Europe

Europe asleep (a key-not)

by

This week, Informatics Europe, the association of European computer science departments and industry research centers, is holding its annual ECSS event, bizarrely billed as “20 years of Informatics Europe”. (Informatics Europe was created at the end of 2006 and incorporated officially in 2011. The first ever mention of the name appeared in an email from Jan van Leeuwen to me with cc to Christine Choppy, received on 23 October 2006 at 21:37 — we were working late. Extract from Jan’s message: “The name `Informatics Europe’ has emerged as as a name that several people find appealing (and  www.informatics-europe.org seems free).” So this year is at most the 18th anniversary.)

I would have liked to speak at this week’s event but was rejected, as explained at the end of this note. I am jotting down here a partial sketch of what I would have said, at least the introduction. (Engaging in a key-not since I was not granted a keynote.) Some of the underlying matters are of great importance and I hope to have the opportunity to talk or write about them in a more organized form in the future.

Informatics Europe came out of a need to support and unite Europe’s computer science (informatics) community. In October 2004 (funny how much seems to happen in October) Willy Zwaenepoel, chair of CS at EPFL (ETH Lausanne) wrote to me as the CS department head at ETH Zurich with an invitation to meet and discuss ways to work together towards making the discipline more visible in Switzerland. We met shortly thereafter, for a pleasant Sunday dinner on November 14. I liked his idea but suggested that any serious effort should happen at the European level rather than just Switzerland. We agreed to try to convince all the department heads that we could find across Europe and invite them to a first meeting. In the following weeks a frantic effort took place to identify, by going through university web sites and personal contacts, as many potential participants as possible. The meeting,  dubbed ECSS for European Computer Science Summit, took place at ETH Zurich on (you almost guessed it) 20-21 October 2005. The call for participation started with:

The departments of computer science at EPF Lausanne and ETH Zurich are taking the initiative of a first meeting of heads of departments in Europe.

Until now there hadn’t been any effort, comparable to the Computing Research Association in the US with its annual “Snowbird” conference, to provide a forum where they could discuss these matters and coordinate their efforts. We feel it’s time to start.

The event triggered enormous enthusiasm and in the following years we created the association (first with another name, pretty ridiculous in retrospect, but fortunately Jan van Leeuwen intervened) and developed it. For many years the associated was hosted at ETH in my group, with a fantastic Executive Board (in particular its two initial vice presidents, Jan van Leeuwen and Christine Choppy) and a single employee (worth many), Cristina Pereira, who devoted an incredible amount of energy to develop services for the members, who are not individuals but organizations (university departments and industry research labs). One of the important benefits of the early years was to bring together academics from the Eastern and Western halves of the continent, the former having still recently emerged from communism and eager to make contacts with their peers from the West.

This short reminder is just to situate Informatics Europe for those who do not know about the organization. I will talk more about it at the end because the true subject of this note is not the institution but European computer science. The common concern of the founders was to bring the community together and enable it to speak with a single voice to advance the discipline. The opening paragraphs of a paper that Zwaenepoel and I published in Communications of the ACM to announce the effort (see here for the published version, or here for a longer one, pre-copy-editing) reflect this ambition:

Europe’s contribution to computer science, going back seventy years with Turing and Zuse, is extensive and prestigious; but the European computer science community is far from having achieved the same strength and unity as its American counterpart. On 20 and 21 October 2005, at ETH Zurich, the “European Computer Science Summit” brought together, for the first time, heads of computer science departments throughout Europe and its periphery. This landmark event was a joint undertaking of the CS departments of the two branches of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology: EPFL (Lausanne) and ETH (Zurich).

.
The initiative attracted interest far beyond its original scope. Close to 100 people attended, representing most countries of the European Union, plus Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia, Israel, a delegate from South Africa, and a representative of the ACM,
Russ Shackelford, from the US. Eastern Europe was well represented. The program consisted of two keynotes and a number of panels and workshops on such themes as research policy, curriculum harmonization, attracting students, teaching CS to non-CS students, existing national initiatives, and plans for a Europe-wide organization. The reason our original call for participation attracted such immediate and widespread interest is that computer science in Europe faces a unique set of challenges as well as opportunities. There were dozens of emails in the style “It’s high time someone took such an initiative”; at the conference itself, the collective feeling of a major crystallizing event was palpable.

.
The challenges include some old and some new. Among the old, the fragmentation of Europe and its much treasured cultural diversity have their counterparts in the organization of the educational and research systems. To take just three examples from the education side, the UK has a system that in many ways resembles the US standard, although with significant differences (3- rather than 4-year bachelor’s degree, different hierarchy of academic personnel with fewer professors and more lecturers); German universities have for a long time relied on a long (9-semester) first degree, the “Diplom”; and France has a dual system of “Grandes Écoles”, engineering schools, some very prestigious and highly competitive, but stopping at a Master’s-level engineering degree, and universities with yet another sequence of degrees including a doctorate.

