How helpful is Neumann’s dichotomy in correcting the NHS setbacks? There’s no doubt that the multibillion-dollar budget attracted the highest-heeled consultants, well versed in all the best practices of SE (software engineering), but not, apparently, consultants from CSI via SRI International, able to translate wish lists into timely, within-budget working systems with happy users. Nobody at the NHS NPfIT level of expertise set out to avoid all the goodies listed under holistic SD. Every single item, from “pervasive” use of requirements and specifications through to design for maintainability, would be noddingly ticked in the YES box.

A unified, central database with reliable, up-to-date information and secure access controls is a major challenge for any industry, but for a national health service it’s a matter of life and death allowing no room for compromise. Yet, scaling up from relatively trivial local trials to a national, integrated network has proved intractable. We are able to pontificate about decomposable architectures but unable to cope when the modules need to mesh.

APHORISM CONTEST

The challenge set in my January/February 2008 column was to find contradictory pairs of aphorisms. The trigger example was “More hands make light work” in contrast to “Too many cooks spoil the broth.” The winner is Joseph M. Perret, who submits “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” conflicting with the unromantic but, alas, realistic “Out of sight, out of mind.” I pause to note that the latter is often cited as an early MT (machine translation) fiasco. It is said, and hard to refute, that this saying was submitted to English-to-Russian then Russian-to-Eng-lish MT programs, producing the phrase “invisible idiot.”

Perret clinches his victory with the problematic pair: “Mother knows best” and “Father knows best.” He defends this as a true contradiction, claiming that the intersection of his parents’ “wisdoms” was indeed the empty set. I suppose the trendy plural is knowledge sets! In which case, I see a larger Venn diagram for my own immediate family. They’ve joked about my grandfatherly omniscience ever since I told them that I failed in the papal job application by being overqualified in infallibility. Last Christmas they gave me a T-shirt saying, “Forget Google—Ask Stan!”

Next column: L’Affaire Ledin continues. Should we teach the innards of malware? Your views solicited. Q

REFERENCES

1. “The new black” snowclone seems to have started in 1962 as the more colorful “Pink is the new navy blue” when fashion editor Diana Vreeland noticed a swing

in Indian fabric preferences. Pedants will note (in vain) that I’m taking liberties with C++ semantics.

2. This collectivism is deliberate. Brit football (soccer) fans will be familiar with a team called the Hamilton Academicals, founded circa 1874. Fan-chant prosodies are a tad more taxing than for those supporting Chel-sea or Liv-er-pool! See my “Terrace Muse” (Daily Express, 1967). Inevitably, the uncouth Hamiltonians shorten their noble team name to the Accies, not to be confused with the Addicks (Chalton FC’s nickname). Over the years I’ve developed some mock sports-computer collations, including such scorelines as: EDSAC 2, Leo 3 (friendly); Fortran 5, Modula 2; OS 2, Exec 8 (a fine away win for Univac); ICT 1900, IBM 360 (game suspended); Motorola 68000, Intel 8086 (after extra time); the Vista-Leopard game (late kickoff). Fresh examples invited.

3. Neumann, P. Holistic Systems; http://www.csl.sri. com/~neumann/holistic.pdf.

4. Leftish greens, who never leave their al dente sprouts uneaten, would point to President George H. W. Bush as an example of what happens to broccoli haters. Alas, his son, Dubya, is quite fond of them. Whom to believe?

5. D. C. Moulton defined the one-line-patch as “a kludge so minimal that no testing is necessary. Corrected by a further one-line patch.” Kelly-Bootle, S. 1995. TCC (The Computer Contradictionary), MIT Press.

6. See any anthology of Greek myths by Robert Graves. I/O is still a cow! Also TCC entries at I/O, mount, and prayer [ibid].

 

LOVE IT, HATE IT? LET US KNOW feedback@acmqueue.com or www.acmqueue.com/forums

 

STAN KELLY-BOOTLE ( http://www.feniks.com/skb/; http:// www.sarcheck.com), born in Liverpool, England, read pure mathematics at Cambridge in the 1950s before tackling the impurities of computer science on the pioneering EDSAC I. His many books include The Devil” ’s DP Dictionary (McGraw- Hill, 1981), Understanding Unix (Sybex, 1994), and the recent e-book Computer Language—The Stan Kelly-Bootle Reader. Software Development Magazine named him as the first recipient of the new annual Stan Kelly-Bootle Eclectech Award for his “lifetime achievements in technology and letters.” Neither Nobel nor Turing achieved such prized eponymous recognition. Under his nom-de-folk, Stan Kelly, he has enjoyed a parallel career as a singer and songwriter. He can be reached at curmudgeon@acmqueue.com. © 2008 ACM 1542-7730/08/0500 $5.00