Just A Summary

Two bulls were grazing at the bottom of the big pasture, when the farmer let a load of heifers in at the top gate.

“Hey,” said the young bull to the old, “What do you say we run up there and fuck us a couple of heifers?”

“Well,” said the old one, “You’re welcome to do that if you want to, but I plan on walking up there and fucking all of them”.

I’ll leave any interpretation up to you.

Open Ears, Open Mind, Open Mouth. Music Making Made Easy

Blurb

Our bodies are the most versatile and sophisticated musical instrument we know. From the complexities of making at beat with our hands and feet to the surprising simplicity of harmony singing, we are all of us musicians.

Abstract

Musicmaking isn’t some kind of sophisticated profession that requires the intervention of gatekeepers and techno priests. You don’t need autotune, you don’t need a record label, you don’t need drums, a guitar or anything else but your hands, feet, ears, brain and mouth to make music that will satisfy you for the rest of your life.

By the end of this talk I promise that, unless you are one of a tiny, tiny minority of people, you’ll not be tone deaf, you’ll be damn near pitch perfect. And you’ll have a song in your head that, unless I have seriously misjudged the people who come to OSCON, you’ll want to teach to everyone you know.

Come along. Clap your hands. Stamp your feet and sing. What have you got to lose?

Crikey! What an intense few days.

Last Friday, I got some email from Giles Bowkett saying that he’d had to flake on a conference in Sweden and could I take his place. The brief was to “be interesting, and I know you can nail that in your sleep”.

Last Saturday, I read it. And being flattered by Giles’s silver tongue answered to say “Probably, when is it?”.

Then I did what I should possibly have done first, I Googled “Giles Bowkett Sweden”, and discovered that he was scheduled to be speaking at Øredev in Malmö on the 11th of November. The rule is “Never refuse a gig”, so I stalked the wily passport to its lair in the big stack of magazines and music books on my bedside table in the flat and set about thinking how I could fill two 45 minute talks with ‘something interesting’. I reckoned that trotting out “Why I Came Back to Perl” at Øredev wasn’t really going to fly (maybe if there were lightning talks), so that meant two new talks.

I can’t quite believe that I just about pulled off a talk about higher order Javascript. I’ve not used Javascript for a couple of years now, and don’t have particularly fond memories of the languages from when I did (I like pretty much everything about the language except the syntax, which is just icky and verbose in places where it shouldn’t be), but thinking in Higher Order Functions is pretty much the same in any language that can support it.

As I wrote my first slide, I realised that there had to be a better way. I was writing a dead simple function to calculate the sum of a list of numbers (first rule of introducing higher order functions: stick with elementary mathematical stuff so far as possible. It’s hard enough wrapping your head around what’s going on without having to wrap it around some new domain at the same time) and I’d written this:

var sum = function (list) {
  var i;
  var r = 0;
  for (i = 0; i < list.length; i++) {
    r = r + list[i];
  }
  return r
}

and I was banging hard against the right hand margin and had about reached the limit for the amount of legible code I’m prepared to fit on a slide. And ideally, I wanted to get an implementation of sum and of product on the same slide to show the similarities between the two of them. So, CoffeeScript was my saviour. Suddenly I was writing:

sum = (list) ->
  r = 0
  (r = r + i) for i in list
  r

product (list) -> 
  r = 1
  (r = r * i) for i in list
  r

and most of the language noise went away and I could concentrate on getting the slides written and the knowledge transferred. My delivery wasn’t everything I could have hoped for – I had a horrible patch early on where I lost where I was in the talk and then noticed some bugs in the slide code that left me slightly croggled, but putting a ‘Questions?’ slide in the middle of the talk turns out to have saved my bacon. Good questions that showed that people were still engaged with what I was trying to talk about, which helped me get my thoughts back in order and I think I did much better in the second half. Either that or my whistle stop introduction to memoization and using streams to shift the point at which stuff gets evaluated left people too baffled to walk out on me. Øredev has a very neat evaluation system, as people leave the room, they throw a red, green or yellow card into a basket. This means that evaluations are very fast. I can’t remember how many yellows I got, but I had 26 greens and 20 reds, so if nothing else I had divided opinions. I take that response to mean that I wasn’t boring.