And so on. The immediate concerns in 2024 are different (Bologna adoption woes are a thing of the past) but the basic conundrum remains: the incredible amount of talent and creativity present in Europe remains dormant; research in academia (and industry) fails to deliver anywhere close to its potential. The signs are everywhere; as this note is only a sketch let me just mention a handful. The following picture  shows the provenance of papers in this year’s International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), the premier event in the field. Even if you cannot read all the details (it’s a photo taken quickly from a back row in the opening session, sorry for the bad quality), the basic message is unmistakable: all China, the US, then some papers from Singapore, Australia and Canada. A handful from Germany and Switzerland, not a single accepted paper from France! In a discipline that is crucial for the future of every European nation.

icse_2024

Venture capital? There is a bit more than twenty years ago, but it is still limited, avaricious and scared of risks. Government support? Horizon and other EU projects have helped many, with ERC grants  in particular (a brilliant European exclusive) leading to spectacular successes, but the bulk of the funding is unbelievably bureaucratic, forcing marriages of reason between institutions that have nothing in common (other than the hope of getting some monies from Brussels) and feeding a whole industry of go-between companies which claim to help applicants but contribute exactly zero to science and innovation. They have also had the perverse effect of limiting national sources of funding. (In one national research agency on whose evaluation committee I sat,  the acceptance rate is 11%. In another, where I recently was on the expert panel, it’s more like 8%. Such institutions are the main source of non-EU research funding in their respective countries.)

The result? Far less innovation than we deserve and a brain drain that every year gets worse. Some successes do occur, and we like to root for Dassault, SAP, Amadeus and more recently companies like Mistral, but almost all of the top names in technology   — like them or loathe them  — are US-based (except for their Chinese counterparts): Amazon, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Apple, Meta, X, or (to name another software company) Tesla. They benefit from European talent and European education: some have key research centers in Europe, and all have European engineers and researchers. So do non-European universities; not a few of  the ICSE papers labelled above as “American” or “Canadian” are actually by European authors. Talk to a brilliant young researcher or bright-eyed entrepreneur in Europe: in most cases, you will hear that he wants to find a position or create a company in the US, because that is where the action is.

Let me illustrate the situation with a vivid example. In honor of Niklaus Wirth’s 80th birthday I co-organized a conference in 2014 where at the break a few of us were chatting with one of the speakers, Vint Cerf. Someone asked him a question which was popping up everywhere at that time, right in the middle of the Snowden affair: “if you were a sysadmin for a government organization, would you buy a Huawei router?”. Cerf’s answer was remarkable: I don’t know, he said, but there is one thing I do not understand: why in the world doesn’t Europe develop its own cloud solution? So honest, coming from an American — a Vice President at Google! — and so true. So true today still: we are all putting all our data on Amazon’s AWS and Cerf’s employer’s Google Cloud and IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Total madness. (A recent phenomenon that appears even worse is something I have seen happening at European university after university: relinquishing email and other fundamental solutions to Microsoft! More and more of us now have our professional emails at outlook.com. Even aside from the technical issues, such en-masse surrender is demented.) Is Europe so poor or so retarded that it cannot build local cloud or email solutions? Of course not. In fact, some of the concepts were invented here!

This inability to deliver on our science and technology potential is one of the major obstacles to social and economic improvement in Europe. (Case in point: there is an almost one-to-one correspondence between the small set of countries that are doing better economically than the rest of the Europe, often much better, and the small set of countries that take education and science seriously, giving them enough money and freeing them from overreaching bureaucracy. Did I mention Switzerland?) The brain drain should be a major source of worry; some degree of it is of course normal — enterprising people move around, and there are objective reasons for the magnetic attraction of the US — but the phenomenon is dangerously growing and is too unidirectional. Europe should offer its best and brightest a local choice commensurate with the remote one.

Many cases seem to suggest that Europe has simply given up on its ambitions. One specific example — academia-related but important — adds to the concerns raised apropos ICSE above. With a group of software engineering pioneers from across Europe (including some who would later help with Informatics Europe) we started the European Software Engineering Conference in 1987. I was the chair of the first conference, in Strasbourg that year, and the chair of the original steering committee for the following years (I later organized the 2013 session). The conference blossomed, reflecting the vibrant life of the European software engineering community, and open of course to researchers from all over the world. (The keynote speaker in Strasbourg was David Parnas, who joked that we had invited him, an American, because the French and Germans would never agree to a speaker from the other country. That quip was perhaps funny but as unfair as it was wrong: founders from different countries, notably including Italy and Belgium, even the UK, were working together in  a respectful and friendly way without any national preferences.) Having done my job I stepped aside but was flabbergasted to learn some years later that ESEC had attached itself to a US-based event, FSE (the symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering). The inevitable and predictable happened: FSE was supposed to be ESEC-FSE every other year, but soon that practice fell out and now ESEC is no more. FSE is not the culprit here: it’s an excellent conference (I had a paper in the last edition), it is just not European. My blood boils each time I think about how the people who should have nurtured and developed ESEC, the result of many years of discussions and of excellent Europe-wide cooperation, betrayed their mission and let the whole thing disappear. Pathetic and stupid, and terrible for Europe, which no longer has an international conference in this fundamental area of modern technology.

The ESEC story helps think about the inevitable question: who is responsible? Governments are not blameless; they are good at speeches but less at execution. When they do intervene, it’s often with haste (reacting to hype with pharaonic projects that burn heaps of money before running out of favor and delivering nothing). In France, the tendency is sometimes to let the state undertake technical projects that it cannot handle; the recipes that led to the TGV or Ariane do not necessarily work for IT. (A 2006 example was an attempt to create a homegrown search engine, which lasted just long enough to elicit stinging mockery in the Wall Street Journal, “Le Google”, unfortunately behind a paywall.)

