It's nice to be able to convey your feelings to your audience through writing, but great writers go further.

The world needs great writers, because they are travel guides. They guide us to visit places we couldn't reach alone. Worthwhile places that would go unvisited and unknown without our guides.

That's why "Kitchen Confidential" is such an amazing book. It's a travelogue.

When Gay Talese wrote "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold", he didn't write a profile of Frank. He was inviting us to go see Frank with him, to sign up to the great adventure of finding out who Frank really was.

If you would like to be one of our guides, I thank you.

Study the book "On Writing", by Stephen King, and begin inviting us to your travels!

If I am in charge of those decisions, I can use Perl to build a prototype, to validate the solution I am creating.

But if I don't decide anything, my job is to code whatever. No chance for me to be creative.

Most quirks of Perl are there to make the construction of prototypes easier and faster.

- "Programming is (should be) fun!", by Gerald Jay Sussman. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2MYzvQ1v8Ww

- "On Writing", by Stephen King. Just the chapter "Toolbox".

The "creation" part is key. Perl is a tool for "easy creation", for creators that want to be more productive. This is what Larry Wall wanted.

This is why Perl is good for prototyping. You "create" the prototype, and then you "translate" it to something else.

Perl is quite relevant for me, but I say this as a creator.

James and Yoly really enjoy living here in Madrid, and they explain the good and the bad of our culture and customs. No bullsh*t, warts and all.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@spainrevealed

tl;dr The main obstacles are supply chain inefficiencies and that no one buys planes that aren't cost-effective.

[0] Japan's Commercial Jet Failure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkmtrsE9Jfg

If you like "The Secrets of Consulting", the next one for you should be "Exploring requirements: quality before design", by Gause & Weinberg. What an eye opener it was for me!

For example, see https://www.failory.com

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_(film)

> "... its density was a little better than that of the other acid, and it was magnificently hypergolic with many fuels. (I used to take advantage of this property when somebody came into my lab looking for a job. At an inconspicuous signal, one of my henchmen would drop the finger of an old rubber glove into a flask containing about 100 cc of mixed acid -and then stand back. The rubber would swell and squirm for a moment, and then a magnificent rocket-like jet of flame would rise from the flask, with appropriate hissing noises. I could usually tell from the candidate's demeanor whether he had the sort of nervous system desirable in a propellant chemist.)"

Because I am commited to the Way of Printf, I have seen myself anticipating where printfs might be needed, and limiting the complexity of each segment of code to support printfs that aren't there yet.

In my experience, commitment to printf debugging incentivizes coding for simplicity and observability.

From Chapter 4:

> "I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas."

> "Because ease of use is the purpose, this ratio of function to conceptual complexity is the ultimate test of system design. Neither function alone nor simplicity alone defines a good design. This point is widely misunderstood."

> "All my own experience convinces me, and I have tried to show, that the conceptual integrity of a system determines its ease of use. Good features and ideas that do not integrate with a system's basic concepts are best left out. If there appear many such important but incompatible ideas, one scraps the whole system and starts again on an integrated system with different basic concepts."

These are some of my favorites:

From Tony Hoare:

  They removed recursion from Algol 60, on the grounds of its alleged inefficiency. Edsger's answer was that recursion was a useful programming tool, and every workman should be allowed to fall in love with their tools. 

  He would repeatedly stress the importance of choosing words carefully: "If you have to use your hands, then there is something wrong with your words", he would say, adding "imagine there is a blind man in your audience, how would you speak?" 

  Over time, I came to learn and appreciate that Prof. Dijkstra's class was operating at two different planes. There was the lesson and then, the lesson within the lesson. At one level, the goal was to solve the presented problem. At the second and more richer meta-level was the approach for arriving at the solution. 

  Prof. Dijkstra taught us that in computing science, complexity comes for free; one has to work hard for simplicity. 

  In his technical writing, he used language like a precision tool. For him, precision did not necessarily imply ease of reading, and he stated that the reader also had to make an effort to understand. 

  Professionally, Edsger's impact on me is best summarized by his ATAC Rule 0: "Don't make a mess of it." It made me strive for simplicity in notation and modelling throughout my working life and take unpleasant complexity as an indication of a possible lack of comprehension. 

  I decided against writing with a fountain pen. He never took issue with this, except in a letter that he posted seven weeks before his death: "I hope you will overcome your resistance and learn how to fill a pen without soiling your fingers, or otherwise you are denying yourself one of the joys of life." These were his last written words to me. 

  A famous quote of EWD is the following: 'I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me' (EWD1213). I can testify that this actually works. 

  When I write papers, even now, I still see Edsger over my shoulder going "Tsk! Tsk!" [...] I found that being less sloppy not only helped my readers understand what I had written, but most importantly, helped me from confusing myself.

  I have an invisible Edsger inside my head which looks over my shoulder when I am writing and quietly goes "Tut tut" if I write something that is muddled or not accurate. I don't always listen to that voice but know I should. 

  At faculty meetings when Edsger was not present it was common for someone to say "If Edsger were here he'd say such-and-such." 

  He came to work in the summer wearing a big Texas cowboy hat - they are made to keep you cool in the Texas sun. Often he would have on a cowboy's string tie. So from the waist up, he looked more Texan than I did. But he almost always wore shorts and sandals, which ruined the cowboy image completely. 

  Edsger critiqued not the person but only what they said, and later one could drink a beer and laugh as if nothing happened. Technical differences and shortcomings should be treated this way. 

  Douglas Engelbart aroused Dijkstra's ire so much that he needed a whole page of vituperative prose to offload his emotions (EWD387). What has Engelbart done to provoke this outburst? One only has to refer to "Engelbart's Law", see Wikipedia. Its reasoning seems to run as follows: look at what mere printing has done as a tool for thought; the system demonstrated is so much more powerful than printing that it must quickly lead to Intellect Augmentation. This way Engelbart showed no appreciation for the rich culture developed over centuries. What makes printing a powerful tool for thought is mostly due to other things than technology. Much of the power of this culture comes from publishers and editors, who sniff out what is worth printing and hold back what is not. Another important component of this culture is provided by libraries and librarians. Much is due to scholarly societies, which started printing their proceedings and to commercial publishers, which created journals, each with their editorial board and unseen bevy of reviewers. Most of all it is due to the idea of a university.