From spackman@disco-sol.dfki.uni-sb.de Sun May 16 11:58:29 1993 From: spackman@disco-sol.dfki.uni-sb.de (Stephen P Spackman) Newsgroups: alt.best.of.internet Subject: Standards Date: 12 May 1993 19:52:03 GMT Organization: DFKI Saarbruecken GmbH, D-W 6600 Saarbruecken Reply-To: stephen@acm.org NNTP-Posting-Host: disco-sol.dfki.uni-sb.de Whoof! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- stephen p spackman +49 681 302 5288(o) 5282(sec) stephen@acm.org dfki / stuhlsatzenhausweg 3 / d-w-6600 saarbruecken 11 / germany ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: mjr@tis.com (Marcus J Ranum) Newsgroups: comp.programming Subject: Re: Standards Date: 12 May 1993 03:57:42 GMT Organization: Trusted Information Systems, Inc. Message-ID: <1spsjm$qa3@sol.TIS.COM> References: <1993May10.124054.12335@hubcap.clemson.edu> <1993May11.220016.7013@hubcap.clemson.edu> Standards? Let me tell you about Standards. This is a true story. When I first got started on standards, it was a pretty simple thing. I was coding a smallish program working in a hospital informatics group. There were several programmers, and to make the code look good and presumably work, we all agreed to a 'standard' programming layout. I admit, it was peer pressure. I didn't want the guys to all laugh at me and throw empty cans of Coke at me, so I went along with it and I standardized a bit. It was easy - I felt like a part of the team. Once you standardize on a little thing, like where the braces go after your if() in C, it gets easy to start to want to standardize on other stuff. Soon I was no stranger to standards. I guess they were starting to consider an ANSI standard for C around then - more peer pressure to standardize. "It's OK - *EVERYONE* is doing it! Even your competitors!" That's what the standards dealers would tell us. Years after that first little standardization effort, I was working for a Big Vendor, and the competition was pretty fierce. All the guys used to stoke up on standards before going out on a sales support call. I was in a sales support unit - pretty soon I was learning about 2, maybe 3 new standards a week. Before going out with a sales rep to talk to a customer, I'd slip copies of the standards our product contained in my briefcase, so I could sneer at the other vendors who had less standards than I did. It was hip. I was happening. I was dancing on the cutting edge of the crystal wave, with POSIX, XPG3, MOTIF and OSF. Those were the good years. Everything was coming up in this golden glow on the horizon, shipping Real Soon Now. After the standards - habituation set in. I was compliant with just about everything. I started dipping into the really strong stuff, mainlining vendor consortia and free-basing vaporware. Each day before I went into the office, I'd believe 2 or 3 wild press releases about new initiatives that were going to solve all my customers problems. Some days, I'd even believe as many as 5, until my head was a swirling mass of incoherent commitments to plan to agree to standardize to eventually produce SOMETHING, SOMEDAY, if there was customer demand for it. Things started to get ugly. I'd go to a customer site, and between flipping up pages of glossies of new consortia and initiatives to solve problems that hadn't been identified as interesting yet, I'd catch myself suddenly trembling. My liver fell out, and my hair got jaundiced. Instead of writing good clean working code, I found myself writing reams and reams of stuff about how great the code would be when I got around to actually writing it. Whenever I saw something ugly about my user interface, I just put another wrapper of goo around it. I even experimented with OOP and C++. My hacker buddies all started looking at me funny. Finally, I woke up in a gutter, after staggering in a drunken daze through downtown Palo Alto with Paul, and I realized that I'd lost control of my problem. Nowadays I'm a reformed Standards-aholic. Somehow, providence saved me from falling into the endless abyss of the Working Groups where I still see some of my old buddies wandering around like zombies, waiting for the consensus that'll never come. It was tough, but I can walk again. My cat has stopped trying to kick dirt over me when I lie down. I don't feel the need to conform anymore. I write K&R C. I laugh at termios. mjr.