It is too easy, however, to cast all the blame on outsiders. Perhaps the most important message that I would have wanted to convey to the department heads, deans, rectors and other academic decision-makers attending ECSS this week is that we should stop looking elsewhere and start working on the problems for which we are responsible. Academia is largely self-governed. Even in centralized countries where many decisions are made at the national level in ministries, the staff in those ministries largely consists of academics on secondment to the administration. European academia — except in the more successful countries, already alluded to, and by the way not exempt either from some of the problems of their neighbors — is suffocating under the weight of absurd rules. It is fashionable to complain about the bureaucracy, but many of the people complaining have the power to make and change these rules.

The absurdities are everywhere. In country A, a PhD must take exactly three years. (Oh yes? I thought it was the result that mattered.) By the way, if you have funding for 2.5 years, you cannot hire a PhD student (you say you will find the remaining funding in due time? What? You mean you are taking a risk?) In country B, you cannot be in the thesis committee of the student you supervised. (This is something bequeathed from the British system. After Brexit!) Countries C, D, E and F (with probably G, H, I, J and K to follow) have adopted the horrendous German idea of a “habilitation”, a second doctorate-like process after the doctorate, a very effective form of infantilization which maintains scientists in a subservient state until their late thirties, preventing them during their most productive years from devoting their energy to actual work. Universities everywhere subject each other to endless evaluation schemes in which no one cares about what you actually do in education and research but the game is about writing endless holier-than-thou dissertations on inclusiveness, equality etc. with no connection to any actual practice. In country L, politicized unions are represented in all the decision-making bodies and impose a political agenda, censoring important areas of research and skewing scientist hires on the basis of political preferences. In country M, there is a rule for every elementary event of academic life and the rule suffers no exception (even when you discover that it was made up two weeks earlier with the express goal of preventing you from doing something sensible). In country N, students who fail an exam have the right to a retake, and then a second retake, and then a third retake, in oral form of course. In country O, where all university presidents make constant speeches about the benefits of multidisciplinarity, a student passionate about robotics but with a degree in mechanical engineering cannot enroll in a master degree in robotics in the computer science department. In country P (and Q and R and S and T) students and instructors alike must, for any step of academic life, struggle with a poorly designed IT system, to which there is no alternative. In country U, expenses for scientific conferences are reimbursed six months later, when not rejected as non-conformant. In country V, researchers and educators are hired through a protracted  committee process which succeeds in weeding out candidates with an original profile. In country W, the primer criterion for hiring researchers is the H-index. In country X, it is the number of publications. In country Y, management looks at your research topics and forces you to change them every five years. I would need other alphabets but could go on.

When we complain about the difficulties to get things done, we are very much like the hero of Kafka’s Before the Law, who grows old waiting in front of a gate, only to learn in his final moments that he could just have entered by pushing it. We need to push the gate of European academia. No one but we ourselves is blocking it. Start by simplifying everything, but there are more ways to enter; they  are what I would have liked to present at ECSS and will have to wait for another day.

Which brings me back to the ECSS conference. I wrote to its organizers asking for the opportunity to give a talk. Naïvely, I thought the request would be obvious. After all, while Informatics Europe was at every step a group effort, with an outstanding group of colleagues from across Europe (I mentioned a few at the beginning, but there were many more, including all the members of the initial Executive Board), I played the key role as one of the two initiators of the idea, the organizer of the initial meeting and several of the following ECSS, the founding president for two terms (8 years), the prime writer of the foundational documents, the host of the first secretariat for many years in my ETH chair, the lead author of several reports, the marketer recruiting members, and the jack-of-all-trades for Informatics Europe. It may be exaggerated to say that for the first few years I carried the organization on my shoulders, but it is a fact that I found the generous funding (from ETH, industry partners and EPFL thanks to Zwaenepoel) that enabled us to get started and enabled me, when I passed the baton to my successor, to give him an organization in a sound financial situation, some 80 due-paying members, and a strong record of achievements. Is it outrageous, after two decades, to ask for a microphone to talk about the future for 45 minutes? The response I got from the Informatics Europe management was as surprising as it was boorish: in our program (they said in February 2024!) there is no place left. To add injury to insult they added that if I really wanted I could participate in some kind of panel discussion. (Sure, fly to Malta in the middle of the semester, cancel 4 classes and meetings, miss paper deadlines, all for 5 minutes of trying to put in a couple of words. By the way, one of the principles we had for the organization of ECSS was always to be in a big city with an important local community and an airport with lots of good connections to the principal places in Europe — and beyond for our US guests.) When people inherit a well-functioning organization, the result of hard work by a succession of predecessors, it is hard to imagine what pleasure they can take in telling them to go to hell. Pretty sick.

For me Informatics Europe was the application to my professional life of what remains a political passion: a passion for Europe and democracy. On this same blog in 2012 I published an article entitled “The most beautiful monument of Europe”, a vibrant hymn to the European project. While I know that some of it may appear naïve or even ridiculous, I still adhere to everything it says and I believe it is worth reading. While I have not followed the details of the activities of Informatics Europe since I stopped my direct involvement, I am saddened not to see any trace of European sentiment in it. We used to have Ukrainian members, from Odessa Polytechnic, who participated in the first ECSS meetings; today there is no member from Ukraine listed. One would  expect to see prominent words of solidarity with the country, which is defending our European values, including academic ones. Is that another sign of capitulation?

