2021 in the programming language standards’ world

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Last Tuesday I was on a Webex call (the British Standards Institute’s use of Webex for conference calls predates COVID 19) for a meeting of IST/5, the committee responsible for programming language standards in the UK.

There have been two developments whose effect, I think, will be to hasten the decline of the relevance of ISO standards in the programming language world (to the point that they are ignored by compiler vendors).

  • People have been talking about switching to online meetings for years, and every now and again someone has dialed-in to the conference call phone system provided by conference organizers. COVID has made online meetings the norm (language working groups have replaced face-to-face meetings with online meetings). People are looking forward to having face-to-face meetings again, but there is talk of online attendance playing a much larger role in the future.

    The cost of attending a meeting in person is the perennial reason given for people not playing an active role in language standards (and I imagine other standards). Online attendance significantly reduces the cost, and an increase in the number of people ‘attending’ meetings is to be expected if committees agree to significant online attendance.

    While many people think that making it possible for more people to be involved, by reducing the cost, is a good idea, I think it is a bad idea. The rationale for the creation of standards is economic; customer costs are reduced by reducing diversity incompatibilities across the same kind of product., e.g., all standard conforming compilers are consistent in their handling of the same construct (undefined behavior may be consistently different). When attending meetings is costly, those with a significant economic interest tend to form the bulk of those attending meetings. Every now and again somebody turns up for a drive-by-shooting, i.e., they turn up for a day to present a paper on their pet issue and are never seen again.

    Lowering the barrier to entry (i.e., cost) is going to increase the number of drive-by shootings. The cost of this spray of pet-issue papers falls on the regular attendees, who will have to spend time dealing with enthusiastic, single issue, newbies,

  • The International Organization for Standardization (ISO is the abbreviation of the French title) has embraced the use of inclusive terminology. The ISO directives specifying the Principles and rules for the structure and drafting of ISO and IEC documents, have been updated by the addition of a new clause: 8.6 Inclusive terminology, which says:

    “Whenever possible, inclusive terminology shall be used to describe technical capabilities and relationships. Insensitive, archaic and non-inclusive terms shall be avoided. For the purposes of this principle, “inclusive terminology” means terminology perceived or likely to be perceived as welcoming by everyone, regardless of their sex, gender, race, colour, religion, etc.

    New documents shall be developed using inclusive terminology. As feasible, existing and legacy documents shall be updated to identify and replace non-inclusive terms with alternatives that are more descriptive and tailored to the technical capability or relationship.”

    The US Standards body, has released the document INCITS inclusive terminology guidelines. Section 5 covers identifying negative terms, and Section 6 deals with “Migration from terms with negative connotations”. Annex A provides examples of terms with negative connotations, preceded by text in bright red “CONTENT WARNING: The following list contains material that may be harmful or
    traumatizing to some audiences.”

    “Error” sounds like a very negative word to me, but it’s not in the annex. One of the words listed in the annex is “dummy”. One member pointed out that ‘dummy’ appears 794 times in the current Fortran standard, (586 times in ‘dummy argument’).

    Replacing words with negative connotations leads to frustration and distorted perceptions of what is being communicated.

    I think there will be zero real world impact from the use of inclusive terminology in ISO standards, for the simple reason that terminology in ISO standards usually has zero real world impact (based on my experience of the use of terminology in ISO language standards). But the use of inclusive terminology does provide a new opportunity for virtue signalling by members of standards’ committees.

    While use of inclusive terminology in ISO standards is unlikely to have any real world impact, the need to deal with suggested changes of terminology, and new terminology, will consume committee time. Most committee members tend to a rather pragmatic, but it only takes one or two people to keep a discussion going and going.

Over time, compiler vendors are going to become disenchanted with the increased workload, and the endless discussions relating to pet-issues and inclusive terminology. Given that there are so few industrial strength compilers for any language, the world no longer needs formally agreed language standards; the behavior that implementations have to support is controlled by the huge volume of existing code. Eventually, compiler vendors will sever the cord to the ISO standards process, and outside of the SC22 bubble nobody will notice.

