Paul M. Jones

Don't listen to the crowd, they say "jump."

You Do Not Have A Right To Contribute

(Another in a series on the proposed PHP code of conduct, itself a work in progress in at least one other place.)

Over the weekend I listened to a recent episode of the Dev Hell podcast, hosted by Chris @grmpyprogrammer Hartjes and Ed @funkatron Finkler, and guest-starring Amanda @AmbassadorAwsum Folson. (Full disclosure: I have been a guest on the podcast previously.)

The episode is #70 “Anti-Canuckite Leanings”, and in it, they discuss the proposed code of conduct starting around 26:00. You should listen to the whole discussion, which ends after about 30 minutes (and really the whole episode if you can).

There’s a lot to address in the discussion, but I’m going to concentrate on only one point. Chris Hartjes says, at about the 30:17 mark:

I think fighting against the code of conduct is a losing battle, because it will get passed. And you have a choice, you can either keep contributing to PHP, or move on and do something else. It’s as simple as that. You do not have a right to contribute to PHP, it’s a privilege. It sucks how that privilege is handed out, and it sucks how sometimes that privilege is wielded as a stick by which to beat other poeople, but at the end of the day, despite it being an open source project, it is a private project, and nobody has to take your contributions. It’s as simple as that.

He reiterates the point a few times:

(48:09) If you don’t like it, go on and contribute to another project.

(48:44) The people who complain, well they either get with the program, or they just go do something else with their time.

(51:45) If you don’t like it, just don’t participate in the project.

To be sure, Chris does not specifically say he is either for or against the code of conduct as presented in the RFC, which currently uses the language of the Contributor Covenant.

Even so, I have heard variations of this from Contributor Covenant supporters. These kinds of comments strike me as interesting in two ways.

First, “If you don’t like it, just don’t participate in the project” and its variations do not seem in the spirit of “fostering an open and welcoming community.” I see this as revealing part of the true intent of Contributor Covenant supporters: to wit, they wish to set themselves up as judges of who is to be accepted, and who is to be rejected.

Second, and more importantly, the very same argument applies in favor of the status quo; that is, not having an explicit code of conduct. Let’s take a look at the same wording, but against having a code of conduct:

If the project does not have a code of conduct, you have a choice, you can either keep contributing, or move on and do something else. It’s as simple as that. You do not have a right to contribute, it’s a privilege. At the end of the day, despite it being an open source project, it is a private project, and nobody has to take your contributions. It’s as simple as that.

So the argument is simultaneously made for not-having a code of conduct, using exactly the same wording. If you don’t like that there’s no code of conduct, “go on and contribute to another project.” After all, “you do not have a right to contribute.” You can “either get with the program, or just go do something else with your time.”

This means to me, among other things, that the burden of proof remains on those who support the Contrbutor Covenant, proof which they sorely lack, or are unwilling to put forth.

For the record, this is not an attempt to hammer on Chris, whom I count as a friend. It is an attempt only to point out one of the many flawed arguments of some who support the Contributor Covenant.

Finally, for the record, I continue to be opposed to the Contributor Covenant and anything substantially similar to or derived from it. Having no code of conduct is better than having the Contributor Covenant.

Read the Reddit discussion about this post here.

On the Proposed PHP Code of Conduct

Recently, Anthony Ferrara opened an RFC for PHP internals to adopt and enforce a code of conduct. Even leaving aside for the moment whether this is an appropriate use of the RFC system, the RFC generated a lot of discussion on the mailing list, in which I participated at great length, and for which I was hailed as abusive by at least one person in favor of the RFC (a great example of a kafkatrap).

To restate what I said on the mailing list, my position on the RFC is not merely “opposed”, but “reject entirely as unsalvageable” (though I did make some attempts at salvage in case it goes through). I continue to stand by everything I said there, and in other channels, regarding the proposed Code of Conduct.

Normally, if you had not heard about this particular discussion, I would say you were lucky, and probably the happier for it. In this case, I have to say that you should be paying close attention. The Code of Conduct as presented enables its enforcers to stand in judgment of every aspect of your public, private, professional, and political expression. I understand that’s a bold assertion; I will attempt to support it below.