I am also surprised to see few new in-depth reports. Our friends from the US Computing Research Association, who were very helpful at the beginning of Informatics Europe (they included in particular Andy Bernat and Ed Laszowka, and Willy Zwaenepoel himself who had been a CRA officer during his years in the US), told us that one of the keys to success was to provide the community with factual information. Armed with that advice, we embarked on successive iterations of the “Informatics in Europe: Key Data” reports, largely due to the exhaustive work of Cristina Pereira, which provided unique data on salaries (something that we often do not discuss in Europe, but it is important to know how much a PhD student, postdoc, assistant professor of full professor makes in every surveyed country), student numbers, degrees, gender representation etc. etc., with the distinctive quality that — at Cristina’s insistence —we favored exactness over coverage: we included only the countries for which we could get reliable data, but for those we guaranteed full correctness and accuracy. From the Web site it seems these reports — which indeed required a lot of effort, but are they not the kind of thing the membership expects? — were discontinued some years ago. While the site shows some other interesting publications (“recommendations”), it seems regrettable to walk away from hard foundational work.

New management is entitled to its choices (as previous management is entitled to raise concerns). Beyond such differences of appreciation, the challenges facing European computer science are formidable. The enemies are outside, but they are also in ourselves. The people in charge are asleep at the wheel. I regret not to have had the opportunity to try to wake them up in person, but I do hope for a collective jolt to enable our discipline to bring Europe the informatics benefits Europe deserves.

And what if everything went well?

by

I do not have a crystal ball and disaster may still strike. A terrorist attack, disruption by the hateful scoundrels of the extreme left. (Meaning I would have to eat the words below, since they will be here for the record, but then we will have worse things to deplore.)

After initial doubts I have had an increasingly good feeling, as we got closer to the event, about the Olympic games. A few months ago I feared that unions would stage irresponsible strikes, but that does not seem to be happening; if peace was bought it was worth it.

It looks like the organization has been truly efficient and professional, with the right dose of controlled craziness (for the opening ceremony). After all, for the first time in decades France has had a competent government since 2017, still in place even if on the way out, and it shows.

What if everything went according to plan and beyond expectations? What if the unimaginable just happened now?

A skillfully orchestrated production, national unity even if temporary, smiles and welcomes — two weeks of bliss?

It is permitted to hold one’s breath and cross one’s fingers.

Bienvenue à Paris.

A remarkable group photo

by

On 13-15 September 1999 a symposium took place in St Catherine College in Oxford,  in honor of Tony Hoare’s “retirement” from Oxford (the word is in quotes because he has had several further productive careers since). The organizers were Jim Woodcock, Bill Roscoe and Jim Davies. The proceedings are available as Millenial Perspectives in Computer Science, MacMillan Education UK, edited by Davies, Roscoe and Woodcock. The Symposium was a milestone event.

As part of a recent conversation on something else, YuQian Zhou(who was also there) sent me a group photo from the event, which I did not know even existed. I am including it below; it is actually a photo of a paper photo but the resolution is good. It is a fascinating gallery of outstanding people in programming and verification. (How many Turing award winners can you spot? I see 7.)

Many thanks to YuQian Zhou, Jim Woodcock and Bill Roscoe for insights into the picture in discussions of the past two weeks.

photo

Macron and Borne: profiles in courage

by

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, and prime minister, Elizabeth Borne, are showing incredible political courage in promoting an indispensable reform of the pension system. The international press (with the exception of one recent reasonable Washington Post editorial) has largely taken the side of the strikers, explaining sententiously that the proper answer would be to tax companies more (as to the efficiency of that approach, here is an old but still valid example, from a left-wing paper). The unions have vowed, in the words of one of their leaders, to “bring the country to its knees” and seem intent on reaching this goal literally. (It may be useful  to point out that unions in France are not what the term suggests. In other countries a union represents the workers at a company or administration. In France every organization has several unions, usually 4 or 5, competing for, typically, a small minority of the workers, but with a role enshrined in the constitution. They are really state-supported political organizations, of various political hues, several of them openly hostile to employers and to capitalism. Interesting approach.)

The reform of the pension system was part of Macron’s electoral program and has been amended repeatedly to take into account the special characteristics of manual or otherwise difficult worth. Months of attempted negotiations took place with those union representatives who were willing to talk. The extreme left and extreme right were united to defeat the reform and at the last minute, after innumerable debates in Parliament which had resulted in a majority-backed solution, intimated enough moderate-right deputies to force the government to use a special constitutional mechanism (“article 49-3”) to ram it through. Who knows how many disruptions of basic services the country will have to endure in the coming months as saboteurs of various kinds try to make good on their promise to prevent the country from functioning. The attitude of the international bien-pensant press, who fans the flames (as they did with the Gilets Jaunes protests 5 years ago),  while castigating the January 6 Washington rioters, who are of the same ilk, is unconscionable.

The entire political class knows that a reform is indispensable, and has been delayed far too long, out of the cowardice of previous governments. Macron’s and Borne’s goal is simple: to preserve France’s pension system (the very system that the opponents deceitfully accuse them of destroying), based on solidarity between generations, workers paying for retirees, as opposed to a capitalization-based system with its dependence on the ups and downs of the stock market. Thanks in particular to a generous health service, people live ever longer; the new plan makes them work a couple of years more to help ensure the sustainability of the approach. Macron is in his second, non-renewable term and has decided that he would not leave office without having carried out this part of his duty. Borne, an outstanding manager with a distinguished record, has taken the risk of sacrificing her political career by bringing the reform through. (In the Fifth Republic’s mixed presidential system, the conventional wisdom is that the prime minister is the president’s “fuse”, an expendable resource for implementing difficult tasks. Cynical and tough, but a direct consequence of the constitution designed by De Gaulle and his deputy Debré 60 years ago.)