The second talk was even sketchier. I was substituting for the rolling ball of awesome that is Giles’ Archaeopteryx presentation/performance. I went in with ten minutes of slides, 45 minutes to fill, a few ideas for demos, a rough idea of the direction I was headed in and no firm idea at all about whether there was going to be a conclusion at the end of it. By the end I had taught a room half full of programmers to sing a song about Space, to split up into parts and do it as a round, and to imitate a theremin by stealing a kick ass idea from the fabulous video of Bobby McFerrin at the World Science Festival last year¹. I even managed to reach some kind of conclusion. And all the cards for that talk were green. I dance the dance of happy.

I met a bunch of good people, geeked out about singing with Kathy from Panda Transport, picked a few fights and generally tried not to get too much .net on me. And it wouldn’t be a developer conference without the odd bit of sexism fail, it was just a shame that the source of it was Nolan “Atari” Bushnell. Okay, so Nolan’s from the seventies, but the “random pretty girl” slide was an old joke when presentations still used honest to goodness slides. I wasn’t entirely convinced by his futurism either – maybe seeing the Atari logo in Bladerunner went to his head.

¹ If you’re trying to visualize me jumping up and down and running about like Bobby does in that video, I kind of left that bit out and relied on hand position instead. One day I shall be fit enough to do the whole body version, but I’m still buzzing on how well it worked without it. If you were in the talk, you were amazing.

So, Giles Bowkett asked me on facebook “Why Perl?”. This is the long answer.

I’m a Perl hacker. I have been for around 16 years now. Around 5 years ago, prompted by the Pragmatic Programmer and Adam Turoff, I started looking at Ruby, and Ruby on Rails and sort of fell into maintaining Typo.

Why? I was getting hacked off with Perl.

I was coming to the end of my tenure/tether as Perl 6 Summarizer: watching a language that I still want to use before I die taking forever to get done gets wearing after a while, especially when you’re spending 8 hours a week summarizing the activities of a development community that, in parts, was verging on the toxic (it’s way better now).

I was also getting annoyed by small niggles in the way Perl 5 works. This was in the days before Moose. Stevan Little was just starting work on what became Class::MOP (as a prototype of Perl 6’s metaobject protocol) and way before the days of Devel::Declare.

Ruby seemed to be, as Matz has described it, “Perl, done right”. All the things that were pissing me off about Perl were so much easier in Ruby. I’ve joked, in a Ha Ha, only serious kind of way, that I left Perl for Ruby because I got fed up of unrolling @_, but there’s more to it than that. “Objects everywhere” fits my head. The language is dynamic. Ruby code had less boilerplate in it. Oh, and Ruby on Rails was looking very cool, even if David Heinemeier Hansson didn’t seem to have a clue about RESTful/Resourceful principles (he has rather more of a clue now). The community looked vibrant. What’s not to like?

I was a very happy Ruby programmer. It’s a great language. If you haven’t taken it out for a spin round the block, you should give it a try.

A Perl 5 rennaissance

While I was away on my failed attempt to become a maths teacher and then my Ruby sojourn, Perl 5 was waking up. If Perl 6 were declared a failure tomorrow by the people who are actually working on it (as opposed to the people who aren’t working on it, but bitch about it anyway – see some of chromatic’s more intemperate posts about those people), then it will still have had value for the way it’s inspired members of the Perl 5 community to nick the good bits and make them happen in Perl 5.

Stevan finished Class::MOP and it got used as the basis for Moose, which is essentially a layer of sensible defaults which sits on top of the insanely configurable and slightly more agnostic Class::MOP, which in turn sits on Perl’s weird reduced instruction set object orientation. Moose even got fast enough that it’s usable in polite company (it was always faster than Ruby), so people did. It grew an ecosystem.

Another, more recent development, is Devel::Declare. Devel::Declare is, in accordance with the long history of Perl, completely batshit insane. What it does is lets you trip the perl parser up and, while it’s standing there looking at the pretty birds flying around its head, you can run ahead and rewrite the code that it’s about to parse. Well, I say run, but what I mean is hobble ahead wearing narrow blinkers and mittens. You can accomplish amazing things in such circumstances, but it’s not fun. Devel::Declare enabled my current favourite module on CPAN: MooseX::Declare, which I’ve talked about here:

An introduction to MooseX::Declare from Piers Cawley on Vimeo.

MooseX::Declare lets me kill boilerplate. Instead of writing:

package Something;
use Moose;

has an_attribute => (is => 'rw');

sub a_method {
  my($self, $with, $parameters) 
      = @_;
  ...
}

I can write:

use MooseX::Declare;
class Something {
  has an_attribute => (is => 'rw');

  method a_method($with, $parameters) {
    ...
  }
}

which makes me happy. This is being done by a module which is written in Perl. It relies on a couple of modules that are implemented in C, but the bulk of the work is done in Perl itself.

