Posts Tagged ‘Programming’
Kill Your Darlings
A programming genius I know is helping me crunch data that I’ve been collecting for this book I’m writing about the public radio pledge drive. The plan is that tranche A, after it’s washed and tumble dried, will be a template for tranche B; using one as a control for the other to find patterns that aren’t obvious.
I know a little about spreadsheets, and that’s how I gave my programmer friend the data I’d gathered. But they weren’t exactly in love with it. “You need to reformat this”, they said. “Otherwise, I need to write a whole language subset (whatever that means) before you can see this data the way you want to see it.” In other words, they didn’t like my spreadsheet.
I like to think I’m a smart person. I like to think I’ve been around enough to know a little about a lot, but that little bit I know is really good. Turns out, spreadsheets are high school level data collection to graduate level people writing programming in languages like Perl. So, here I am, reformatting my spreadsheet in a way that my programming friend’s program can better search it, parce it, slice and dice it.
And you know, their way is better.
There isn’t as much ambiguity. There’s much more consistency. And I’m finding mistakes, not in the original data, but how I notated it. It’s like when writers are taught to read their copy backwards as a way to catch mistakes because reading it forward makes it too easy to miss them. Rearranging my twenty columns into their three is a brutal exercise in utility. But it’s exactly the kind of brute force utilitarianism that a programming language needs to create elegant results.
“Kill your darlings” is what editors tell writers too in love with what they’re written.
I can tell you, programmers are even worse.
Antonin Scalia and Public Radio
It’s worth noting that back in the early 70s, when President Nixon was looking for ways to curtail federal funds to public broadcasting, he received advice from his then council for public broadcasting, future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. According to Andrew Giarolo, a doctoral candidate at Seton Hall in 2013 and author of, “Resolving the Debate on Public Funding for National Public Radio”, Mr. Scalia “crafted a policy by which local stations would drive programming choices.”
This was important at the time because there was a division within Congress between those who thought NPR should be a national network vs. those who thought federal funding should focus on stations developing a local-only programming policy. Both camps knew that the size of the voice affected the spread of the message. And since public radio had by then gained the reputation of being an “Eastern liberal institution”, conservatives in the White House, Congress and the courts wanted to make sure federal money wasn’t supporting it too strongly.
Programming is key because programming is expensive and needs to be paid for. Local stations didn’t have the budgets to create the kind of investigative reports that infuriated the Nixon adminstration, but networks and dedicated production facilities did. So attacking CPB funds was a key strategy by the right.
Although Scalia helped prepare legislation for submission to Congress that contained ideas for local stations to drive programming rather than NPR, it went nowhere. But, years later, NPR would itself create a system of diversified funding sources that included local stations, that would protect funding for programming and save it from budget attacks in the future.