In the meantime, Macron and Borne are showing Europe and the world what true dedication and leadership mean.

La folie française

by

Nulle part, dans la cohue des exégèses du mouvement des « gilets jaunes », ne trouve-t-on l’explication pourtant évidente : c’est pour partie une affaire de droit commun et pour le reste un coup de main proto-fasciste. Rien d’autre.

L’aspect le plus clair est celui de la délinquance. Dans quel autre pays civilisé des énergumènes se mettent-ils, pour clamer leurs frustrations, à opprimer leurs concitoyens en paralysant la société par la violence ? Dans un seul. La France. Et c’est en France seulement que l’on ne trouve rien à redire. En France et dans tous les pays du monde, si vous bloquez l’entrée d’un rond-point avec votre voiture, les gendarmes arrivent et vous emmènent au poste. En France seulement, si vous faites la même chose avec trente de vos acolytes, tout le monde compatit, le préfet vient repectueusement palabrer avec vous, et Le Monde convoque un professeur de sociologie pour expliquer combien vous avez raison de souffrir du mépris des élites. Absurde et inouï. Si le gouvernement Macron a fait une erreur, c’est celle-là : au premier péage bloqué, au premier radar neutralisé, il fallait dans les dix minutes coffrer les délinquants et les déférer à la justice – quitte à elle, dans la meilleure tradition d’un pays démocratique, de les juger sans passion en écoutant leurs doléances. Mais se plier à la morgue de ces gens qui utilisent la force pour empêcher les autres de vivre leur vie et d’assurer leur subsistance ? La suite était à prévoir : l’illégalité étant officiellement sanctionnée, tout ce qu’un pays compte d’extrémistes de gauche et de droite, et de simples malfrats ravis de casser et de piller, s’engouffre dans la brèche. Mais c’est hypocrite de regretter les malheureux débordements. Avant même l’entrée des casseurs professionnels, la violence était dès la première heure la définition même du mouvement. Il ne s’agissait pas de plaintes, de pétitions, de manifestations ; il s’agissait de saboter le fonctionnement le plus élémentaire d’une société civilisée. D’empêcher les citoyens de circuler et de travailler. Dans tout autre pays les voyous se retrouvaient immédiatement en prison. En France, on les invite à la télévision.

L’illégalité de droit commun n’est que le début. L’idéologie et surtout la pratique de ces gens rappellent de plus en plus le fascisme. Le fascisme est, pour une large part, le triomphe de la force brute sur la légalité: la prise de pouvoir d’une minorité par la violence, et l’imposition par la violence de ses valeurs au reste de la société. Les 250 000 bloqueurs du premier samedi représentaient moins d’un pour cent de la population adulte. De quel droit s’arrogent-ils l’autorité de décider qui passe et qui ne passe pas ? De tabasser un jeune homme et sa compagne, partis pour le cinéma, parce qu’ils refusent de klaxonner leur approbation ? C’est pour ne pas avoir arrêté dans l’œuf ce genre d’action brutale et illégale que l’Allemagne, l’Italie, l’Espagne, le Portugal et d’autres se sont retrouvés dans les années trente sous le joug de dictatures sanguinaires. Le semblant bonhomme et sincère de certains bloqueurs de ronds-points ne peut faire illusion. Il ne s’agit ni plus ni moins que de l’attaque de la force brute. Celle qui ne s’embarrasse pas d’arguments et qui se contente de vous asséner : vous ferez ce que vous dis, car je suis fort, vous êtes faible, et vous êtes en mon pouvoir.

Et leurs revendications ? Tous les conservatismes, tous les refus de raisonner, tout le fiel des envieux s’y retrouvent. Le mouvement, on ne le dira jamais assez, est d’abord celui des chauffards. Qui fréquente la France des provinces sait quelle haine a suscitée l’une des réformes précédentes, la limitation à 80 km/h. La raison était pourtant simple : les ingénieurs ont calculé qu’on pouvait sauver 300 vies par an de cette façon. Les chauffards — qui fréquente la France des routes départementales les connaît bien — n’accordent aucune attention à cet objectif de salut public : non, prétendent-ils, ce n’est qu’un prétexte pour nous ponctionner un peu plus. D’ailleurs l’ire des chauffards, des gilets jaunes, se concentre sur tout ce qui améliore la sécurité routière, comme les radars. La hausse des taxes sur les carburants n’est que le prétexte suivant pour se mettre en colère, prétexte d’autant plus absurde que cette hausse survient à un moment où les prix de base chutent. Quant à la transition énergétique, personne n’y prête attention non plus. Là aussi pourtant, les scientifiques s’époumonent à nous avertir : il est minuit moins une pour faire quelque chose, sinon le monde court à la catastrophe ; accidents climatiques constants, îles englouties, migrations cette fois-ci par dizaines de millions. Vous pourrez bien bloquer les ronds-points alors. Mais non, ce sont encore ces technocrates de Paris qui veulent nous prendre notre argent.

