downright contradictory results! A few years ago I taught a class that used Python 3, and it turned out that almost all Googling pointed us at Python 2 examples and answers, which lead to all manner of confusion amongst my students.

So call me old-fashioned, but I still like a book, even if it’s an e-book, when I’m learning something conceptually new, as I do really appreciate a coherent voice and structure. If I need to remind myself of a library function or piece of syntax, it’s to the Googles. If I’m learning something that’s very similar to something I already know, then I’m happy with on-line docs if they’re well written. If, however, I’m expanding my horizons in more significant ways, a book is still the thing.

It’s a true joy, and I’m really looking forward to being able to read the “finished” work. It’s a project oriented book, though, which means that to really learn from it we’re going to have to play along at home, programming, and experimenting, and analyzing. We’re all going to have to set aside some time for this when it does come out. But it’ll be worth it. And while the claim is that we’ll be learning about Generative Projects or Genetic Programming or whatever Bill decides to have GP stand for when he wraps this thing, we’re also going to learn a lot about software development and problem solving along the way, from someone who’s got a lot of great things to say on those important subjects. So we’d best buckle our seatbelts!

I do, however, have to take issue with a claim Bill makes in the introductory “About this book” section:

This is not a textbook. If your instructors try to use it as one, complain. If they argue, send them to me.

To be honest, it’s turning out a lot more like an anti-textbook. It will not improve your performance on tests. We’ll use “advanced” techniques before we discuss “basic” ones, ignore common practices to focus on more appropriate contingent solutions for specific problems, and may not even touch on techniques your instructors think you ought to know.

Remember, my goal is to support and extend your existing skills so you can productively explore further. Seek comprehensive knowledge and historical grounding in other books. They are full of it.

I can’t help but think he had me in mind when he wrote these lines, and I doubt he’ll be surprised to learn that I’m certainly seriously considering using it in my Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Intelligence course in the Spring. <snigger>

The issue, I suspect, is what one considers a “textbook” and what the point of such a thing is. Traditionally textbooks are big, fat things that provide a “coherent” overview of “everything you need to know about subject X”. I’ve got a bunch of these on my shelves with nice overviews of things like calculus and physics and chemistry. Old things, with a clear sense of what matters and what order it should be presented in.

In teaching computer science, however, things are typically much less clear. What’s “vital” in our field? What’s the “natural” or most pedagogically sensible order to present that material? There are lots of ideas out there, but hardly consensus. And that’s on the introductory material; my upper division electives usually focus on material where there’s even less agreement.

Starting in the late 90’s I started moving away from “traditional” textbooks when I could. I found that the most important part of most of my courses was process rather then content. Most computing textbooks I’ve seen are, unfortunately, much stronger on content than process. There are piles of books full of catalogues of algorithms, but they’re mostly presented like magic tricks, things Very Smart People dreamt up in some strange opium vision, inaccessible to the rest of us. The challenge in my experience is coming up with these visions, the process and the problem solving. So a book like Fowler’s wondrous Refactoring is far more educational in the long run, giving us skills for life instead of a box full of baubles.

The contrast between process and content has been made far more pronounced by the web and its many tools and collections. Young folks (and even this old guy) almost never reach for a book when they want to look something up; that’s what Google is for. The reference value of big encyclopedias of “facts” is greatly diminished when we can so easily find things on-line, but a well-written description of an important process is still a treasure.

Which brings us back to Bill’s book.

He claims it’s not a textbook because he doesn’t plan to cover “every” technique or concept or approach. He’s going to doing things in the “wrong” order. Foolishly, he’s not going to help improve our performance on tests, choosing to instead helping us develop skills that will help us for years to come.

Silly, silly man.

So, yeah, I do want to use Bill’s book in my class, and my students are more than welcome to complain to me or take it up with Bill. I doubt, however, that they will. The writing is opinionated and ornery and humble in all the right ways, and the emphasis on projects and problem solving are the sort of thing our students just eat up. I’m guessing that they’d happily line up behind something like this vs. a more traditional text.

As will I.

P.S. You should check out the book’s LeanPub site (https://leanpub.com/pragmaticGP) and sign up for notification. It’s a great way for people to help delude Bill into thinking that he’s not actually wasting his time.

Or something like that.

The overwhelming flood of content that we are now drowning in clearly puts paid to those assumptions. The content is out there, free, waiting for us to find it and stuff it in our heads, with more on the way. “Free on-line class shakes up photo education” from Wired is a nice example of how the content space is changing dramatically, as well as implying that traditional face-to-face education is perhaps a doomed beast:

“I think we’re heading towards a place where we’ll no longer be able to charge for content,” says Worth. “And that scares the shit out of academic institutions.”

This does indeed scare academics and administrators, and excites lots of entrepreneurs who (often rightly) feel that they compete with traditional institutions in the content space. Those, both in and out of the academy, who worry are ultimately missing the point. Content was never what we should have been charging for, and if that’s all we were doing we were frankly doing it wrong. Our real value is in the life changing experiences. When I talk to our alumni, they rarely reminisce about specific courses, and even less often about particular content. What they remember are the things they built and the experiences they shared. They remember the love Margaret Edson talks about so eloquently in this 2008 graduation speech at Smith College:

2008 Smith College Commencement Margaret Edson from Smith College on Vimeo.

So those of us in the Academy need to get over our fascination with content and focus on the business of trying to make a difference in the lives of our students. And students and parents need to become smarter shoppers and look for schools that will give them the experiences that will make a difference in their lives. Any school can give you names and dates, facts and figures, drills and exercises. And so can the Internet. A good school challenges you to discuss, write, build, experience, and understand, which is something that people are a hell of a lot better at than books or web pages.

