Dick Pountain/Idealog 252/27 June 2015 16:27
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that I haven't mentioned my Nexus 7 tablet in recent months, which is because, until a couple of days ago it languished in a drawer, fatally wounded by the Android 5.0 Lollipop update. (Google should have broken with its confectionery-oriented naming convention and named it "GutShot"). Lollipop rendered it so slow as to be unusable - five minutes or more to display the home screen - and even after scores of reboots, cache clearances and a factory reset, it remained not just slow but it appeared its battery had died too, taking a day to recharge and barely an hour to discharge again.
I did investigate downgrading back to 4.4 KitKat, but the procedures involved are absolutely grisly, requiring not just rooting, but downloading huge ISO image files via a PC with the ever-present chance of a failure that bricks the tablet completely: all totally unacceptable for a consumer-oriented device. (It did set me wondering how the Sale of Goods act might apply to destructive OTA upgrades that aren't reversible by normal human beings...) Instead I went to my local PC World and picked up an Asus Memo Pad 7 for £99, which I repopulated with all my apps and data within a morning, thanks to the brighter side of Google's Cloud, and has worked a treat ever since, and has a front camera and card-slot too. Then last week I discovered that Android 5.1.1 was now available for the Nexus and, with nothing to lose, installed it. A mere six months after its assassination my Nexus came back to life again, faster and slicker than the Asus, with its battery miraculously resurrected and lasting longer than originally.
There has to be a moral to this tale somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can identify it. Google's testing of 5.0 was clearly inadequate, and its lethargy in keeping us victims informed and releasing a fix not far short of criminal. But stuff like this happens on the IT battlefield all the time. A bigger issue is that it destroys confidence in the whole Over-The-Air update model which I'd come to see as the way forward. If Google (or Apple, or Microsoft) wishes to mess directly with my machine, then at the very least they'll need to provide a simple, fool-proof mechanism to unwind any damage done. But that leads on to another, deeper issue: it feels to me as though all these new generation, cloud-oriented firms, are approaching some sort of crisis of manageability. The latest phones and tablets are marvels of hardware engineering, with their cameras and motion sensors and GPS and NFC and the rest, but all these services have to be driven from and integrated into operating system kernels that date back to the 1980s, using programming languages that fall some way short of state-of-the-art. The result is a spectacular cock-up like Lollipop, or those minor memory-leaks that cause your iPad to gradually clag up until you have to reboot it.
It is of course inconceivable to start from scratch at this point in history, but I was reminded last week of what might have been when I exchanged emails, after twenty years, with Cuno Pfister, a Swiss software engineer I knew back in Byte days who used to work on Oberon/F with Niklaus Wirth in Zurich. Oberon was Wirth's successor to Modula-2, the culmination of his programming vision, and Oberon/F was a cross-platform, object-oriented framework with the language compiler at its heart, complete with garbage collection to combat memory leakage, preconditions to assist debugging, and support for a Model-View-Controller architecture. Its basic philosophy was that an operating system should become a software layer that "imports hardware and exports applications". New hardware drivers and applications were written as insulated modules, usually by extending some existing module, and they clicked into place like Lego bricks. Strong modularity and strong typing enabled 90% of errors to be caught at compile time, while garbage collection and preconditions simplified debugging the rest. It was precisely the sort of system we need to program today's tablets, but of course it could make no headway at all against the sheer inertia of Unix and C++.
What I miss most about that concept is having the programming language compiler built right into the OS. I still occasionally get the urge to write little programs, but all the tools I have are either massive overkill like Visual Studio, or command-line austerity like Ruby, and the APIs you have to learn are hideous too. I did recently discover a quite usable Android JavaScript tool called DroidScript, and the first thing I wrote in it, as is my historical habit, was a button that when pressed says "bollox"...