Le problème politique est profondément et exclusivement français. Les Français sont uniques, y compris parmi leurs voisins d’Europe occidentale. L’exception française a ses attraits : le goût, la tradition, l’élégance (pas chez les gilets jaunes), l’amour pour une langue d’une beauté sans égale. Mais elle se manifeste aussi par des défauts indéracinables. Dans tous les pays du monde, le citoyen moyen comprend que pour que quelqu’un reçoive de l’argent quelqu’un doit en produire. L’état c’est moi, et toi, et elle, et lui. Pas en France (et l’on peut avoir fait Polytechnique sans que jamais on vous ait expliqué ce qui ailleurs relève de l’école communale). En France « L’État » c’est quelqu’un d’autre. Il nous prend notre argent, toujours trop, et il est tenu de nous en donner, jamais assez. Il est de bon ton de se moquer des Américains qui croient que le monde a été créé tel quel en six jours, mais les Américains, jusqu’au moins instruit, comprennent les rudiments de l’économie. Les Français non. D’où les revendications conjointes de moins d’impôts et de plus d’aides. On ne peut sous-estimer ici l’influence de la gauche à la française. Cent ans de gauchisme primaire ont profondément corrompu le conscient et l’inconscient collectifs. Les patrons sont des exploiteurs, les salariés des exploités, révoltez-vous !

La deuxième catastrophe va avec la première : l’incompréhension des règles de la démocratie et l’imputation au gouvernement en place (dans le cas présent, en place depuis à peine un an et demi) de tout ce qui va mal. Gavroche le chantait déjà : Je suis tombé par terre / C’est la faute à Voltaire / Le nez dans le ruisseau / C’est la faute à Rousseau. Il ajouterait aujourd’hui :

J’en ai pris plein le front
C’est la faute à Macron

La démocratie, comprise à la française, ce sont tous les privilèges et aucun devoir. C’est le droit inaliénable de la minorité à se venger de son sort sur les innocents. Titre du Monde : « En occupant le rond-point de Gaillon, dans l’Eure, des manifestants forgent leur conscience politique et s’exercent à la démocratie ». Remarquable. On imagine les variantes : « En tirant au bazooka sur mes voisins, je m’exerce au pacifisme ». « En volant des voitures, je m’exerce au civisme ». « En trichant à l’examen, je m’exerce à l’honnêteté ». Invraisembable inversion des valeurs : l’arbitraire et le règne de la force brute érigés en morale.

La troisième catastrophe française est le recours immédiat et constant au sabotage et à la violence. Qui vient régulièrement en France de l’étranger est habitué au phénomène, que l’on pourrait appeler, si c’était drôle, le syndrome des Galeries Lafayette : il se passe toujours quelque chose. Parfois tragiquement venu de l’extérieur, comme dans le cas du terrorisme. Mais le plus souvent interne : grève du rail, grève d’Air France, grève des contrôleurs aériens, manifestation violente, incendie de voitures (dans quel autre pays le nouvel an signifie-t-il qu’on brûle chaque année des centaines de voitures ?), blocage de l’approvisionnement en essence, grève des « intermittents du spectacle » (parce qu’on ne les paye pas assez quand ils ne travaillent pas). Résultat : dans tous les pays voisins, on peut tranquillement planifier un voyage ; en France c’est impossible, on ne sait jamais ce qui va se produire. La violence en particulier est indigne d’un pays démocratique. De ce point de vue les gilets jaunes et leurs coups de main fascisants ne font que suivre une tradition ininterrompue, et largement impunie par crainte des conséquences (toujours le règne de la force) : séquestration de patrons, occupation illégale des universités avec dégradations en millions d’euros et représailles physiques contre ceux qui osent essayer de passer leurs examens, tabassage des responsables des relations humaines d’Air France par des syndicats de type quasi-mafieux. Au-delà de la violence, le dérèglement continuel est la source principale du retard français. La France est aujourd’hui le seul pays d’Europe où les vendeurs par correspondance ont cessé de garantir des dates de livraison, pour cause de troubles. Comment accepter une situation aussi humiliante ? Si les Suisses, les Allemands et d’autres réussissent tellement mieux, ce n’est pas qu’ils soient particulièrement plus intelligents. (D’intelligence et de créativité, la France n’en manque pas, du reste elle en exporte de plus en plus, comme elle exporta ses Huguenots après 1685.) C’est tout simplement qu’ils travaillent dans un environnement stable.

Le résultat récent le plus clair et le plus tragique est l’échec de ce qui aurait pu être une chance majeure pour la France : la récupération de l’industrie financière britannique pulvérisée par l’imbécile Brexit. Paris avait tous les atouts : la magie de la ville (vous iriez vivre à Francfort, vous, si vous aviez le choix ?), un gouvernement jeune et dynamique. Mais les banquiers ne sont pas fous. La banque a besoin de calme et de stabilité. Pas d’occupations, de grèves, de blocages, de déprédations et d’émeutes. Partie perdue, irrémédiablement.

Les destructions ne sont pas des débordements du mouvement : elles sont le mouvement. Dès le début, dès le premier automobiliste empêché de se rendre à son travail, il ne s’agissait pas de protester : il s’agissait de casser l’activité économique. Déjà les commerçants, pour qui novembre et décembre sont les mois clés, annoncent la pire saison depuis des années (et demandent bien sûr des dédommagements à l’État, c’est-à-dire une ponction supplémentaire). Une conspiration au seul bénéfice d’Amazon ne s’y serait pas prise autrement. Qui ne peut voir qu’il ne s’agit en aucun cas d’une protestation politique respectueuse de la démocratie, mais purement et simplement d’une tentative de destruction du pays ?