So, that’s addressed one of the annoyances that led me to Ruby. What about ‘objects everwhere’. I got used writing things like:

5.times { |each| ... }

Surely I’m not going to able to write:

5->times(sub {...})

in perl?

Well…

use Moose::Autobox;
sub Moose::Autobox::SCALAR::times {
    my($count, $block) = @_;
    1->to($count)->each_key($block);
}


5->times(sub {$_->say});

Bingo! I’d like to be able to write 5->times { $_->say } but can’t quite manage it. Give PerlX::MethodCallWithBlock a little more time though…

So, while I was away, most of the issues I had with Perl, issues that had driven me into the arms of Ruby, had been addressed.

It’s not about the bike

The new Perl tech is great, but all it does is removes barriers. I wasn’t attached to the Perl language by some huge bungee cord which was crushing me against these barriers while I sojourned in Ruby land, all the while pining for Perl. I was loving Ruby. It’s a great language.

What I am attached to is the group of friends I’ve made in the Perl community over the years. Many of whom I’ve never actually met face to face.

I felt like such a curmudgeonly old fart in the Ruby community (more specifically, the Rails community). Everything’s shiny and new and awesome. And, I suppose when you’re coming to the language from something like PHP, it is shiny and new and awesome. But it gets wearing after a while. And the arrogance? My dear! The arrogance! Admittedly, some people have a lot to be arrogant about – I still cheer DHH’s “Fuck you!” slide, but others… not so much. The kind of “Look! Ruby is uniquely suited to writing DSLs!” bullshit¹ that sends chromatic off in fits of apoplexy annoyed me too, especially when I was looking at the kind of examples they were presenting as exemplary and remembering Perl from 5 years before that did the same thing but with cleaner language-like interfaces.

Coming back to Perl may well be a straightforward retreat to competence. I may be rationalizing like mad. But right now, it feels like I left Ruby because the ruby community, in the West at least, isn’t a fun place for me to be. The sexism is just the icing on that particular cake.

¹ Here’s my response to Rspec:

testclass exercises Something {
    test that we can create an object {
        isa_ok $test->subject->new, 'Something';
    }
}

Note the lack of perlish furniture in the test that we can create an object part. No need to quote the strings, no meaningless dos scattered about the place, no :symbols appearing at random. Okay, so I have to quote 'Something' in the implementation block, but the implementation block is unadulterated Perl. I don’t claim that only Perl can do this. I do claim that, right now at least, Ruby can’t.

I got a bit of stick on IRC last night for some of the choices I’d made when I was writing Test::Class::Sugar, in particular because one of the prerequisites is chromatic’s handy and opinionated Modern::Perl module. The ‘controversial’ aspect of Modern::Perl is that, when you use it, your code won’t run on any Perl before Perl 5, version 10.

The thing is, I don’t care about older perls any more. Version 10 features like ~~ and // are too convenient to fart about writing circumlocutions just to run on a version of Perl that I have no intention of ever using again.

Actually, that’s not quite true, those version 10 features are too convenient for me to fart about working around their absence. If you think that a module I write is useful enough that you want it to work on version 8, then of course I’ll accept your patch. But don’t be surprised if, when I start adding new features, I break the backward compatibility.

Also, on the happy day that version 10.1 escapes the pumpking patch, I’ll be setting that as my minimum perl version even if chromatic doesn’t bump the version number in Modern::Perl.

It’s all about the virtues

Your context is different from mine. I’m writing in Perl again for my own amusement more than anything. There are developments in modern Perl – tools like Moose and Devel::Declare – that I think are exciting and important. The Announcements project I started was as much about playing with the new tools as it was about trying to write something of wider utility. Test::Class::Sugar arose as a direct result of attempting to write Announcements and the desire to write test classes without hoopage. My principle drive then, is impatience to get Test::Class::Sugar to the point where I can get back to writing Announcements.

But then laziness and hubris kick in. So the code needs some polish. The parser and the code generator need to be disentangled, I need to get Adrian Howard to apply the little patch I had to make to Test::Class. Laziness demands I document it.

Impatience tells me to lean on the features of modern perl – that way I can get back to being a user of the new library as quickly as possible. Laziness tells me that I’m not going to need backwards compatibilty. Hubris tells me my work is good enough that someone who does will like it enough to send me a patch.

Everybody wins.

In which your correspondent does magical battle with the guts of Perl and emerges bloodied, but unbowed with a useful principle to code by.

