Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Standards are often a land war; where members of the standards body act to create de facto standards at the same time they participate in the negotiation of de jour standards. The mix varies. In some contexts the land war dominates. But it’s real politics and certainly tastes dirty. Many standards bodies have clauses in their members agreements to prevent other kinds of dirty gaming. For example clauses to temper the member’s ability to playing stick-up with their patent rights. It’s harder to do in these cases; since it would require the member to temper their striving for market share. This plays off interestingly against the device where a standards body retains for it’s members early access to the specification - a device intended to give the members the reward of early mover advantage. This pattern also reminds me of the scheme were a firm creates a “open standard” so other market players chase his tail lights. Card space is a good example of that move.
Meanwhile there is another delightful introductory paragraph in that posting.

I very much liked this introductory paragraph:

Years ago I read an interesting article about the encyclopedia entry for the keyword “Longitude”. According to the article, the entry merely said “See Latitude”. With that short, two-word sentence the encyclopedia author conflated these two concepts as mere orthogonal dimensions, lumped together, each as boring as the other. This ignored the fact that latitude is boring, easy, trivial, known to the ancients and as easy to calculate as measuring the altitude of Polaris. But longitude, there lies an epic adventure, something fiendishly difficult to calculate accurately, something that propelled a great seafaring nation to a search for accurate timepieces that would work at sea, just in order to more accurately calculate longitude. Books have been written about longitude, lives lost, fortunes made. But latitude — latitude is for children.

Complementary pairs appear through out the world of standards. Often one of these is easier to pull together than the other. After the fact or at if one is only looking casually this difference in cost tends to be forgotten. One of the many places where at first blush two things appear the same, but as you get closer they are not. Delightfully you can actually use this cognitive effect for humor.

I’ve greatly enjoyed much of Richard Gabriel’s writing over the years.   Though I’ll admit I haven’t read anything he’s done in the past few year.  In any case I happened to I listened to this interview he gave at OOPSLA to Software Engineering Radio.  The interviewer wanted to learn about this thing, Lisp, and he asks a series of questions to dig into the matter.  While for me this was pretty dull Richard does tell retell a story I’d not heard in recent years.   That got me to thinking about a model of how ideas used to flow from the academic research labs into programming community at large; and in particular how the Lisp community didn’t use standards in quite the same way as other language communities.

Lisp is a great foundation for programming language research.  It is not just easy to create new programming frameworks in Lisp.  The pie chart of where you spend time building systems has a slice for framework architecting and engineering.  Lisp programmers spend a huge portion of thier time in that slice compared to folks working in other languages.  In Lisp this process is language design, where as in other languages it’s forced into libaries.  There is a tendency in other languages for the libraries to high cost, which makes them more naturally suited for a standardization gauntlet.  In Lisp it’s trivial to create new frameworks and they are less likely to suffer the cost and benefits of becoming standardized.

You get a lot more short term benefit in Lisp, and you pay latter as sweet frameworks fail to survive.  They don’t achieve some level sustianance because they don’t garner a community of users too look after them.

Back in the day this was less of a problem.  And thereby hangs the tail that Richard casually mentioned.  He was sketching out how a pattern that was common during the AI’s early golden age.  Graduate students would aim high, as is their job, and attempt to create a peice of software that would simulate some aspect of intelegence - vision, speech, learning, walking, etc. etc. - what aspect doesn’t really matter.  In service of this they would create a fresh programming language that manifested their hypothisis about how the behavior in question could be manifested.  This was extremely risky work with a very low chance of success.  It’s taken more then fifty years to begin to get traction in all those problems, and back in the day computers were - ah - smaller.

Enticing graduate students into taking huge risks is good, but if you punish them for failing then pretty soon they stop showing up at your door.  So you want to find an escape route.  In the story that Richard sites, and which I’d heard before, the solution was to give them a degree for the framework.

Which was great.  At least for me.  All thru that era I used to entertain myself by reading these doctorial thesis outlining one clever programming framework after another.

What’s facinating is that each of those acted as a substitute for a more formal kind of library standardization.  They filled a role in the Lisp community that standardized libraries played today in more mainstream programming communities.  This worked in part because individual developers could implement these frameworks, in part or if they were in the mood in their entirety, surprisingly quickly.  These AI languages provided a set of what we might call programming patterns today.  Each doctoral thesis sketched out huge amount of detail, but each instance of the ideas found there tended to diverge under the adaptive presure of that developer unique problem.

So while a doctoral thesis isn’t a standards specification it can act, like margarine for butter, as a substitute.  Particularly if the consumers can stomach it.  Lisp programmers like to eat whole frameworks.

Off and on I wonder a bit about how quickly standards can change, and what it would mean if we could change them very quickly.  My usual example for this would be highway speeds.  There isn’t much point in driving 70 mph 15 miles down the highway just to join a 3 mile blockage of stop and go traffic.  The authorities could, presumably signal everybody upstream that it’s in their best interests to drop down to 45 mph.

Of course you can see also the traffic calming ideas, the architecture of control ideas, some of the ideas about calming traffic via the intervention of individual drivers.  Obviously such a systems can be implemented along the lines of libertarian paternalism.

Dynamic standard setting is like dynamic pricing.  IT tech makes it easier to implement.  You could replace all the speed limit signs with electronic signs much as the store I was in the other day had replaced, in the shoe department, all their price labels with electronic ones.  Of course pricing and standards have changed dynamically long before we had IT.  Other stores just put up 30% off signs.  I don’t doubt that if the highway authorities communicated that “southbound travelers on 128 are advised that to practice 30% reduction in speed” much of the benefit could be achieved.
These musings are triggered by an idea the California regulators have floated to do something analogous with the thermostats in new buildings.   The scheme would allow them to signal the buildings to back off on their electricity consumption when the traffic jams occurs in the electricity distribution network.  Lauren Weinstein’s reaction to this suggestion is delightfully over the top.

Here’s a thought provoking example of a exchange standard along with an short informed essay about the effects it has on the adjacent parts of the system.  The example is the trash chute in an apartment building.  In my experience, at least in NYC, much of the trash is broken up into units the size of a plastic shopping bag.  That happens to fit nicely into many of these chutes, and size standardization flows back up the supply chain nicely.  There are household trash bins that take a standard plastic grocery bag for a liner.  Living in an inner ring suburb in Boston, as I now do, I was surprised how hard it was to find a source for those trash bins.  In seemingly related news my wife recently made some cloth grocery bags, which are identical in topology to the plastic ones.