2021 in the programming language standards’ world

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Last Tuesday I was on a Webex call (the British Standards Institute’s use of Webex for conference calls predates COVID 19) for a meeting of IST/5, the committee responsible for programming language standards in the UK.

There have been two developments whose effect, I think, will be to hasten the decline of the relevance of ISO standards in the programming language world (to the point that they are ignored by compiler vendors).

  • People have been talking about switching to online meetings for years, and every now and again someone has dialed-in to the conference call phone system provided by conference organizers. COVID has made online meetings the norm (language working groups have replaced face-to-face meetings with online meetings). People are looking forward to having face-to-face meetings again, but there is talk of online attendance playing a much larger role in the future.

    The cost of attending a meeting in person is the perennial reason given for people not playing an active role in language standards (and I imagine other standards). Online attendance significantly reduces the cost, and an increase in the number of people ‘attending’ meetings is to be expected if committees agree to significant online attendance.

    While many people think that making it possible for more people to be involved, by reducing the cost, is a good idea, I think it is a bad idea. The rationale for the creation of standards is economic; customer costs are reduced by reducing diversity incompatibilities across the same kind of product., e.g., all standard conforming compilers are consistent in their handling of the same construct (undefined behavior may be consistently different). When attending meetings is costly, those with a significant economic interest tend to form the bulk of those attending meetings. Every now and again somebody turns up for a drive-by-shooting, i.e., they turn up for a day to present a paper on their pet issue and are never seen again.

    Lowering the barrier to entry (i.e., cost) is going to increase the number of drive-by shootings. The cost of this spray of pet-issue papers falls on the regular attendees, who will have to spend time dealing with enthusiastic, single issue, newbies,

  • The International Organization for Standardization (ISO is the abbreviation of the French title) has embraced the use of inclusive terminology. The ISO directives specifying the Principles and rules for the structure and drafting of ISO and IEC documents, have been updated by the addition of a new clause: 8.6 Inclusive terminology, which says:

    “Whenever possible, inclusive terminology shall be used to describe technical capabilities and relationships. Insensitive, archaic and non-inclusive terms shall be avoided. For the purposes of this principle, “inclusive terminology” means terminology perceived or likely to be perceived as welcoming by everyone, regardless of their sex, gender, race, colour, religion, etc.

    New documents shall be developed using inclusive terminology. As feasible, existing and legacy documents shall be updated to identify and replace non-inclusive terms with alternatives that are more descriptive and tailored to the technical capability or relationship.”

    The US Standards body, has released the document INCITS inclusive terminology guidelines. Section 5 covers identifying negative terms, and Section 6 deals with “Migration from terms with negative connotations”. Annex A provides examples of terms with negative connotations, preceded by text in bright red “CONTENT WARNING: The following list contains material that may be harmful or
    traumatizing to some audiences.”

    “Error” sounds like a very negative word to me, but it’s not in the annex. One of the words listed in the annex is “dummy”. One member pointed out that ‘dummy’ appears 794 times in the current Fortran standard, (586 times in ‘dummy argument’).

    Replacing words with negative connotations leads to frustration and distorted perceptions of what is being communicated.

    I think there will be zero real world impact from the use of inclusive terminology in ISO standards, for the simple reason that terminology in ISO standards usually has zero real world impact (based on my experience of the use of terminology in ISO language standards). But the use of inclusive terminology does provide a new opportunity for virtue signalling by members of standards’ committees.

    While use of inclusive terminology in ISO standards is unlikely to have any real world impact, the need to deal with suggested changes of terminology, and new terminology, will consume committee time. Most committee members tend to a rather pragmatic, but it only takes one or two people to keep a discussion going and going.

Over time, compiler vendors are going to become disenchanted with the increased workload, and the endless discussions relating to pet-issues and inclusive terminology. Given that there are so few industrial strength compilers for any language, the world no longer needs formally agreed language standards; the behavior that implementations have to support is controlled by the huge volume of existing code. Eventually, compiler vendors will sever the cord to the ISO standards process, and outside of the SC22 bubble nobody will notice.

Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2 and the v143 platform toolset

Products, the Universe and Everything from Products, the Universe and Everything

Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2 was released by Microsoft last week.

One of the changes included in Preview 2 is the addition of the Visual Studio 2022 specific v143 platform toolset (Preview 1 used the v142 platform toolset from Visual Studio 2019). Support for the v143 toolset has already been added to Visual Lint 8.0 and will soon become available within both VisualLintConsole and VisualLintGui in Visual Lint 8.0.3.

As part of that change, 8.0.3 will include a PC-lint Plus indirect file for Visual Studio 2022, and the Configuration Wizard and Options Dialog will both offer Visual Studio 2022 projects as an option:

Configuration Wizard with co-rb-vs2022.lntThe PC-lint Plus indirect file co-rb-vs2022.lnt has been added to to support Visual Studio 2022.

Furthermore, since Preview 1 was released last month we have been gradually plugging away (no pun intended!) in the Visual Lint development branch, adding support for the VS2022 VSSDK COM interfaces along with new x64 build configurations where needed.

It's worth noting that although named identically, the Visual Studio 2022 interfaces differ somewhat from their 32 bit predecessors so a lot of boilerplate changes have been required. However as we (fortunately, it turns out) use an in-house Visual Studio interfacing library to wrap the Visual Studio COM interfaces we use those changes have been largely localised to the support library itself - and that's made things a lot easier than it might otherwise have been.

Once that was done we turned our attention to the Visual Studio plugin project itself, by adding x64 build configurations to it and then gradually working through the code fixing the inevitable compilation and linker errors (mostly by conditionally compiling out 32 bit specific code, such as that relying on the add-in interfaces used with Visual Studio versions prior to Visual Studio 2015).

We finally got a clean build on a dev machine this morning, and then turned our attention to adding a VS2022 VSIX package project, which is necessary to deploy a plugin (or "extension", in Microsoft terminology) to Visual Studio 2022.

A few tweaks, some headscratching and more tweaks later, and just after lunch today Visual Lint not only successfully loaded under debug in a Visual Studio 2022 experimental instance for the first time but also analysed its first project under that environment:

screenshotA development build of Visual Lint running within Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2. screenshotA development build of Visual Lint running within Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2.

Of course getting the plugin running under debug is just the first step - there is still much to do before we can release a public build with a Visual Studio 2022 compatible version of the Visual Studio plugin.

That said, getting to this point is hugely encouraging, so today has definitely been a good day.

Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2

Products, the Universe and Everything from Products, the Universe and Everything

Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2 was released by Microsoft last week.

One of the changes included in Preview 2 is the addition of the Visual Studio 2022 specific v143 platform toolset (Preview 1 used the v142 platform toolset from Visual Studio 2019). Support for the v143 toolset has already been added to Visual Lint 8.0 and will soon become available within both VisualLintConsole and VisualLintGui in Visual Lint 8.0.3.

As part of that change, 8.0.3 will include a PC-lint Plus indirect file for Visual Studio 2022, and the Configuration Wizard and Options Dialog will both offer Visual Studio 2022 projects as an option:

Configuration Wizard with co-rb-vs2022.lntThe PC-lint Plus indirect file co-rb-vs2022.lnt has been added to to support Visual Studio 2022.

Furthermore, since Preview 1 was released last month we have been gradually plugging away (no pun intended!) in the Visual Lint development branch, adding support for the VS2022 VSSDK COM interfaces along with new x64 build configurations where needed.

It's worth noting that although named identically, the VS2022 interfaces differ somewhat from their 32 bit predecessors so a lot of boilerplate changes have been required. However as we (fortunately, it turns out) use an in-house Visual Studio interfacing library to wrap the Visual Studio COM interfaces we use those changes have been largely localised to the support library itself - and that's made things a lot easier than it might otherwise have been.

Once that was done we turned our attention to the Visual Studio plugin project itself, by adding x64 build configurations to it and then gradually working through the code fixing the inevitable compilation and linker errors (mostly by conditionally compiling out 32 bit specific code, such as that relying on the add-in interfaces used with Visual Studio versions prior to VS2015).