The Contributor Covenant version on which the RFC is based is authored and maintained by intersectional technologist and transgender feminist Coraline Ada Ehmke. Ehmke believes that open source is a political movement:

From the onset open source has been inherently a political movement, a reaction against the socially damaging, anti-competitive motivations of governments and corporations. It began as a campaign for social liberty and digital freedom, a celebration of the success of communal efforts in the face of rampant capitalism. What is this if not a political movement?

– Why Hackers Must Welcome Social Justice Advocates

Whether or not this description of open source is accurate, it is true that Ehmke thinks of open source as a political arena. As such, one must read the Contributor Covenant as a political document, with political means and political ends. Specifically, it is a tool for Social Justice.

As a tool for Social Justice, it recognizes no boundaries between project, person, and politics. This attitude is written into the Contributor Covenant with the text, “This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community.” So, when is a project participant not representing the project? The answer appears to be “never.”

That is, a project participant is always representative of the project. We can see one example of this from the “Opalgate” incident. In reference to a Twitter conversation where Opal is not the subject, Ehmke opens an Opal project issue, and then attempts (with a Social Justice mob of backers) to intimidate the project managers into removing one of the Twitter conversants from the project because of his non-project-related speech.

This is Social Justice in action. Remember, it is the author of the Contributor Covenant acting this way. To look at this incident, and simultaneously opine that the Covenant as a tool of Social Justice is somehow not political, or that it does not intend to police speech unrelated to the project, reveals that opinion as obviously incorrect. This kind of behavior is not “abuse” of the Contributor Covenant; it is the intended application of the Covenant. The Covenant is designed specifically to enable that behavior under cover of “safety” and “welcoming” and “respect”.

But “safety” and “welcoming” and “respect” are the primary goals of the Covenant, aren’t they? I assert they are the curtain behind which the true goal is veiled: power over persons who are not sufficiently supportive of Social Justice. I think is it appropriate to mention the motte and bailey doctrine here:

[The doctrine is compared] to a form of medieval castle, where there would be a field of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich. If an enemy approached, you would retreat to the motte and rain down arrows on the enemy until they gave up and went away. Then you would go back to the bailey, which is the place you wanted to be all along.

So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you claim you were just making an obvious, uncontroversial statement, so you are clearly right and they are silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.

Sentiments like “safety” and “welcoming” and “respect” are the motte of the Covenant: the defensible tower from which challengers are ridiculed. (“It’s nice! Who doesn’t want to be nice? Why do you think we should enable harassers and abusers? Why do you want to exclude women, LGBTQ, etc?”) But the real purpose of the Covenant is to enable work in the bailey: that is, to gain power over the political enemies of Social Justice, by using project membership as a form of leverage over them.

We saw that bailey-work in the Opalgate example above. As another example of attempting to use leverage, we have the following incident in the Awesome-Django project, run by Roberto Rosario. Rosario turned down a pull request, and thereafter received this demand to adopt and enforce the Contributor Convenant. (Interestingly enough, Github deleted the issue entirely, as far as I know without comment, and without notification to Rosario; the archive.is link appears to be the only evidence of the issue’s existence.)

After Rosario declined, the issue-opener ended the conversation with an attempt at intimidation: “You are a member of the Django Software Foundation and are supposed to be setting the example. I will be forwarding the content of this issue to the Chair to evaluate your continued presence in the DSF.”

Thus, the issue-opener began in the motte (“welcoming” and “respect”) but ended on the bailey (threats to leverage refusal of the Covenant into rejection from a project). Again, this is not an abuse of the Covenant. As a tool of Social Justice, that is its author’s intended purpose: to give cover for threats and intimdation against those who do not support the author’s politics.

