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"When thinking differently just isn't different enough."

You and Me and the WWDC
By Kirk Hiner
April 15, 2002

I absolutely love the WWDC. I've never been to one, most likely never will be to one, but I absolutely love it. I love it because it's the future of the Macintosh.

I should point out now that this month's notion will not be altogether absurd. It's more of an appreciative notion, I suppose. The people who attend this event, after all, do what I can't. They do that to which I cannot even come close; the create software that not only keeps me entertained, but that allows me to earn a living.

I can play football. If the draft was cancelled this year, the games were dropped, and my Seahawks were forced to all open car dealerships despite their snazzy new uniforms, I'd still be able to play with my friends on the high school practice field.

I can write books. If Vonnegut was to retire for good this time, Moore was to make sense of the world, and the events in the lives of the Baudelaire orphans were to quit being so unfortunate, I could always write my own books. I could read those of my friends. I could re-read the ones I liked and discover the countless volumes I've never opened.

I can see plays. Hollywood could fall into the ocean and I'd still be able to see local theater companies, summer stock, and high school musicals. Well, perhaps not the high school musicals. Most of the time, those are shows only a parent could love...and even then they usually have to fake it. But hey, it's not like Hollywood is giving us anything with swordfighting skeletons these days, so I'd probably still take the John Stuart Mill High School production of Carousel or Into the Woods.

What I can't do--what I can't even fathom doing--is creating computer software. I can't imagine having someone hand me developer tools and say, "Here, have at it." I know there's training to be had, classes to take, but I also know they'd do me no good. I mean, I could take years and years of figure skating lessons, I could even buy out the French and Russian judges, but I still wouldn't be taking home the gold.

I have friends who code software (though mostly for the PC, and none for games, the good-for-nothings). One was my roommate my sophomore year of college, and I remember many a night when I was set to partake of some campus skullduggery. I'd ask Willy (Bill, for short) if he wanted to accompany me, and he'd say he couldn't because he had a math problem to do.

"Just one?" I'd ask. "No problem. I'll wait."

"It'll take me a couple hours to finish it," Willy would say.

A couple hours? A couple hours to solve one problem? The concept baffled me. I was an English major, a field in which there were no answers to problems. The trick wasn't to solve a problem, but to pretend to solve it and then BS your way through a few pages of support arguments.

"Hamlet was an inconsistent, highly impulsive person. He rarely had reason for anything he did, and he therefore chose not to kill Claudius because at that moment he lost all truth he'd won about revenge through the appearance of the ghost and the play within the play and instead succumbs to the immediate need."

If nothing else, college did a great job of teaching me how to defend arguments I don't fully understand. Next stop, the U.S. Senate! Whee!

Not for the engineering students, though. Their world consisted of problems with solutions. Chaos with order. Zeros with ones. Their world had answers, and they had to find them, even if it took two hours just to find one. Then they had to remember how they found it and apply that knowledge to other problems.

Willy did this. He made it through five years of this torture (with co-op), found himself a job, found himself a wife (in spite of his major and the geekiness it entails), and bought himself a home. I'd say I admire the road he travelled, but I still can't get past that time he threw out a huge hunk of summer sausage in the trash can behind my desk and couldn't understand why it upset me. I'd have a hard time admiring Martin Luther King, Jr. if he were to have pulled that stunt with me.

The WWDC is full of guys like Willy, only hopefully a little more sensitive to the pungency of rotting deer meat and its adverse effects on the human nervii olfactorii. It's full of guys who attempt to command a world I can't understand so they can make plenty of money off guys like me. More power to them. I need their products as badly as they need my money.

See, I couldn't learn this stuff. I wouldn't want to try. I can look at blank paper and fill it with words. I can make educated guesses as to what will affect readers in certain ways, and I can try to keep them involved for a few hundred pages. I can make my words communicate with people. What I can't do is make my words communicate with machines. I can't put words and commands into strings that talk to chips and diodes and processors and who even knows what else. To do that, everything has to be exact. Everything has to sit in its proper place and read the proper way. Software code, as far as I can tell, is the writing equivalent of being punished in grade school for speaking out of turn.

And yet, there are people who do this. There are people who can not only take new developer tools, learn them, master them and create with them, but who revel in it. I won't even try to explain it. I could guess that it's the challenge, maybe. Perhaps it's a feeling of control they get from making code behave the way they want. I think, however, I'm leaning more towards the idea that they just want to create. Just as I attempt with novels, sketches and Absurd Notion articles, developers just want to create something of value. They want to give the world something we can appreciate, and hopefully make enough money off of it to continue doing so.

Thus, the WWDC. Have at it, gentlemen. Sign up now. Learn what you gotta learn. Do what you gotta do. Then, come Macworld Expo New York 2003, show it all off to me. Amaze me. Make me rethink the way I work and the way I play. Take OS X, the operating system that's easily the best I've ever used, and make it even better. Apple wants you to, I want you to, and your bank accounts want you to. We're all in this together.

Well, for some of the time, anyway. After all, I've still got plays to see, books to read and football games to play. Your software may be great, but it's nothing compared to twelve out-of-shape men--friends for over twenty years--scrambling for a fumbled football in the snow and the mud. I wonder when there'll be a conference for that.

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