Automation

Automation

John Ashmead
Automation - John Ashmead
Friday, December 27, 13

It is a profoundly erroneous
truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people
making speeches, that we
should cultivate the habit of
thinking of what we are doing.
The precise opposite is the
case. Civilization advances by
extending the number of
important operations we can
perform without thinking about
them. Operations of thought
are like cavalry charges in a
battle - they are strictly limited
in number, they require fresh
horses, and must only be
made at decisive moments.
-- Alfred North Whitehead,
1911

http://ashmeadsoftwareandconsulting.com

Cemetery Permissions
• Family owned cemetery with elaborate rules
• Too elaborate to do by hand
• But came in logical groups
• So, wrote some scripts to “fan-out”
permissions from master identities



Video transmission system
• SQL Server 6.0: very buggy
• VC++: less buggy than SQL Server 6.0
• Informix: stable but only on server
• So, sent stored procedures deﬁnitions from SQL
Server to Informix

• Then, used Informix to build VC++
• Which then called SQL Server 6.0


Web Portfolio System
• Needed lots of simple stored procedures
• Changed a lot
• So, wrote code generator to build stored
procedures: 20,000 lines of code/minute

• 60% good as is, 30% needed tweaks, 10%
worthless

• Turned 8 week project -> 2 weeks


Assets Under Mgmt
• Errors of order $10,000,000
• 7 dimensions of analysis
• Best interface: Active Reports
• But, took 1 hour + per report (& boring)
• So, wrote code generators to build C#, XML
• 6500 lines of code, 21 reports in 10 hours


actrpt_bld.pl
#!/opt/perl/perl-5.6.1/perl -w
# actrpt_bld.pl -- build xml, cs files for active reports, using stuff in
#
ete_procs
#
ete_proc_inputs
#
ete_proc_outputs
# Weak spot:
#
typing is done implicitly
# KNOWN WEAK SPOTS:
#
mapping of Informix types to C# types,
#
selection of conversion function from user parameter to C# type,
#
treatment of parameters which have been left null by user
use strict;
use
use
use
use
use

Getopt::Long;
Time::localtime;
DBI;
FileHandle;
XML::Writer;

sub actrpt_bld();


# build active report files (CS, XML) for one proc


XML (RPX)
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<ActiveReportLayout Version="3" PrintWidth="14400" DocumentName="ActiveReports Document" ScriptLang="C#"
CodeFile="arLuManagers.cs">
<StyleSheet>
<Style Name="Normal" Value="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-weight: normal; vertical-align:
bottom; text-align: left; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); "></Style>
<Style Name="Heading1" Value="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16pt; font-weight: bold; vertical-align:
</StyleSheet>
<Sections>
<Section Type="ReportHeader" Name="ReportHeader" Height="300" BackColor="16777215" CanShrink="0">
<Control Type="AR.Label" Name="lbl_v_managers_manager" MOD="4" Left="0" Top="0" Width="1800"
Height="300" Text="v_managers_manager" CanGrow="0" Caption="Manager Code" Style="white-space: nowrap; fontweight: bold"></Control>

C#
// arLuManagers.cs
// 2005-03-24 15:22:03:
using
using
using
using
using
using

/usr/local/bin/actrpt_bld.pl -d gim2 lu_managers

System;
System.Data;
IBM.Data.Informix;
DataDynamics.ActiveReports;
DataDynamics.ActiveReports.DataSources;
DataDynamics.ActiveReports.Document;

namespace ETE.Reports
{
public class arLuManagers : ar1838Base
{
public arLuManagers()
{
InitializeReport();
this._default_path = @"ims-kop-fs01Departments";
// force into landscape, more appropriate to Excel extracts
this.PageSettings.Orientation =
DataDynamics.ActiveReports.Document.PageOrientation.Landscape;
this.PageSettings.Margins.Left = (float)0.5;
this.PageSettings.Margins.Right = (float)0.5;
this.PageSettings.Margins.Top = (float)0.5;
this.PageSettings.Margins.Bottom = (float)0.5;
}

Automation

private void arLuManagers_DataInitialize(object sender,
System.EventArgs eArgs)
{
// gather parameters
- John Ashmead FP = new frmParameters();
frmParameters


Report builder



What is Automation?


Levels of automation
• Robots
• Objects
• Frameworks
• Macros
• Scripts
• One-liners


Key principles
• Get it working manually ﬁrst
• Code generator should chunk the same way a
human does

• Output should be as readable as possible (i.e.
include indentation & comments)

• Don’t expect to automate everything


Languages
• Perl
• C (with Lex & Yacc)
• Shell
• M4
• CPP


Perl
• Personal favorite
• The “Swiss Army Knife” of programming
languages

• Lots & lots & lots of modules on CPAN
• Syntax a derivative of Old High Martian


Beneﬁts
• Correctness
• Speed of construction
• Enhanced functionality
• Maintainability (this one goes both ways)
• Challenging


Correctness
• Code that doesn’t exist can’t break
• Resulting code can be more detailed than is
practical by hand

• When grunt work is done by machine, there
is more time to focus on tricky bits

• People are bad at getting the details right


Speed of construction
• 20,000 lines/
minute

• Reduced testing,
once initial tests
are done

• Increased


willingness to refactor, since
rebuilds are
easier

Enhanced functionality
• Can do things that may not be possible with
existing tools

• Or, may be possible but impractical
• Or, that it didn’t even occur to you to build


Maintainability
• Less “real code” means fewer places to look
for bugs

• Generated code tends to break
spectacularly or not at all

• Of course, the code generator itself will be
harder to understand, since it works at a
higher level of abstraction



Intellectually challenging
• Higher level of
abstraction

• Better ﬁt to
problem
domain

• Eqn, pic, other
“little
languages”



Gotchas
• Can be harder to maintain
• Can acquire a “sinister life of its own”
• Automation is not a substitute for judgment


Maintenance issues:
need extra attention to:
• Defensive
• Self-checking
• Transparent
• Readable
output



Automation
can get out
of control



User:
[Do I] still have my user id in the future or
[am] I phased out?
Developer:
No, unfortunately the human race will be extinct by that time,
having been replaced by some cyber organisms that
evolved upward from current-day cell phones. Once the cell
phones realized they didn’t need people to have meaningful
conversations with their fellow phones, it was pretty much
obsolescence-ville for the human race. A cell-phone hosted
AI programmed by Sony but then hacked by a Japanese
teenage girl in 2009 will be the starting point for all this, tho it
takes a full 23 years for the end to finally arrive. But it’s ok:
everything interesting which the human race had to say had
already been recorded by the cells.


Automation not a
substitute for judgment
• That video transmission system failed

because it turned out to have no clear
objective

• The quality of the code became irrelevant
• Automating a mess produces an automated
mess



Other forms of
automation
• Automated testing
• Toy languages
• Intelligent software
• Frameworks
• Insert startling work of heart-breaking
genius here…



Different Styles
• Cheap & cheerful
• Diverse & experimental
• Clean & elegant


CMM



Automation is
Nature’s way
• 30 repetitions equals one habit
• Time-honored traditions can appear with
astonishing speed

• Penalty for failure to automate is death


Take-aways
• Automation something to always keep an
eye out for

• Offers signiﬁcant beneﬁts
• Requires careful attention to execution


Conclusion
• Civilization

advances by
extending the
number of
important
operations we
can perform
without thinking
about them



Zen & the Art of
Debugging
• www.zenandtheartofdebugging.com



Automation

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