Since threats and intimidation are the end-game, consider what else might be threatened by being insufficiently supportive of Social Justice in general, and the Contributor Covenant in specific. Any project leader, any conference organizer, any publisher, or any employer, might be approached regarding your politically-incorrect opinions as expressed on any non-project forum or subject, and be threatened and intimidated into distancing themselves from you. This leads to ejection from projects, denial or disinvitation from conferences, rejection of manuscripts, and refusal-to-hire or outright firing, based on political (not professional) concerns.

This is not the kind of behavior found in a free and open society. It is instead the behavior of a society that is totalitarian, even fascist-with-a-smiley-face. You are not allowed to disagree with the Social Justice proponents, in any capacity. You are not even allowed to “not care” – you will be made to care.

As such, I assert that the Contributor Covenant, and any other codes of conduct originating in Social Justice, are to be opposed out of hand, both in PHP, and in any other place they are suggested.

Postscript

While reading in preparation for writing this piece, I came across a lot of information that didn’t really fit, but might still be useful. Here’s a partial list of links.

Social Justice In Action

Discussions About Codes of Conduct

Alternative Codes of Conduct

Read the Reddit discussion about this post here (GamerGhazi), here (SocialJusticeInAction), here (Devalate), and here (PHP).

Atlas: a persistence-model data mapper

Atlas is a data mapper implementation for your persistence model (not your domain model).

As such, Atlas uses the term "record" to indicate that its objects are not domain entities. Note that an Atlas record is a passive record, not an active record; it is disconnected from the database. Use Atlas records indirectly to populate your domain entities, or directly for simple data source interactions.

No migrations. No annotations. No lazy loading. No domain models. No data-type abstractions. No behaviors. No opinions. Just data source mapping.

Read more at the Github repository.

How Do You See The PHP-FIG?

Fram a Reddit discussion; please reply over there.

There are some ongoing discussions on the PHP-FIG mailing list about, among other things, how the FIG is seen by the wider PHP community.

Since an earlier discussion pointed out that perhaps the FIG, while well-known, don’t do enough “active outreach”, consider this an attempt to “reach out.”

Do you think:

  1. The FIG is a bunch of self-aggrandizing elitist jerks who couldn’t write a competent or useful “proposed standards recommendation” if their lives depended on it, and should disband entirely.

  2. The FIG, while aware that the wider PHP community is watching, writes PSRs primarily for itself, and others can adopt or ignore as they wish;

  3. The FIG has become the closest thing to a userland standards group that the PHP community has, and should accept that role;

  4. Some other opinion?

Thanks in advance for your thoughtful, considered opinion, whether positive or negative.

Again, please comment at Reddit.

How To Think Real Good

Via http://meaningness.com/metablog/how-to-think. All of the following are quotes from the article that, in general, appeal to my priors. All emphasis in original, which you should read in its entirety.

The implicit assumption is that the problem Bayesianism solves is most of rationality, and if I’m unimpressed with Bayesianism, I must advocate some other solution to that problem. I do have technical doubts about Bayesianism, but that’s not my point. Rather, I think that the problem Bayesianism addresses is a small and easy one.

- Bayesianism is a theory of probability.

- Probability is only a small part of epistemology.

- Probability is only a small part of rationality.

- Probability is a solved problem. It’s easy. The remaining controversies in the field are arcane and rarely have any practical consequence.

My answer to “If not Bayesianism, then what?” is: all of human intellectual effort.

* * *

Understanding informal reasoning is probably more important than understanding technical methods.

* * *

Many of the heuristics I collected for “How to think real good” were about how to take an unstructured, vague problem domain and get it to the point where formal methods become applicable. ... Finding a good formulation for a problem is often most of the work of solving it.

* * *

Suppose you want to understand the cause of manic depression. For every grain of sand in the universe, there is the hypothesis that this particular grain of sand is the sole cause of manic depression. Finding evidence to rule out each one individually is impractical. ... [T]here is an infinite list of logically possible causes. ... We can’t even imagine them all, much less evaluate the evidence for them. So:

Before applying any technical method, you have to already have a pretty good idea of what the form of the answer will be.

* * *

Choosing a good vocabulary, at the right level of description, is usually key to understanding.