Skip to the conclusion if you’re uncomfortable with the guts of the Perl runtime

Test::Class had me tearing my hair out earlier. There I was, happily transforming

test something {
  ok 1;
};

into something very like¹:

*test_something = 
  Sub::Name::subname(
      'test_something' 
    => sub : Test { ok 1 }
  );

through the magic of Devel::Declare, but Test::Class didn’t seem to be playing fair. Instead of letting my tests run happily, it was complaining that it:

The thing is, I wasn’t loading Test::Class too late. The problem is that, at the point I applied the Test attribute to my sub, the sub didn’t have a name and, because of the constraints you’re operating under when you’re using Devel::Declare to do code transformation, there was no obvious way to give it a name in time.

Incompatible magics

The trouble is, Test::Class does what it does through the magic of compile time code attributes, and, further, it relies on the fact that if a perl subroutine that gets inserted into the symbol table like this:

sub has_a_name {...}

Then, when you get hold of a reference to that code by other means (say, in the subroutine that handles the setting of an attribute, that code ref knows its own name. However, if a subroutine that ends up in the symbol table like this:

*anonymous_ref = sub {...};

Doesn’t know its name, unless you take advantage of the Sub::Name module.

So, in my generated code, I was giving my coderef a name, but it was happening to late. At the point that Test::Class::Test method was seeing the coderef, the coderef was anonymous.

My magic and Test::Class’s magic were incompatible.

The thing is, both sorts of magic are really just sugar for some pretty mundane donkey work. Test::Class does what it does through attributes because no flesh and blood programmer in their right mind would want to write something like this every time they wanted to write a test method:

sub test_something {
  ...
}
__PACKAGE__->mark_as_special_method('test_something', 'test', '3');

In fact, mark_as_special_method doesn’t even exist as its own subroutine. The code that marks a method as special is just part of the body of the Test attribute handler.

Conclusion

Which brings me neatly to my conclusion.

When you’re designing a module that does anything magical, consider starting with a mundane core API that handles the business side of things. Then layer your magic on top of that API. Then document the API and the magic. Obviously the magic bits go up front in the docs, and the API goes in its own section (or even podfile) down at the bottom, where only eejits like me, who want their magic to work slightly different to yours, will bother reading it.

Obviously, I’m motivated by an issue I’m having with a particular module from CPAN, but the principle of separating the magic and the mundane is applicable everywhere. It’s called Separation of Concerns, or The Single Responsiblity Pattern. I call it a Just Story.

You’ll find the pattern in well designed websites that are using unobtrusive javascript to wave an AJAX wand over the site. You’ll see it woven through books like The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers – where it’s called an Abstraction Barrier.

Patches sent

It turns out to be very easy to add mark_as_special_method (though I actually wrote it as ‘add_testinfo’ in the patch) to Test::Class. It’s about as straightforward an Extract Method refactoring as I’ve ever done – even without automated tools, I managed not to fuck it up. There’s a patch in Adrian Howard’s inbox, and I’m hopeful that it’ll be applied soon.

¹ Not exactly – that’s the result of calling the shadowed test subroutine which was the result of the code transformation.

Check out the osfameron fork of Devel::Declare for the beginnings of some decent documentation which explains what’s going on.

Have you ever tried to run Rails, Rspec, Rake or, for that matter almost any Ruby library or application that you’ve ever heard of with the -w flag? How about running Rails with taint checking on?

They aren’t exactly pleasant experiences.

Meanwhile, over in Perl land, it’s a very rare module indeed that isn’t at least clean under -w and, where appropriate, taint friendly. It would be a very irresponsible Perl Monger indeed who wrote a web framework that didn’t assume it was going to be running under the -T flag. Warnings and taint checking are annoyances, and sometimes they’re flat out wrong, but more of the time they’re useful. Which is why, in Perl, you’ll sometimes see blocks of code like:

{
  no warnings;
  # Code that does stuff which would trigger a warning
}

If the author is being particularly careful, she will specify which warnings to suppress – after all, there’s no need to turn off all the warnings if all you’re intending to do is redefine a method. So the prudent Perl programmer would write:

{
  no warnings 'redefine';
  # Code that redefines an existing method
}

However, there are often ways of achieving your aim even with all the warnings on.

If modules that don’t have use warnings are rare on CPAN, modules that don’t have use strict will get the unwary programmer laughed at in the street. There are modules that simply won’t work under use strict, but they tend to have no strict, either wrapped around the narrowest scope that won’t work under strict, or proudly displayed up front. The presence of a no strict implies to the interested reader that the programmer knows (or thinks he knows) what he’s doing. Writing code that does even the most implausible metaprogramming things without raising errors from strict or spamming STDERR with warnings is a matter of professional pride. Writing straightforward code that stays silent is the absolute baseline for Perl programming professionalism in my book.

Meanwhile, here in Rubyworld, there’s no equivalent of strict and it’s actively hard to start coding with warnings turned on because important frameworks like rspec and rails aren’t -w clean. In Perl, this isn’t a problem, use warnings turns warnings on lexically. Your code might well call all sorts of noisy code elsewhere but, unless you’re running with -w as well, you’ll only see the warnings for your code. If you set $VERBOSE, you’ll get all the warnings. Warnings in the log file should be like red Fs in your test output – a sign that all is not as good as it could be in your code. Sure you could just ignore the ones you know are harmless, then you’re in danger of losing the real problems in the noise.

As a gesture of goodwill, here’s alias_method_chain written so it should raise no warnings except when the ‘without’ method already exists.

def alias_method_chain(target, feature)
  aliased_target, punctuation = target.to_s.sub(/([?!=])$/, ''), $1
  yield(aliased_target, punctuation) if block_given?

  with_method, without_method = "#{aliased_target}_with_#{feature}#{punctuation", "#{aliased_target}_without_#{feature}#{punctuation}"
  
  alias_method without_method, target
  remove_method target # Warning begone!
  alias_method target, with_method

  case
  when public_method_defined?(without_method)
    public target
  when protected_method_defined?(without_method)
    protected target
  when private_method_defined?(without_method)
    private_target
  end
end

We’ve just spent the weekend on one of Robin Wood’s spoon carving workshops, which was my 41st birthday present from Gill. It was great fun, if a little tiring. There is something primally satisfying about turning a piece of wood into woodchips. Getting a spoon or spatula at the end of the process is a huge bonus. We came away with a bag full of more or less decent treen, a couple of woodcarving knives and a burning desire to own one of Robin’s small drinking vessels.

Oh. And I fell in love with an Axe. The Gränsfors Bruks Swedish Carving Axe to be precise. This is the tool you use for turning a log into a spoon blank, and for much of the rough shaping of that blank. During the course of the weekend, I tried both the Gränsfors axe and an English ‘Kent pattern’ axe of the sort that can be picked up at car boot sales for pennies and sharpened and rehandled easily (quite what you use to rough out the new handle is left as an exercise to the interested reader). The English axe was very nice, but the Swedish one was just lovely. In particular, there’s a move which involves gripping the handle right by the head and flicking your wrist. This takes the top half of the blade through the wood in a precise sweeping motion that slices off wood in a way that’s almost erotically satisfying.

Yup. I don’t get out much. Why do you ask?

My choice lies before me: an English blade for maybe a fiver from a car boot sale or a sultry Swedish beauty for seventy quid from gransfors.co.uk? It’s not even a choice. The Swedish beauty had me at ‘car boot sale’ – I’m not sure which circle of hell car boot sales belong in, but I’m certain I don’t want want to go there. Besides, I’m a photographer and a computer programmer. Most of the bits and pieces cost hundreds or thousands of pounds.

Now, where did I put my credit card?

The Alpha Course people have been running a bunch of poster ads built around the slogan “If God did exist, what would you ask?”. The posters are filled with anodyne questions like “What’s the point?” or “Is this it?”.

They also tend to have large amounts of white space on them – I’m sure there are enterprising graffiti artists out there who look upon that as a fine opportunity.

So, here’s a few questions I’d ask god, if it existed:

What about that malaria parasite?

Because nothing says boundless Love like cooking up a disease that kills millions upon millions of people in the service of a parasitic lifecycle. Malaria’s been around so long that at some point during the long war between the parasite and humans, evolution cooked up a kink in the genome to try and keep the disease at bay. It works too. Sort of. Admittedly, if you get two copies of the gene, you get sickle cell anaemia, but malaria’s that awful that that bet seems worth making.

What’s the opportunity cost of religion?

Think about it. What proportion of humanity’s store of creativity, effort and money has been pissed up the wall in the service of religion over the years? Okay, so, the Sistine Chapel is a bit special, Bach’s Cantatas prod some serious buttock and it’s hugely good fun to sing from The Sacred Harp. But genius doesn’t go away if religion isn’t there. What would those artists have done, unshackled? And what might our scientists have done? The church has suppressed any number of scientific advances over the centuries and is still trying it on today. Look at the ongoing furore about stem cell research, cloning and all that other potentially good stuff.

