Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

Nineteen Eighty-Four (henceforth “1984”) is one of those books that seems to follow you around, like Alice in Wonderland. By that I mean that references to it keep cropping up around you, but more than that, it’s like the references to these works somehow encode some information which underlies some central truth to the universe. Follow the white rabbit, as Morpheus would say. In fact it was at the intersection of these two great threads that I resolved to read 1984. I was visiting a very dear friend, who I saw had started reading this book, which piqued my interest in it again, but at some point in my conversation with her, she mentioned one of her favourite books, Alice in Wonderland of course, and I said something like, “Yes, it’s very important for [imaginative artists] like you to read that book.” (or words to that effect) and then said “I wonder if there is an equivalent that [responsible software engineers] like me should read?” Naturally, her reply was 1984.

The short answer is “no”, in case you are happy to just take my word for it and don’t have time to read my justification for this view. A slightly longer answer would be “Hotwire version 0,710 would be the best piece of software ever (until the next best piece of software ever comes out) if a finite number of bugs were fixed and a finite number of relatively simple features were added.” Many of the bugs and features missing are related to the usability of the user interface, which is to some extent a matter of taste, but there are usability improvements that can be made based on certain widely accepted metrics. Below, then, I give a mixture of a review, an infestation(?) of bug reports, and a design concept.