* * *

1. A successful problem formulation has to make the distinctions that are used in the problem solution.

...

2. A successful problem formulation has to make the problem small enough that it’s easy to solve.

* * *

It’s important to understand that problem formulations are never right or wrong.

Truth does not apply to problem formulations; what matters is usefulness.

In fact,

All problem formulations are “false,” because they abstract away details of reality.

* * *

[I]f you don’t know the solution to a problem, how do you know whether your vocabulary makes the distinctions it needs? The answer is: you can’t be sure; but there are many heuristics that make finding a good formulation more likely. Here are two very general ones:

Work through several specific examples before trying to solve the general case. Looking at specific real-world details often gives an intuitive sense for what the relevant distinctions are.

Problem formulation and problem solution are mutually-recursive processes.

You need to go back and forth between trying to formulate the problem and trying to solve it.

* * *

If a problem seems too hard, the formulation is probably wrong. Drop your formal problem statement, go back to reality, and observe what is going on.

* * *

Learn from fields very different from your own. They each have ways of thinking that can be useful at surprising times. Just learning to think like an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a philosopher will beneficially stretch your mind.

...

If you only know one formal method of reasoning, you’ll try to apply it in places it doesn’t work.

* * *

- Figuring stuff out is way hard.

- There is no general method.

- Selecting and formulating problems is as important as solving them; these each require different cognitive skills.

- Problem formulation (vocabulary selection) requires careful, non-formal observation of the real world.

- A good problem formulation includes the relevant distinctions, and abstracts away irrelevant ones. This makes problem solution easy.

- Little formal tricks (like Bayesian statistics) may be useful, but any one of them is only a tiny part of what you need.

- Progress usually requires applying several methods. Learn as many different ones as possible.

- Meta-level knowledge of how a field works--which methods to apply to which sorts of problems, and how and why--is critical (and harder to get).

Configuration Values Are Dependencies, Too

As part of my consulting work, I get the opportunity to review lots of different codebases of varying modernity. One thing I’ve noticed with some otherwise-modern codebases is that they often “reach out” from inside a class to retrieve configuration values, instead of injecting those values into the class from the outside. That is, they use an equivalent of globals or service-location to read configuration, instead of using dependency injection.

Here is one generic example:

<?php
class Db
{
    // backend type, hostname, username, password, and database name
    protected $type, $host, $user, $pass, $name;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->type = getenv('DB_TYPE');
        $this->host = getenv('DB_HOST');
        $this->user = getenv('DB_USER');
        $this->pass = getenv('DB_PASS');
        $this->name = getenv('DB_NAME');
    }

    public function newConnection()
    {
        return new PDO(
            "{$this->type}:host={$this->host};dbname={$this->name}",
            $this->user,
            $this->pass
        );
    }
}
?>

Granted, the example follows the modern practice of keeping sensitive information as environment variables. Similar examples use $_ENV or $_SERVER keys instead of getenv(). The effect, though, is global-ish or service-locator-ish in nature: the class is reaching outside its own scope to retrieve values it needs for its own operation. Likewise, one cannot tell from the outside the class what configuration values it depends on.

Is the following any better?

<?php
class Db
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->type = Config::get('db.type');
        $this->host = Config::get('db.host');
        $this->user = Config::get('db.user');
        $this->pass = Config::get('db.pass');
        $this->name = Config::get('db.name');
    }
}
?>

As far as I can tell, that’s a variation on the same theme. The generic Config object acts as a global singleton to carry configuration for every possible need; it is acting as a static service locator. While service location is inversion-of-control, it is in many ways inferior to dependency injection. As before, the class is reaching outside its own scope to retrieve values it depends on.

What if we inject the generic Config object like this?

<?php
class Db
{
    public function __construct(Config $config)
    {
        $this->type = $config->get('db.type');
        $this->host = $config->get('db.host');
        $this->user = $config->get('db.user');
        $this->pass = $config->get('db.pass');
        $this->name = $config->get('db.name');
    }
}
?>

This is a little better; at least now we can tell that the Db class needs configuration of some sort, though we still cannot tell exactly which values it needs. This is the same as injecting a service locator.

