May 13, 2003, 12:00 AM — Over the last few days, gigabytes worth of disk space on my portable
have been ploughed up, mulched and re-planted with brand new software
implementing brand new standards of various shapes and sizes. I won't
bore you with the gory details.
One of the pleasures of such marathon Web download sessions is the
opportunity it affords to surf the Web for reading matter while the
download runs in the background. After all, the machine is *busy* so I
cannot really expect it to do real work while the download is going on
right? Wrong. Yes, I know, but that is my excuse and I'm sticking to
it.
Watching the progress meter of a 40 MB download crawl forward nanometer
by nanometer, I think of something Roger Needham[1] once said. He said
that computing is weird in that the technology *preceeds* the science.
In most sciences, it is the other way around. Scientists invent new
building materials, new treatments for disease and so on. Once the
scientists have moved on to fresh challenges,the technologists move in
to productize and commercialize the science.
In Information Technology - especially the software side of things - we
do things the other way around. The technological tail seems to wag the
scientific dog so to speak. What happens is that the technologists come
up with something new. If it flies in the marketplace, the scientists
move in to figure out how to make it work better, faster or simply to
discover *why* the darned thing works in the first place.
The Web for example, did not come out of a laboratory full of white
coats and clipboards. (Well actually, yes it did but they were particle
physicists and were not working on software[2]). The Web was produced by
technologists in the first instance. Web science came later.
Needham's comments in turn reminded me of an excellent essay by Paul
Graham from a recent Python conference. In the essay, entitled 'The
hundred-year language'[3] Graham pointed out that the formal study of
literature - a scientific activity in its analytical nature - rarely
contributes anything to the creation of literature - which is a more
technological activity.
Literature is an extreme example of the phenomenon of the technology
preceeding, in fact trumping, the science. I'm not suggesting that
software can be understood in literary terms. (Although one of my
college lecturers was fond of saying that programming was language with
some mathematics thrown in.) Software is somewhere in the middle, the
science follows the technology but the science, when it comes, makes
very useful contributions. Think for example of the useful technologies
that have come out of scientific analysis of the Web. I'm thinking of
things like clever proxy strategies, information retrieval algorithms
and so on.
As I kick off another multi-megabyte download and start the installation
of the most recent addition to my desktop, I think about what all this
software is for and why I'm installing it. I conclude that wherever
software sits in the spectrum of science versus technology, there is
"way" too much technology and not enough science.
You see, I'm investigating a variety of technologies that address a well
known, well understood problem. The problem of reliable messaging. How
can software ensure that messages get from system A to system B even if
A or B fall over half way through the exchange?
It is well known that the way to solve this problem is via an
acknowledgement mechanism in which stuff sent must be
acknowledged(receipted) before it is deemed to have been successfully
sent. Reliable messaging - as implemented over the decades in message
oriented middleware (MOM) - is a good example of the technique in
action.
So, given the well worn nature of the path I am on, how come that
here in 2003 we have HTTPR[4], WS-Reliability[5],
WS-ReliableMessaging[6], EBMS[7] and a host of other mutually repugnant
'standards' for solving the well understood problem of reliable
messaging?
It is clearly not a situation that can be easily explained away on
scientific innovation grounds. This is no longer a scientific problem.
Indeed, the scientists no longer find the problem interesting, it is a
"solved" problem. So what are the technologists up to with their
plethora of competing 'standards'?
The answer lies back in the science departments - but not in the
computer science departments. Mathematicians like John Nash, ecomomists
like Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, Political Scientists like Robert
Axelrod, all know what is going on here.
These Scientists and others like them that study competition and
cooperation as phenomena in their own right would have no trouble
explaining what is going on in today's reliable messaging technology
space. It has nothing to do with computing and everything to do with
strategy - commercial strategy.
