The Pragmatic Bookshelf PragPKeepingu It Light b IN THIS ISSUE: * THE FUTURE IS AUGMENTED Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and the choices we face * Olsen on optimization * Blankenship on managing * David Smith on augmented humanity * Daniel Markham on AI and the platform as the enemy * Michael Swaine on the mother of all demos * John Shade on CEObots, Antonio Cangiano on all the new tech books, Issue #115 and a puzzle! January 2019 PragPub January 2019 Contents FEATURES Why AR Will Win ................................................................................................ 12 by David Smith Augmented reality will change us. David has some ideas about how that can and should happen. The Platform is the Enemy ................................................................................ 20 by Daniel Markham What is the goal of technology, anyway? Has anybody ever clearly stated it? Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer ..................................................................... 24 by Michael Swaine In this latest installment in his computer history series, Mike discusses the graphical user interface. COLUMNS Swaine’s World ........................................................................................................ 3 by Michael Swaine No predictions. Technically Awake ................................................................................................. 4 by Russ Olsen Reasons not to optimize your code. New Manager’s Playbook ..................................................................................... 8 by Marcus Blankenship What meaning do you take from your job? Shady Illuminations .............................................................................................. 40 by John Shade John’s predictions for 2019. BOOKS Antonio on Books ................................................................................................. 29 by Antonio Cangiano Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction Plus 28 other new tech books. From The Pragmatic Bookshelf ......................................................................... 32 Systems Programming in the Twenty-First Century — i — DEPARTMENTS On Tap ........................................................................................................................ 1 The PragPub Puzzle .............................................................................................. 11 Solution to Puzzle ................................................................................................... 38 The BoB Page .......................................................................................................... 39 Except where otherwise indicated, entire contents copyright © 2019 The Pragmatic Programmers. You may not sell this magazine or its content, nor extract and use more than a paragraph of content in some other publication without our permission. Published monthly in PDF, mobi, and epub formats by The Prose Garden, LLC, Cave Junction, OR. E-Mail [email protected]. The editor is Michael Swaine ([email protected]). ISSN: 1948-3562 — ii — On Tap Building the Future Fifty years ago, Stewart Brand said in The Whole Earth Catalog, “We are as gods, we might as well get good at it.” Fifty years later, it’s as good a mantra What kind of future are we building? for a software developer as you could ask for. You’re in the future-building business. What kind of future are you building? Our two lead articles in this month’s PragPub invite you to think deeply about our tools, our platforms, and ourselves. David Smith is sure that Augmented Reality is going to change our lives in the future. But he’s less sure about what that augmented reality will look like and about how we will create it. Will we build a world in which we are manipulated by software or one in which we ourselves are augmented? And will we continue to try to build AR from the outside, or will we develop the tools to create and modify AR from within, so that we truly understand its workings and potential? Daniel Markham looks at the platforms we are building, and he wonders if we are making the right choices. Should we view the goal of technology to be a brain extension, helping us to decide what to do and then help us get it done? Or to be a hand-held power tool, helping us accomplish the things we’ve already decided to do? Does it make a difference? Are we as gods or are we building platforms that usurp that role? David Smith’s idea that we should build software from within is not new: it was at the heart of Douglas Engelbart’s famous Mother of All Demos fifty years ago, and was the idea behind Smalltalk’s enabling the developer/user to modify the system dynamically as it is running. David has been working with Alan Kay for almost thirty years now on how to make these ideas live again. Mike revisits that Engelbart demo in the latest installment of his computer history series. Our regular contributors are all here this month: Russ Olsen on optimization, Marcus Blankenship on managing, Antonio Cangiano on tech books, and John Shade on CEObots. Plus there’s a puzzle! We hope you enjoy this first PragPub issue of 2019! Who Did What writing, editing: Michael Swaine [email protected] editing, markup: Nancy Groth [email protected] customer support, subscriptions: [email protected] submissions: Michael Swaine [email protected] extreme curation: BoB Crew PragPub January 2019 1 reclusive curmudgeon: John Shade [email protected] data protection officer: Michael Swaine [email protected] Photo Credits Cover, page 1, and page 12: “Game Girl Person” [U1] by Max Pixel is licensed by Creative Commons 2.0. Pages 11 and 38: “Puzzle” [U2] by voyeg3r is licensed by Creative Commons 2.0. Page 20: “Tower of Babel” [U3] by Raquel Baranow is licensed by Creative Commons 2.0. Page 24: “Engelbart Hypothesis” [U4] by OneVillage Initiative is licensed by Creative Commons 2.0. Pages 29 and 32: “Books - Colored” [U5] by frankes is licensed by Creative Commons 2.0. You can download this issue at any time and as often as you like in any or all of our three formats: pdf [U6], mobi [U7], or epub [U8]. PragPub January 2019 2 Swaine’s World 50 Years On December ninth of last year, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, held an event in celebration of the 50th anniversary of by Michael Swaine Douglas Engelbart’s legendary demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco's Civic Auditorium in 1968. The demonstration No predictions. was titled “A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect” and that was what it was about, but I think it was Steven Levy who called it “the Mother of All Demos” and that name stuck. In that 1968 presentation, Doug sat at a cutom-designed console “where he drove the presentation through their NLS computer residing 30 miles away in his research lab at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), onto a large projection screen overhead, flipping seamlessly between his presentation outline and live demo of features, while members of his research lab video teleconferenced in from SRI in shared screen mode to demonstrate more of the system.” [Doug Engelbart Institute] Tim Berners-Lee was at the recent event, along with Ted Nelson and Brewster Kahle and Andy van Dam and Christina Engelbart and Vint Cerf and members of Doug’s team. Doug started something 50 years ago that is still being developed. He was engaged in discovering — or inventing — how we can use technology to expand not just the potential of humans but of humanity. Elsewhere in this issue David Smith and I have a bit more to say about Doug’s ongoing work, David with considerably more authority than I. Among other memorable things that happened as 2018 drew to a close, the founders of Juul became overnight billionaires. As Bloomberg News points out, Juul is now more valuable than Airbnb or SpaceX. Juul, as you no doubt know, makes a USB-shaped nicotine delivery device. Smart business model: rather than trying to develop a product or service that is so engaging that it becomes addictive, just build a business around a substance that is already addictive. The drone phenomenon hit peak annoyingness just before Christmas when drone sightings shut down London’s Gatwick airport multiple times and disrupted travel for 100,000 people. Meanwhile AT&T went live with its 5G service in 12 cities. 5G press release wars promise to be big in 2019, though 5G reality will likely be restricted to big cities for a while. Oops, I told myself I wasn’t going to make any predictions. So... Happy New Year! PragPub January 2019 3 Technically Awake What Mad Pursuit? I’ve spent a lot of my career teaching people about programming. I’ve taught everyone from complete technical newbies to old programming hands by Russ Olsen everything from structured programming to OO programming to functional programming to how to use the latest editor. Reasons not to optimize your code. In the early days, the computers were painfully slow and memory was expensive and hard to come by. So back then, performance was always at the top of everyone’s mind. In those days How fast is that? was probably the most frequent question I heard, second only to Wouldn’t this be faster? and How can we make this use less memory? Things are different now. These days a few tens of dollars can get you a solid gigahertz of processing power and more disk space than you could fill in a lifetime. Yes, everything has changed. Except the questions, which remain How fast is that? and Wouldn’t this be faster? along with How can