Having seen all these examples, and other similar ones, in real codebases, I conclude that configuration values should be treated as any other dependency, and injected via the constructor. I suggest this approach:

<?php
class Db
{
    public function __construct($type, $host, $user, $pass, $name)
    {
        $this->type = $type;
        $this->host = $host;
        $this->user = $user;
        $this->pass = $pass;
        $this->name = $name;
    }
}
?>

Simple, clear, obvious, and easy to test. If you use a dependency injection container of some sort, it should be trivial to have it read environment variables and pass them to the Db class at construction time. (If your DI container does not support that kind of thing, you may wish to consider using a more powerful container system.)

Alternatively, I think the following may be reasonable in some cases:

<?php
class DbConfig
{
    // backend type, hostname, username, password, and database name
    protected $type, $host, $user, $pass, $name;

    public function __construct($type, $host, $user, $pass, $name)
    {
        $this->type = $type;
        $this->host = $host;
        $this->user = $user;
        $this->pass = $pass;
        $this->name = $name;
    }

    public function getDsn()
    {
        return "{$this->type}:host={$this->host};dbname={$this->name}";
    }

    public function getUser()
    {
        return $this->user;
    }

    public function getPass()
    {
        return $this->pass;
    }
}

class Db
{
    protected $dbConfig;

    public function __construct(DbConfig $dbConfig)
    {
        $this->dbConfig = $dbConfig;
    }

    public function newConnection()
    {
        return new PDO(
            $this->dbConfig->getDsn(),
            $this->dbConfig->getUser(),
            $this->dbConfig->getPass()
        );
    }
}
?>

In that example, the DbConfig manages a set of injected configuration values so that the Db object treats its own configuration as a separate concern. However, that approach is just a little too indirect and open-to-abuse for my taste most of the time. The temptation is to start putting more and more inside the DbConfig object, and you end up with a mini-service-locator.

To sum up: Configuration values are dependencies; therefore, inject configuration values the way you would any other dependency.

UPDATE: Stephan Hochdörfer notes on Twitter: "I would probably re-phrase a bit: Configuration values should be treated like deps. Not sure if u can say that they are deps ;)." The point is well-taken, though it may be a distinction without a difference. If the class cannot operate properly without a particular value, whether that value is a scalar or an object, I think it's fair to say the class is dependent on that value.

Read the Reddit discussion about this post here.

Stop Fighting ISIS, Start Fighting Saudi Arabia

But ISIS is only a symptom of the larger disease, which is the spread of fundamentalist Wahhabist Islam from Saudi Arabia all over the world. This has become such a problem that even Germany -- which has precipitated the current "migrant" crisis in central and western Europe -- has publicly warned the Saudis against their fifth-column work. ...

Until Saudi Arabia is forcefully and directly confronted over its international financing of extremism, events like Paris and San Bernardino will continue and multiply.

Also, "The United States is not a nation-state in the sense the European countries are; it is not a country of blood relations, but of fealty to a document of western, Enlightenment principles regarding the relationship of citizen and state." Source: End the War on ISIS Now.

First Stable Aura 3.x Releases

Today we released the first round of stable Aura 3.x packages:

Since the announcement of the plans for Aura 3.x, we have made one small concession: the minimum PHP version is 5.5, instead of 5.6 as originally announced. Even so, all the 3.x packages are tested and operational on PHP 5.6, PHP 7, and HHVM.

Via the Aura blog at http://auraphp.com/blog/2015/12/01/aura-3-stable-releases/.

SQL Schema Naming Conventions

Several weeks ago I asked on Twitter for SQL schema naming conventions from DBA professionals. (I'm always interested in the generally-accepted practices of related professions; when I can, I try to make my work as compatible with theirs as possible.)

I got back only a handful of responses, representing MySQL, PostgreSQL, and DB2 administrators, really not enough for a statistically useful sample. Even so, I'm going to present their anonymized responses here, because they led me to work I had not previously considered at length.