P.S. The Academy isn’t the only place where we’re struggling to figure out The Point. This excellent post by Vaguery on what coworking is and isn’t is extremely relevant and comes to many of the same conclusions: Experience and community matter. Hop on and stoke the engines, peeps; we’ve got places to go and things to do.

This year’s CSci graduates included students graduating with high distinction, students who’d published their research in major international conferences, done extensive volunteer work, travelled the world, pursued diverse interests, and won highly competitive national awards. Some are going into grad school, some to jobs, some to volunteer work, and some are still trying to figure out the next step. One of the great advantages of a small department is that I’d worked personally with almost all of them on special projects, and had the rest in at least a few classes, and I consider it an honor and a privilege to have gotten to know them.

And that’s just the CSci grads. Another advantage of a small campus is you get to know lots of students in lots of areas. People I knew from the radio station graduated today, along with committee members, musicians, artists, actors, historians, psychologists, biologists, and the lot. This included two Truman Scholars and, as we were reminded today, the only other schools that could boast two Truman Scholars at their graduation this year were Stanford and Wellesley. Not bad for a little school in the middle of nowhere that no one’s ever heard of, eh?

Talking about how great this or that group of students is always sounds dangerously like comparing children, but we just keep getting cool students to work with. This is really the “norm”, whatever that means when both the individuals and groups have such distinct personalities. These folks leave, taking with them a lot of experience and knowledge and enthusiasm, and there’s no doubt that we’ll miss them. There are, however, plenty of great students still on campus, and wonderful new admits that will be joining us in August.

So, best wishes to all this year’s graduates.

Do cool things.

And send us a postcard now and then.

P.S. I’ll try to get the pictures I took today up on Flickr sometime in the next few weeks, but with grading, the May Session course, and being in Ann Arbor the second half of the week, processing all those photos is going to have to wait a bit.

I did indeed take a bunch of photos, and posted just over 600 of the least blurry of them on Flickr yesterday. This is no big deal – I do lots of events and post piles of photos like this all the time.

Except this time the view count just went totally through the roof. My events account typically gets a few hundred views a day, with small spikes when I post a new set. 1,000 views, though, would be a big day for that account.

I’ve had over 5,000 views today, the vast majority of which have been on the Fashion Trashion photos.

I’m quite thoroughly gobsmacked, and not entirely sure where all the traffic is coming from. I’m thinking a lot of it is via Twitter, but it’s not really clear.

I suspect that the total lifetime views of my photographs pre-digital/Flickr might have been than 5,000, so to have 5,000 views of my work in one day is pretty amazing. I’m most grateful for the attention – thanks!

Flickr’s “day” just rolled over, and we peaked at 5,600 views for the 24 hour period. I’ve probably never seen anything close to that, and may never again. Crazy.

The joy of programming is taking a crappy piece of code, full of hacks and bad practices, and rewriting it to be better in every way. — LynnKale

for a moment I couldn’t think of a word for “thing to tell me how to do other things,” googled ‘how to’ and figured the word (documentation) — _eli

It’s gems like this that make my day. Both authors are UMM CSci alum, now off doing cool stuff. It’s neat to be able to stay in touch on-line.

It’s an interesting study, and likely to spur a whole new slew of interest in on-line courses, but it’s really not clear what it means. I’m sure there are a zillion ways I could pull together data showing an education advantage of X over Y, for a zillion Xs and Ys, but one would have to be very careful in the interpretation. I’m willing to bet that most of my colleagues here at UMM would teach better in English than Chinese, and most faculty in China would teach more effectively in Chinese than English, but that hardly means one is a better teaching language than the other. Context is everything, and it’s not clear (at least in the survey study) what the contexts are.

A few possible issues:

• 12 years is an eternity in the history of the web and web-based teaching. Are the studies from 12 years ago even talking about the same things as those now?
• What are we actually comparing? Face-to-face courses have all kinds of variance, and their effectiveness changes with the instructor, the students in a particular running of the course, and external events. Presumably on-line courses will as well. Are we comparing the best to the best? The median to the median? I can easily imagine that an on-line course of a few dozen people can be a vastly better experience than a huge lecture hall of 800 students, even if the latter is still called “face-to-face” instruction. Similarly, one person struggling to manage 150 on-line students is not likely to look good compared to an energetic classroom discussion section of 12 people. The meta-survey doesn’t make it easy to see clearly what the comparisons are in the individual surveys, and I suspect that they probably vary widely, ranging from the pretty reasonable to apples-vs-kumquats.
• How much of this is simply a function of novelty, both in faculty putting a lot of effort into a cool new thing, and students being impressed by the shiny new toy?

Etc., etc., etc.

I think the question isn’t, and can’t ever be, whether on-line is better than the classroom. In the end it’s about finding a way for a particular instructor and a particular student (or group of students) to work well together, and that’s going to depend on an awful lot of things and almost certainly change over time as teachers, students, and the world changes. On-line education and classroom education augmented with on-line components are clearly going to be an important (and probably increasing) part of that, but there will probably always be circumstances where a group of people are better served by some face time than by an on-line experience.

This study also looks at courses as isolated experiences. At a residential university like ours, the courses are crucial, but hardly the whole picture. Students learn a ton from simply living together, eating, doing laundry, volunteering, going to the movies, dating, being in clubs, and generally making all sorts of vital transitions as they move from 18 to 22 (give or take). Look at the important differences between someone’s who’s 16 and someone who’s 26, and an awful lot of that has nothing do to with courses. A good university experience can play a critical role both in and beyond the classroom, and a heck of a lot of that is tied up in physical presence.