We finally got a clean build on a dev machine this morning, and then turned our attention to adding a VS2022 VSIX package project, which is necessary to deploy a plugin (or "extension", in Microsoft terminology) to VS2022.

A few tweaks, some headscratching and more tweaks later, and just after lunch today Visual Lint not only successfully loaded under debug in a Visual Studio 2022 experimental instance for the first time but also analysed its first project under that environment:

screenshotA development build of Visual Lint running within Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2. screenshotA development build of Visual Lint running within Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2.

Of course getting the plugin running under debug is just the first step - there is still much to do before we can release a public build with a VS2022 version of the Visual Studio plugin.

That said, getting to this point is hugely encouraging, so today has definitely been a good day.

Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2

Products, the Universe and Everything from Products, the Universe and Everything

Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2 was released by Microsoft last week.

One of the changes included in Preview 2 is the addition of the Visual Studio 2022 specific v143 platform toolset (Preview 1 used the v142 platform toolset from Visual Studio 2019). Support for the v143 toolset has already been added to Visual Lint 8.0 and will soon become available within both VisualLintConsole and VisualLintGui in Visual Lint 8.0.3.

As part of that change, 8.0.3 will include a PC-lint Plus indirect file for Visual Studio 2022, and the Configuration Wizard and Options Dialog will both offer Visual Studio 2022 projects as an option:

Configuration Wizard with co-rb-vs2022.lntThe PC-lint Plus indirect file co-rb-vs2022.lnt has been added to to support Visual Studio 2022.

Furthermore, since Preview 1 was released last month we have been gradually plugging away (no pun intended!) in the Visual Lint development branch, adding support for the VS2022 VSSDK COM interfaces along with new x64 build configurations where needed.

It's worth noting that although named identically, the VS2022 interfaces differ somewhat from their 32 bit predecessors so a lot of boilerplate changes have been required. However as we (fortunately, it turns out) use an in-house Visual Studio interfacing library to wrap the Visual Studio COM interfaces we use those changes have been largely localised to the support library itself - and that's made things a lot easier than it might otherwise have been.

Once that was done we turned our attention to the Visual Studio plugin project itself, by adding x64 build configurations to it and then gradually working through the code fixing the inevitable compilation and linker errors (mostly by conditionally compiling out 32 bit specific code, such as that relying on the add-in interfaces used with Visual Studio versions prior to VS2015).

We finally got a clean build on a dev machine this morning, and then turned our attention to adding a VS2022 VSIX package project, which is necessary to deploy a plugin (or "extension", in Microsoft terminology) to VS2022.

A few tweaks, some headscratching and more tweaks later, and just after lunch today Visual Lint not only successfully loaded under debug in a Visual Studio 2022 experimental instance for the first time but also analysed its first project under that environment:

screenshotA development build of Visual Lint running within Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2. screenshotA development build of Visual Lint running within Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2.

Of course getting the plugin running under debug is just the first step - there is still much to do before we can release a public build with a VS2022 version of the Visual Studio plugin.

That said, getting to this point is hugely encouraging, so today has definitely been a good day.

Documentation, another case of rapidly diminishing returns

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

No body writes documentation in startups.

Writing documents is a luxury only established companies can afford. One might ask: are companies successful because they write documents or do they write documents because they are successful? But I’d be hard pushed to find anyone to argue the latter.

Back in 1996 I worked on the ill-fated UK rail privatisation. I was part of the team writing a new computer system to create a new rail timetable – one that would allow competition in train services. In the average week I spent half my time coding and half my time documenting.

For every program there was a program specification – what the program had to do. And a functional specification – saying what the program did. I had to update both. And these had to align with the system architecture, which was a multi-volume beast I wasn’t allowed to touch.

Additionally I had to create a unit test plan for each program or set of changes. Unit tests were manual and the test plan was made up of two Word documents. One was a big table and the other had one test per page. As I conducted the test I had to update the plan with success or fail – and fail of course mean rework so we alwys made sure it worked before hand.

