survival through language

Early in my career I landed on a project that was halfway through the launch. The project had been delayed a few times and higher management was getting increasingly agitated. Our sales team had lined up the ads and delays in an Advertising Based Revenue Model was simply intolerable. Engineering leads saw the salvation in cool technology so everything was cutting-edge. We sure had fun talking about advantages of Solr? Scalability of Cassandra and awesomeness of Zookeeper; too busy to try to fill the communication gap with the business team. When the problem is too complex it’s easy to fall into the idea that the solution is equally complex. During Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov pretended to sleep throughout the battle planning session, as he feared that Alexander would blame him for the inevitable defeat against Napoleon. When everyone was presenting their attack strategy; he had a solution: burn down Moscow before retreating east of the city. Some believe that a decision arguably saving Russia was only taken because of Kutuzov’s impaired decision-making, caused by a bullet destroying his frontal lobe! Maybe that’s what we had to do, forget about Moscow and remember that home is much more than a bunch of buildings.

Delays in the project had not stopped the initial requirements from evolving; every day a new set of integrations had to be done with the outside world. Even the business owner at the time didn’t know what the system was capable of and this stage was reached even before the project was launched. The conversations between business and engineering teams would take hours at times just because two hours into the discussion they would realize that when they talk about ‘Order’, they are talking about completely different things. A business process emerges wherever human and machine work are combined to produce value. We desperately strive for harmony and understanding between both tech and non-tech people. In his fantastic book on domain specific languages called DSL in Action, Debasish Gosh writes: “Creating a common vocabulary might take more time up-front than you’re initially willing to spend, but I can almost guarantee that you’ll save yourself a lot of redoing in the long run.” Thinking back, it amazes me how much energy was spent fighting over framework and technology features rather than discussing inherent and obvious characteristics of a language that could be leveraged in creating a domain specific language (DSL) that could in turn be used to finally enable our engineering, QA, documentation and business teams to perform in symbiosis.

Yeah, it’s difficult and expensive to build enough vocabulary, let alone watching a language and a beautiful story emerge out of that. When a language is powerful enough, it’s easier to dream about abstractions. These abstractions become building blocks of the stories we tell each other. A language and the ability to convey complex messages could arguably be one of the most important reasons why we have survived as a successful species. Pack animals are weak alone and as a matter of fact, Homo sapiens sapiens, ‘wisest of the wise’, are the weakest of all. A big headed slow creature with no claws; imagine what our ancestors went through to reproduce enough offspring to satisfy their immortal genes. Out of a population of billions, only a few can survive in nature, but those also seem not to be able to survive without their camera. Yes hippie, you have to face the fact one day that you have never been and will never be one with nature. We neither have the immunity of a bacterium to survive in extreme conditions nor the ferocity or strength to fight like a lion. We have survived many odds. It’s unbelievable. But that is not the point of the discussion; I haven’t done any particular research in the area, I do believe however that we have survived thanks to our language and communication skills. And we survived longer when we told a universally pleasant story with them.

Sailing smoothly from business ideas to technological products requires us to build a Tower of Babel made of all the natural languages that have arisen within disparate practices and cultures - engineering and business teams. The good thing about trying to think of a DSL is that we try to reshape those simple elements of language that seem to have a logical, natural definition for each group, when those definitions don’t match. But I know, building common vocabulary and eventually a language, is costly and more difficult than it sounds. And to make matters even more complicated, a beautiful story is not just created by a talented team; It is emerged out of a culture which is shaped by a much, much more complex landscape.

I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still. Arhur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell.