Go FORTH And Codify

Sometimes I chance upon random conjunctions between thought streams, conversations and just stuff that I happen to be reading at the time, that merge succinctly to reinforce the stream of thought I'm currently engaged with. Just now, I was thinking about a friend's current problems at work and how she might go about engaging with them; which led to our usual rant about how shitty the modern world of work is and has been for too long, now. Having grown up in the era when worker's rights were clearly defined and well-defended - I say the era because it frankly was an historical blip in social history thus far - we enjoyed a level of equilibrium and common sense - to a point - between workforce and employer that we've not seen the like of since. This has been on the skids since the start of the 1980s and we have been heading down the pan from then on, with a consistent erosion of worker's rights and the employment of institutional bullying tactics to cow the workforce into submission.

Anyway, I was also thinking, as I always do at this time of day: ' what's today's post going to be about?'. I was considering a follow up to yesterday's, with a bit of a foray into the programming language that yesterday's subject - Canadian programmer Virgil Dupras - employed to create his post-apocalypse minimal operating system, Collapse OS: a forty odd year old programming language called FORTH. The language is an interesting one in that you largely write the language yourself as you program it [that's a dreadfully simplistic encapsulation, but there'll be more in a future post], something that intrigues me and makes me want to learn more, so I did the usual and tried to find books available on the subject - I do like a book, as my rather too large collection of them [blog posts passim] will attest - but was dismayed to find that most are too expensive for a merely speculative buy. However, I've found the original definitive tome on getting acquainted with FORTH available online as a free pdf file.

I won't be printing the whole thing out just yet, as it's over 300 pages long, but I started to read the introductory stuff and came across this little passage which, in a kind of parable of the nature of FORTH as a programming language, also summed up the nub of my earlier train of thought vis-à-vis employment; good versus bad management and harmony or the lack of it in the workplace. Here it is in full:

'Imagine that you're an office manager and you've just hired a new, eager assistant. On the first day, you teach the assistant the proper format for typing correspondence. (The assistant already knows how to type.) By the end of the day, all you have to say is "Please type this."

On the second day, you explain the filing system. It takes all morning to explain where everything goes, but by the afternoon all you have to say is "Please file this." By the end of the week, you can communicate in a kind of shorthand, where "Please send this letter" means "Type it, get me to sign it, photocopy it, file the copy, and mail the original." Both you and your assistant are free to carry out your business more pleasantly and efficiently.'

This was written on or about the cusp of the demise of such human-scale thinking, back in the very early 1980s, at a time when good management knew the value of their workforce and trusted them to do the job they had been adequately trained for and were being fairly paid to carry out, without the insane levels of micromanagement and disciplinary culture that pass as the norm these days. Cooperation not confrontation, to quote my mate Gwil Bach in a recent email round with the Lads [blog posts passim for this reference]. How long before we can get back to using our common sense in our own service? We'd all be the happier and the wealthier for it...