Go to almost any place of worship and try to count the cost of it. It won’t be long ‘til you’re up to $lots. The money to pay for that comes off the backs of working people. For centuries, the tradition of tithing – giving 10% of your income to the church – wasn’t just a tradition, it was The Law. 10% of everything you earned, grew, made. For what? What might free people have achieved given that money and time to use as they saw fit?

Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, The Spanish Inquisition, Conquistadors… why?

Religious apologists would have you believe that the first three of those are proof of the awfulness of atheism. But they built their power and performed their atrocities by harnessing up the same religious impulses that gave us the Spanish Inquisition and the conquistadors. The religious impulse says “We are the Right People, they are savages”. Once you’ve got people convinced that they’re on the right side of the fence, it’s amazing what they’ll do to others in the name of a loving god.

If god exists, why were these people even born? You can tell me that god works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform, but I don’t really see how you can call genocide a ‘wonder’. If god’s going to claim to be the source of morality, then surely it should be held to those same standards. If god exists, then it has the power to stop atrocities. The fact that they happen leads me to infer that either there is no god, or any existing god is malevolent.

What’s wrong with women?

Look at almost any holy book you care to name, and women usually end up holding the smelly end of the stick. It may well be that sexism is endemic in human nature (I don’t think it is mind), but when you have religious authority for treating women as chattels, keeping them barefoot and pregnant and generally treating them as second class citizens… Well, it doesn’t help does it? Most of the holy books seems to have a pretty low opinion of men’s ability to keep it in their pants too. Otherwise why all the idiotic strictures about women keeping themselves covered up lest they inflame the uncontrollable desires of men. Come on! Blaming the victim’s so medieval.

Why should I worship you?

So, god made me. Big fucking deal. In the words of every teenager ever: I didn’t ask to be born. I owe god nothing. If I did want to worship my creator then I’d be far more inclined to worship my mother; I know she exists, and she went to a great deal more trouble to bring me into the world than anyone or any thing else that I can think of.

How do we get rid of you?

Seriously. God’s nothing but trouble. The suffering in the world’s dreadful when you stop to think about it. If we can lay the blame at the door of the cold, implacable machine that is Darwinian evolution, then there’s comfort in knowing that it’s nothing personal. It’s just the way the chips have fallen. There’s comfort too in knowing that there’s nothing to stop us as individuals and as a wider community doing everything in our power to make the world a better place for us, our children and the 8 billion other folks we’re sharing the place with. Because this is it. This is our only go on the merry go round. There’s no heaven, no hell, there’s just the world we make for ourselves and pass on to the next lot. It’s in our own best interests to look after it.

But if you have to lay the blame for the bad stuff at the door of some god, some conscious being who deliberately did this… It’s intolerable, frankly. That some being could choose to unleash malaria, TB, bubonic plague, syphilis, AIDS and the common cold on the world that it created is just… When we catch kids pulling the wings off flies, we tell ‘em off. When we catch god doing worse things, we (or a depressingly large fraction of us) worship the bloody thing. And because we buy the promise of a better world to come, we do a crappy job of making the world we’re in a better place. Great.

Does god exist?

I’m an atheist. I doubt anyone could prove, absolutely, the nonexistence of god. However, I fervently hope that there is no god because the alternative is so awful.

I spent the weekend at the UK Sacred Harp Convention, singing blood curdling hymns to the glory of god, very loudly with a hundred or so others. Great fun so it was. There’s something joyous about hollering out a hymn that opens with the line “And am I born to die?” and ends with the stanza

Especially if you’re stood in the middle of a hollow square with the altos behind you hitting a high note that lifts every hair on the back of you neck.

Anyhow, at one point during the Saturday evening social I found myself arguing that, although we singers today may feel grateful to those congregations of singers down the years who have sung these songs and handed the practice down to succeeding generations, there’s no requirement to be grateful, or even to go hunting for ‘authenticity’. Every generation that’s sung these songs and many others haven’t sung them to preserve them or to pass them on. They’ve sung them because the act of singing them has helped them to get through their lives. The songs we have, we know because successive generations have found them to be worth singing or recording. And we sing them for similar reasons. Future generations can go hang, I sing this stuff because it makes me feel good, not because I have some kind of duty.

“It’s a Darwinian argument,” I said, “Though obviously, I wouldn’t put it like that in Alabama…”