Since really bad executive talent has been a topic somewhat on my mind,
and on the minds of others, too, I imagine, I thought I'd dredge up this
little item from what was probably the late nineties.
RECURSES, REVILED AGAIN
Ann Arbor: There is some danger, meta-software cosmologists warn, that the universal all may be entering an unstable phase and beginning to exhibit some of the symptoms commonly seen in overloaded or poorly-thought-out computer systems. For example, recursion, the mathematical and programming term for the process of functions calling themselves, seems to be rearing its head in areas of daily life that are not specifically software-related.
For example, the White House is calling, apparently without more than the usual lingual length in cheek, for an independent prosecutor to investigate the behavior of the independent prosecutor who's investigating them. You could argue (and you probably will) that this is not a recursive call but just an example of instantiation, where the constructor, independent_prosecutor (target, agenda), is being called to create another instance of the independent_prosecutor object. However, I could argue (and I think I will, right now, in fact) that the situation is less clear-cut than that, since the instantiating object (the White House) is only enabled to issue the call after a triggering action by an existing instance of the class being instantiated, namely the issuance of a ludicrous_gaffe message. Metaphysically, then, we could see Kenneth Starr as having called himself by providing another object with the enabling condition it requires to sic Janet Reno on his mangy ass.
Now, the definition of "recursion" offered by the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (http://wfn-shop.Princeton.EDU/foldoc/) includes the following important note:
"If a function will always call itself, however it is called, then it will never terminate. Usually however, it first performs some test on its arguments to check for a "base case" - a condition under which it can return a value without calling itself."
In other words, the implementer of a recursive function has the responsibility to provide a guard or short stop, preventing runaway processing. However, since the independent_prosecutor object was almost certainly (oh, ok, certainly) not designed using sound computational principles or in an ISO 9001-certified environment, the probability of there being no such guard in place approaches (oh, ok, is) 1. So, from this, we can postulate the frightening vision of 100% of the intelligent life in the universe being named independent prosecutors within a period of time that can be (but hasn't been) easily calculated. At the first point at which an object attempts to execute an independent_prosecutor constructor and receives a NULL return, indicating that no more sentient beings are available to fill the office, there had damn well better be somebody checking the return values, or the universe will seg fault.
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Meanwhile, in yet another example of recursive corporate behavior, Reuters reports that Al Dunlop, the so-called "chainsaw" of corporate downsizing, has himself been downsized by his latest victim -- that is, employer -- Sunbeam Corporation. It is not the case, yet, that Sunbeam had to bring in a downsizing expert in order to rid itself of an incompetent, inefficient executive workforce, but that situation is certainly not impossible to imagine (at least, not for me, it isn't, but then I enjoy imagining things like that). Since companies bring in Huns like Dunlop to improve short-term performance, and since these people carry a substantial price tag themselves, it's only a short step toward hiring another CEO whose specialty is cutting out the cutters- out (since after you improve earnings per share in year 1 by reducing labor, closing plants, and generally gutting a corporation, there isn't much left to cut in year 2 -- except the high priced axemen and axewomen left over from the previous year.)
Fortunately, this form of recursion does have its own, fundamental guard in that the corporation in question represents the scope of the operations. When the last employee (presumably the last CEO hired) lays himself off, the last pointer is freed, and the system executes a graceful shutdown.
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The Wood-Charles News Service and Computer Science Rant has been brought to you by the Odd Town Tavern, now pioneering the hospitality industry's first recursive last call. "Oh, call yourself," suggested a member of wait staff.