When my program was ready to check-in I had to fill in a source code control form so my team leader knew which files to check in. If I added a new code file to the system I needed to complete an additional form to explain what the file was. On one occasion I got fed up of a 2,000 line C++ file and refactored it as 4 smaller files. Being C++ his meant 4 pairs of .h and .cpp files, so 8 new files each with a form. My team leader was quite clear: I was never to do this again, it made too much work for her.

Did it help? – I find it hard to imagine it did. In fact I started my own hidden documentation, the “Rough Guide to …” which told me (and other devs) things we actually needed to know.

There are two types of companies: those that don’t write documents – and where many many people are asking for documentation. Documentation is seen as a solution to (almost) any problem. And yet people don’t write documents, then they feel guilty about not writing them.

The second type of company is overrun with documentation. There seem to be armies of people writing documentation: architects and business analysts seem particularly keen to write documents. These are often prose, they are about as readable as your average Shakespeare play is to a 15 year old and read about as often. Project managers are also prone to documentation but they don’t write prose; instead, project plans and progress presentations are documents in another medium.

In the first type of company nobody reads documents because there are none. In the second type of company its debatable how many of those documents are read. Many of them are so utterly boring that it is hard to stay awake reading them. As I’m often heard to say:

The bigger a document is, the less likely it is to be read.

And if it is read, the bigger a document is the less the reader will remember.

In one eye-and-out-the-other.

It’s probably just as well because documentation rapidly becomes out of date unless copious amounts of time are invested in keeping it up to date. Actually, it is good that documentation is seldom read because reading it is almost as expensive as writing it and, in theory at least, it should be read far more often.

True, “documentation” covers a very wide range of things. From project plans to release notes, from user guides to architecture diagrams. Some has more readers more than others – user guides compared to functional specifications. But then, who has read their iPhone manual? Does such a document even exist? Arguably the best products don’t need documentation.

In both types of companies I hear complaints about the lack of communication – actually, I don’t think I’ve ever visited a client were people didn’t complain about the lack of communication. But only in the first type of company do people think that documentation will cure the problem.

In such companies documentation is seen as the solution to almost every problem. Programmers complain they haven’t been given written requirements and specifications, they complain the user designers aren’t giving them documents of is expected, and most of all they complain the developers who came before them did not document what they did. Equally testers demand the same requirements and specification but also want programmers to provide written descriptions of what the program does. Project managers want written reports of what was done and so on.

Nobody ever got fired for asking for more documentation, but I’m not so sure about writing it.

While I have sympathy that these people want information I don’t believe documentation will solve the problems – perhaps because I’ve never seen a development effort with “Goldilocks documentation” – not too much and not too little. One thing I do know is that if everyone wrote the documentation they thought was needed, and what others wanted from them, then little would get done.

What I fear is a descent into documentation as everyone sets about communicating through documentation and not talking.

Because documentation takes time and money to create, it takes time and money to read, it takes time and money to update and keep current. And all the time and money spent on documentation is time and money not being spent on developing products and testing products in the market.

Worst still documentation becomes a hinderance to change. On multiple occasions I have met companies that do not want to change their products or processes because the cost of updating the documentation is too great.

I’ve nothing against documentation itself, I simply lament the time and money that could be better spent elsewhere, I regret the missed opportunities for real communication and belief that something has been communicated; and I fear the limitations that documentation brings once in place.

To answer my own question above. I don’t believe companies that write documents are successful, documentation does not determine success – if it did many many projects would have succeeded instead of failing. That documentation is so often lacking but products are successful actually goes to prove that is not essential.

Nor do I really believe companies write documents because they are successful. They write documents because they are successful enough to be able to afford to write documents but those same documents inhibit future success.

Before I close, I can almost hear people rushing to their keyboards to tell me of occasions were a system document saved their life,

“If Sam hadn’t left behind a document that told me the function was connected to the reactor core…”

While I’m sure such cases exists I’m not convinced the they justify the vast amounts of cost of writing a document against doing something else. If Sam hadn’t written that document what might Sam have done with the time instead? Possibly something even more valuable.

As with planning documentation exhibits rapidly diminishing returns on investment.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash


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