The metaphor happened to me in grad school in the 60s when I finally took the trouble to trace McCarthy's Lisp in itself and realized just how powerful and comprehensive he had made it in such a compact way. It was not so much the Turing aspect but the "slope" of the power "from nothing". I said to myself "this is the Maxwell's Equations of computing". I think I recounted this in the "Early History of Smalltalk".
And as a science and math major as an undergraduate, I knew the story that David told about how Heaviside had collapsed the difficult to understand partial differential equations form into the vectorized-operatorized t-shirt size we know. As a post-doc I had some fun working in McCarthy's lab at Stanford and a hobby was finding much more compact ways to do Lisp (it can really be shrunk down from John's version) .... and amounts really to being able to say what it means to send a message from one context to another .... Cheers, Alan ________________________________ From: John Zabroski <[email protected]> To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, July 9, 2010 2:48:27 PM Subject: Re: [fonc] goals Just wondering... when did that metaphor get started at VPRI? The first time I had heart you reference the t-shirt metaphor was October 2009 [1]. I remember joking about it on Lambda the Ultimate in April of 2009 [2], and my joke was actually based on a presentation given by the head operations physicist of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider project at BNL, Todd Satogata [3]. He gave a talk about how you can buy a t-shirt with Maxwell's Equations on it and it pretty much describes the whole universe. But he said his goal was to unify the strong force and weak force and come up with a new t-shirt, and make millions of dollars and become famous. When I heard that you were interested in Maxwell's Equations for Computer Science, I immediately made the connection to Todd Satogata's BNL speech (I've heard him give roughly the same pitch in other speeches many times), so that is why I made the joke about printing Maxwell's Equations for Computer Science on a t-shirt. [1] http://media.cs.uiuc.edu/seminars/StateFarm-Kay-2009-10-22a.asx [2] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3265#comment-48129 [3] http://toddsatogata.net/ On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 1:44 PM, Alan Kay <[email protected]> wrote: One of my all time favorite metaphors and examples for part of what we are trying to do in this "T-shirt programming" project. > >Cheers, > >Alan > > > > ________________________________ From: David Leibs <[email protected]> > >To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]> >Sent: Fri, July 9, 2010 10:33:04 AM >Subject: Re: [fonc] goals > > > > >> >> >> >>for example, is a lot of this added code because: >>the programmer has little idea what he was doing, and so just wildly >>copy-pasted >>everywhere and made a big mess?... >>has lots of code which is actually beneficial, such as doing error checking >>and >>building abstractions. >> >>similarly, is a piece of code smaller because: >>the programmer is good at getting work done in less code? >>or because the code is essentially a tangled mess of hacks? >> >> It isn't that the programmer has little idea of what he is doing. Things just take time to be transformed into an optimal form. There is a good example from the history from math, and physics that illustrates the point. Maxwells equations originally applied to a set of eight equations published by Maxwell in 1865. After that the number of equations escalated to twenty equations in twenty unknowns as people struggled with the implications. Maxwell wrestled with recasting the equations in quaternion form. Time passed. It was all very ugly. Finally In 1884 Oliver Heaviside recast Maxwell's math from the then cumbersome form to its modern vector calculus notation, thereby reducing the twenty equations in twenty unknowns down to the four differential equations in two unknowns that we all love and call "Maxwells equations". Heaviside invented the modern notation giving us the tools to make sense of something very profound and useful. Good work on hard things takes time plus a lot of good people that care. cheers, -David Leibs > >_______________________________________________ >fonc mailing list >[email protected] >http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > >
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