On s’arrêtera à la quatrième catastrophe française : la démission des clercs. C’est toujours très bien vu en France de s’enthousiasmer pour des idéologies rutilantes et généralement meurtrières. C’est très, très mal vu de soutenir le pouvoir, même quand il représente la raison, le droit et l’avenir. Mais où sont donc les fameuses élites (celles contre qui, selon les poncifs, le peuple est censé se révolter) ? Elles sont occupées à trouver des excuses aux vandales. Le Monde, auto-proclamé « journal de référence » (traduction : le New York Times sans les prix Nobel et sans les correcteurs d’orthographe), a passé tout l’été sur un scandale qu’il avait monté de toutes pièces, et sacrifie quotidiennement la vérité à une espèce de bonne conscience gauchisante sans aucun souci de l’avenir du pays. Le Figaro, au lieu de rallier la bourgeoisie au seul garant possible de l’ordre, se perd en élucubrations identitaires. Libération se croit toujours en Mai 68 et ne suit plus très bien ce qui se passe. Le Canard Enchaîné, vestige de la presse à chantage des années trente, dont on ne saurait sous-estimer dans le paysage français la puissance ricanante, méprisante, délétère et invincible, propage un peu plus chaque mercredi (entre ses contrepèteries obscènes) l’image du « tous pourris ». Pour soutenir Macron, personne.

Les élites devraient pourtant se rallier en masse ; non que Macron et Philippe soient infaillibles (ils ont fait des erreurs et ils en referont) mais tout simplement parce que dans la situation politique française actuelle ils sont le seul espoir crédible d’éviter le désastre. Le désastre, c’est la tiers-mondisation accélérée, l’écroulement de l’économie et le glissement vers le totalitarisme. D’un côté, un démagogue avide de pouvoir, suppôt de toutes les dictatures, admirateur de Chavez et de Maduro (qui en quelques années ont fait d’un des pays les plus stables de l’Amérique Latine, producteur de pétrole de surcroît, un abîme de pauvreté où les enfants meurent faute de médicaments et l’inflation mensuelle est à 94%, et qui serait pour nous le modèle ?) ; de l’autre, une extrémiste incompétente, issue d’un clan familial corrompu qui n’a jamais complètement renoncé à ses sources idéologiques des années trente. Macron est jeune, intelligent, compétent, calme et veut réformer la France là où elle en a le plus besoin, pour le bénéfice même de ceux qui n’ont rien trouvé de mieux pour progresser que de faire du chantage au reste du pays. Il a été démocratiquement élu, par une majorité sans ambages. La simple éthique démocratique appelle à le laisser faire son travail. Le simple souci du salut public appelle à le soutenir.

Tous ceux qui croient en la démocratie ; qui ont confiance dans l’énorme potentiel de la France ; qui savent qu’il faut en finir avec les lourdeurs et incongruités qui la paralysent ; qui perçoivent le risque énorme de totalitarisme ; et qui refusent que la violence d’une minorité l’emporte sur l’état de droit ; tous ceux-là doivent mettre au vestiaire le cynisme et l’éternel moquerie française pour s’engager publiquement et sans réserve, sans complaisance mais sans états d’âme, derrière l’unique force qui peut éviter la descente aux enfers.

A Marseillaise for our age

by

[This blog is normally in English, but today’s article is particularly relevant to French speakers. The topic: freeing a national anthem of its hateful overtones.]

Mardi dernier quatorze juillet, une fois de plus, la Marseillaise a retenti un peu partout. C’est le jour où les hommes politiques s’essayent à l’entonner, juste ou (plus souvent) faux. On peut s’imaginer, en fait on espère, qu’ils sont ici et là un peu gênés. “D’un sang impur, abreuve les sillons!“. Vraiment ? Qu’est-ce qui rend un sang si impur que tout bon patriote ait le devoir de le faire jaillir ?

Certes, c’est arrivé, il y a trois quarts de siècle, quand on a soudain avisé des centaines de milliers de Français que leur sang était désormais classé non conforme. Il y a quelques autres épisodes de ce genre dans l’histoire du pays ; ce ne sont pas — pour dire les choses poliment — les plus reluisants, et certainement pas ceux que le chant national devrait glorifier.

À entendre ces jours-ci une petite tête blonde de sept ans chanter (juste) le sang impur qui doit abreuver les sillons, je me suis demandé quelles pensées ces slogans pouvaient bien éveiller pour les enfants des écoles à qui l’on enjoint de les répéter en choeur. Et l’étendard sanglant ? Et les tyrans (Matteo Renzi ? Mario Draghi ?) qui nous envoient leurs féroces soldats non seulement mugir mais, jusque dans nos bras, égorger nos fils, nos compagnes?

Il est temps de réformer ce chant raciste et haineux. Qu’il ait joué son rôle n’est pas la question. La révolution avait ses ennemis, elle se défendait. Quand nous l’invoquons aujourd’hui, cette révolution, ce n’est pas à Robespierre et à l’assassinat de Lavoisier (la république n’a pas besoin de savants) que nous devrions faire appel, mais à son message de liberté et de fraternité. Assez de sang, de batailles, de férocité. Place à ce qui nous définit vraiment aujourd’hui.

