There is something to literate programming, especially these integrated tests and doc strings. I’d like to see more of that supported by languages. We tried to add doc comments of some sort to ES4 with first-class metadata hooks or reflection hooks and it was just impossible to get everybody to agree.
Seibeclass="underline" Do you read code you’re not working on?
Eich: I do it as part of my job. Code review is a mandatory pre-check-in step, mostly to compensate for Netscape’s bad hiring, but we kept it and still use it for integration review. We have a separate “super review” for when you’re touching a lot of modules and you don’t know all the hidden invariants that Joe Schmoe, who no longer works on Mozilla, knew in his head. Somebody else may have figured them out so you have somebody experienced to look at the big picture. Sometimes you can bypass it if you know what you’re doing and you’re in the sort of Jedi council, but we’re not trying to cheat on it too much.
We don’t have design reviews, so sometimes this causes a delayed design review to happen. They say, “Oh, back to the drawing board. You wrote too much code. You should have designed it this other way.” That’s the exception. We aren’t going to impose any kind of waterfall, design then implementation. That was the big thing when I was getting into the industry in the early ’80s and it was a nightmare, frankly. You spend all this time writing documents and then you go to write the code and often you realize that it’s really stupid and you totally change the code and put the documents down the memory hole.
Seibeclass="underline" So that’s code that is going into Mozilla; do you ever read other people’s code, outside Mozilla, just for edification?
Eich: Open source is great. I love looking at other people’s code that’s in some other part of the world. I don’t spend enough time on it but I do look at server frameworks or I look at things like Python and Ruby.
Seibeclass="underline" The implementations of those things?
Eich: Implementations and also library code. I look at the Ajax libraries—and it’s heartening to see how clever people can be and how this small set of tools—closures, prototypes, and objects—can be used to create reasonable, convenient, sometimes very convenient abstractions. They’re not always hardened or safe but they’re awfully convenient.
Seibeclass="underline" When you read a big piece of code, how do you get into it?
Eich: I used to start top-down. If it’s big enough you get function pointers and control flow gets opaque. I sometimes drive it in the debugger and play around with it that way. Also, I look for bottom-up patterns that I recognize. If it’s a language processor or if it’s got something that makes system calls that I understand, I can start looking at how those primitives are used. How does that get used by higher levels in the system? And that helps me get around. But really understanding it is this gestalt process that involves looking at different angles of top and bottom and different views of it, playing in the debugger, stepping through in the debugger—incredibly tedious though that can be.
If you can understand what’s going on a little bit in the heap—chase pointers, walk through cons cells, whatever—that can be worth the trouble though it gets tedious. That, to me, is as important as reading source. You can get a long way reading source; you can also get stuck and get bored and convince yourself you understand something that you don’t.
When I did JavaScript’s regular expressions I was looking at Perl 4. I did step through it in the debugger, as well as read the code. And that gave me ideas; the implementation I did was similar. In this case the recursive backtracking nature of them was a little novel, so that I had to wrap my head around. It did help to just debug simple regular expressions, just to trace the execution. I know other programmers talk about this: you should step through code, you should understand what the dynamic state of the program looks like in various quick bird’s-eye views or sanity checks, and I agree with that.
Seibeclass="underline" Do you do that with your own code, even when you’re not tracking down a bug?
Eich: Absolutely—just sanity checks. I have plenty of assertions, so if those botch then I’ll be in the debugger for sure. But sometimes you write code and you’ve got some clever bookkeeping scheme or other. And you test it and it seems to work until you step through it in the debugger. Particularly if there’s a bit of cleverness that only kicks in when the stars and the moon align. Then you want to use a conditional break point or even a watch point, a data break point, and then you can actually catch it in the act and check that, yes, the planets are all aligned the way they should be and maybe test that you weren’t living in optimistic pony land. You can actually look in the debugger, whereas in the source you’re still in pony land. So that seems important; I still do it.
Seibeclass="underline" Is the way you discover a problem that you’re stepping through looking at the source with your mental model of what’s about to happen, and then you see it not happen?
Eich: You see it not happen, or—and this is my problem—I was in pony land. I’m getting older and more skeptical and I’m doing better, but there’s still something that I was optimistic about. In the back of my mind this Jiminy Cricket is whispering, “You probably have a bug because you forgot about something.” That kind of problem happens to me still.
And sometimes I know about it, I swear—somewhere in there I know I’m wrong. I have this sort of itch in my hind-brain—well, not in my hind-brain; I don’t know where it is; the microtubules. Anyway, I kind of feel like there’s something that I should watch out for, and being in debugger helps me watch out for it and it helps me force the issue or see that the test vector, though it covered the code in some sense, didn’t cover all the combinations, because it’s a huge, huge hyperspace. And if you just change this one value then you’d go into a bad place.
Seibeclass="underline" In addition to reading code, lots of programmers read books about programming—are there any books that you would recommend?
Eich: I should be a better student of the literature. But I think it’s sort of like music in that you have to practice it. And you can learn a lot reading other people’s code. I did like Brian Kernighan’s books; I thought they were neat, because they would build up a small amount of code, and start reusing it as you go, and modularizing. And Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1–3, especially the seminumerical stuff. Double-hashing—I love those parts. The lemma about the golden ratio with the proof left as an exercise.
But I’m a little skeptical of book learning for programming. Programming is partly engineering; there’s maybe some math on a good day. And then there’s a lot of practical stuff that doesn’t even rise to the level of engineering in the sense of civil engineering and mechanical engineering. Maybe it’ll be formalized more over time.
There’s definitely a good corpus of knowledge. Computer science is a science. I remember somebody on Usenet 20 years ago said, “Science lite, one-third the rigor.” There’s still a lot of stuff that doesn’t look like it really holds up over time—there are these publish-or-perish ten-page, ten-pointfont papers that often have holes in them. The journal publications are better because you get to interact with the referee; it’s not just a truth or dare. And they get reviewed more carefully. The areas of mechanized proofs, that’s getting impressive. But it’s still not reaching programmers. So there’s something a little bit missing in computer science in my view that makes me skeptical of book learning. I should probably not go so far on this Luddite track. But there it is.
There is science there, and there are important things to learn. You could spend a lot of time studying them, too. I know a lot of people on the theoretical side of it from work on JavaScript language development, and a lot of them are hackers, too, which is good. Some of them don’t program.