My questions were:

  1. For table names, do you prefer plural (posts), singular (post), or something else?

  2. For primary key column names, do you prefer plural (posts_id), singular (post_id), just plain id, or something else?

  3. How do you name many-to-many association tables? For example, if many posts relate to many tags, do you prefer combining the table names in plural or singular? If so, do you separate them with an underscore? The examples would be posts_tags for plural, and post_tag for singular. Or do you prefer another approach?

The answers follow.

Table Names

  • "Table and columns are singular, so create table item, account and not items, accounts."

  • "Keep names singular. The reason behind that is that it was easy to reference column name with table name. Example: "user".first_name. The biggest challenge going with singular name is that most of the popular table names are considered keywords for the databases. Some of the examples: user, order, name, type etc."

  • "Table names should be plural. That's how I learned it, and it seems to make sense that a name for a collection of rows should be plural."

  • "I prefer plural table names."

  • "Plural - because it is a set of things."

Primary Key Names

  • "Every table must have an id primary key (surrogate) using a sequence (identity is ok sometimes)."

  • "I prefer singular names for column without any prefix or suffix."

  • "I would have said post_id but for the past several years I've switched to just id."

  • "I prefer primary key always id."

  • "Singular. For example, UserID."

Association Table Names

  • "If I follow singular table names, I use post_tag_mapping. I like to use _mapping suffix to explicitly identify such tables."

  • "We use plural_plural."

  • "I prefer mapping tables singular."

  • "I combine them as SingularPlural and generally have the dominant entity first as it owns things in the second entity. Ex: PostTags or UserRoles or StudentTests."

What Does This Tell Us?

Not a whole lot, it seems. We might say "there's no generally accepted practice" but with only 5 respondents that's not a reliable conclusion.

Havig said that, one respondent summed up what seemed to be a common sentiment this way: "Most people will probably agree it's about agreeing on a standard, and then being consistent with it." I think that's often the case with standards.

Another respondent noted, "Once upon a time you had production DBAs, and development ones that could do data modelling. These days it's just production DBAs, and we always inherit designs as we come in later." That certainly squares with my own experience. DBA professionals are generally hired much later as the business matures, and they're stuck with whatever non-DBA-professional decisions were made before their arrived. The pre-existing schemas bind their hands.

What Would Joe Celko Do (WWJCD) ?

However, more than one respondent referred to Joe Celko's SQL Programming Style, which I immediately ordered and read through.

I thought Celko's recommendations made a lot of sense. At first I thought I would have to copy the relevant sections here, but it turns out that Simon Holywell has already done so at his SQL Style Guide.

Celko's answers to the above questions appear to be:

  1. For tables: "Use a collective name or, less ideally, a plural form. For example (in order of preference) staff and employees." This one was especially interesting to me. The idea of using a collective name, not merely a plural name, makes a lot of sense to me, though it does not lend itself to automation.

  2. For primary key names: "Where possible avoid simply using id as the primary identifier for the table." I gather from other reading that the recommendation is to use a natural identifier as a prefix; in the case of a posts table, that would be post_id.

  3. For association tables: "Avoid, where possible, concatenating two table names together to create the name of a relationship table. Rather than cars_mechanics prefer services." On seeing it this way, it also makes sense to me, and I do not recall seeing it stated that way before.

Further, Celko lays out a series of uniform suffixes for column names. That by itself is pretty interesting.

Conclusion

If you're starting a project from scratch, and are interested in following the advice of at least one SQL and DBA professional giant, you may wish to review the recommendations at http://www.sqlstyle.guide and try them out. Even better, buy Celko's book. At the very least, by reading those recommendations, you'll have gained a greater range of options to choose from.

UPDATE: If it was not clear from the introduction, this exercise was about discovering generally-accepted practices of DBA/SQL professionals (i.e., people whose primary job is to administer a database and write SQL schemas), not the preferences of application developers who happen to use SQL databases.

Read the Reddit discussions about this post hereand here.