Il ne s’agit pas de changer tous les ans d’hymne national en réponse aux modes. Il sera toujours, par nature, un peu déphasé. Mais après deux cent treize ans de Marseillaise, dont cent trente-six ans de service continu comme chant officiel du pays, il est temps de se séparer des relents les plus honteux de son texte d’origine. La musique restera, assez bonne pour avoir été reprise par Schumann, Tchaikowsky, Beethoven, Rossini et bien d’autres ; mais les paroles doivent être adaptées à ce qu’est la France moderne, tournée vers  l’avenir.

Seuls les peuples faibles ne savent s’unir qu’à travers la détestation des autres. Leurs chants sont emplis de rejets et de négations. Les peuples forts s’appuient, eux, sur des images positives. Quelle formule projette le mieux  l’attitude fière d’une nation confiante en son avenir : “contre nous, de la tyrannie“, ou “avec nous, la démocratie” ? “Un sang impur” ou “nos coeurs purs” ?  “Égorger” ou “admirer” ?Jugez-en.

Il existe des Marseillaises alternatives, mais souvent elles ne sont que le miroir de la première, avec leurs propres excès ; voir par exemple cette version sympathique de prime abord mais d’un anti-militarisme qui ne peut que diviser encore. Point n’est besoin de remplacer les anciens cris par des insultes nouvelles.

La version qui suit — chantable, respectant la métrique,  et dont je fournirai les autres couplets si elle provoque autre chose que des invectives — a un tout autre but : non pas diviser, mais réunir ; attiser non pas les différences mais les affinités ; et permettre à chacun de la chanter à pleine voix : sans honte ; au contraire, avec fierté.

Allons enfants de la patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé
Avec nous la démocratie
L’étendard vaillant est levé (bis)
Entendez-vous, dans les campagnes,
Frémir tous ces peuples envieux ?
Ils viennent, jusque sous nos cieux,
Admirer nos villes, nos montagnes.

(Refrain)

Ensemble, citoyens !
Renforçons notre union !
Que nos cœurs purs
Vibrent à l’unisson.

 

Résidence de l'ambassade de France, Berne, 14 juillet 2015
Résidence de l’ambassade de France, Berne, le 14 juillet 2015

The biggest software-induced disaster ever

by

 

In spite of the brouhaha surrounding the Affordable Care Act, the US administration and its partisans seem convinced that “the Web site problems will be fixed”.

That is doubtful. All reports suggest that the problem is not to replace a checkbox by a menu, or buy a few more servers. The analysis, design and implementation are wrong, and the sites will not work properly any time soon.

Barring sabotage (for which we have seen no evidence), this can only be the result of incompetence. An insurance exchange? Come on. Any half-awake group of developers could program it over breakfast.

Who chose the contractors?

When the problems first surfaced a few weeks ago, anyone with experience and guts would have done the right thing: fire all the companies responsible for  the mess and start from scratch with a dedicated, competent and well-managed team.

The latest promises published are that by the end of the month “four out of five” of the people trying to register will manage to do it. Nice. Imagine that when trying to make a purchase at Amazon you would succeed 80% of the time.

And that is only an optimistic goal.

The people building the site do not have infinite time. In fact, the process is crucially time-driven: if people do not get health coverage in time, they will be fined. But what if they cannot get coverage because the Web sites do not respond, or mess up?

Consider for a second another example of another strictly time-driven project: on January 1, 2002, twelve countries switched to a common currency, with the provision that their current legal tender would lose its status only a bare two months later. The IT infrastructure had to work on the appointed day. It did. How come Europe could implement the Euro in time and the US cannot get a basic health exchange to work?

Here is a possible scenario: the sites do not work (cannot handle the load, give inconsistent results). A massive wave of protests ensues, boosted by those who were against universal health coverage in the first place. Faced with popular revolt and with the evidence, the administration announces that the implementation of the universal mandate — the enforcement of the fines — is delayed by a year. In a year much can happen; opposition grows and the first exchanges are an economic disaster since the “young healthy adults” feel no pressure to enroll. The law fades into oblivion. Americans do not get universal health care for another generation. Show me it is not going to happen.

The software engineering lessons here are clear: hire competent companies; faced with a complicated system, implement the essential functions first, but stress-test them; deploy step by step, with the assurance that whatever is deployed works.

The exact reverse strategy was applied. As a result, we face the prospect of a software disaster that will dwarf Y2K and other famous mishaps; a disaster that software engineering textbooks will feature for decades to come.

 

The most beautiful monument of Europe

by

 

The most beautiful of all monuments in Europe is not the palace of Versailles, notwithstanding the Hall of Mirrors with its endless reflections of chandeliers and pillars, notwithstanding the fairy-tale grace of the Trianons, notwithstanding the sumptuous Hall of Congresses where the 1919 peace conference put a formal end … read the entire text. Le plus beau des monuments d’Europe n’est pas Versailles, malgré sa Galerie des Glaces où se reflètent à l’infini les lustres et les pilastres, malgré ses Trianons, malgré son imposante Salle du Congrès où prit officiellement fin, en 1919, … lire le texte complet en français.

 

Yes, I know, this is supposed to be a technology blog.

There are, however, times like right now when intellectuals should not remain silent — especially engineers and scientists.

I wrote the text referenced above several years ago; I don’t remember the exact date but it sounds very much Maastricht-aftermath. I have circulated it to a few friends, but think the time has come to publish it.

I am quite aware that unfolding events may make it look ridiculous. And then what? I will have done my tiny bit to bring people back to reason.

Note: I do not remember the provenance of the photograph. If informed, I would be happy to add the proper acknowledgment.