On 10/21/22 5:02 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
As for "NeXT machine's software RIP", Rick Rashid, who was central in
the development of that software, was my office neighbor. He left to
take a position at Microsoft as VP of Research. I wonder if the
software is RIPing.
So many (technical) careers seem to have been "ended" (lost) by getting
"promoted" into the big boys' management pastures (Microsoft, Google,
Apple, etc) over the decades. I can't list all the promising tech
people I have known who ended up lost in the upper echelons of those
companies. I wonder if the work coming out of those
behemoth/leviathans is *because of* this or *in spite of this*?
While it was not central to my core mission (it was to peripheral ones
around developing distributed user interfaces) of RIPing, the promise of
PS as a full featured (if ideosyncratic) language in NeWS and NextStep
was awe-some at the time. Watching all that defer/failover to Java and
then (painfully) JavaScript was like watching a long slow 1000 car
accident on a black-iced 8 lane freeway.
By some measure, "nobody got hurt" however... and the kinds of tools
*living* on/within the Web these days vindicates any idea that these are
not viable solutions (as awkward and misbegotten as they may seem up
against their more ?elegant? predecessors).
I don't have the focus (I've tried) to take up Owen's AgentScript or the
larger RedFish Acequia Architecture which addresses (once again) the
same issues (and more)...
My copy of Glenn Reid's 1990 Thinking in PostScript
<https://w3-o.cs.hm.edu/users/ruckert/public_html/compiler/ThinkingInPostScript.pdf>
sat on my shelf for two decades singing a siren song that wasn't ever
quite strong enough for me to give it my full attention for the few
weeks/months I believe it deserved.
Someday (if humanity survives another century, or interstellar visitors
bother to crack our rusty harddrives) this will all be as much fun as
the vestigal (aka "junk") DNA we started finding when we started
ubiquitous DNA/RNA sequencing. It must all be "good for something"?
Right? Clearly was at one time!
Fascinating that anyone (besides me) is even discussing such things 30
years later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28115946
As glen has put it before "old man's stories... <sigh>"
Speaking of "old men", Mikhail Kalishnakov
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Kalashnikov> was probably
reminiscing on like this right up until his death in 2013 when he moved
on to the giant soviet wheatfield pasture in the sky-steppe. I'm
pretty sure plenty of kids in schools and shopping malls are still being
mowed down by his innovations as well as rival warlord gangs (and
starving refugees) in the third world, no matter how much the likes of
Western Monopolistic companies like Browning (Official weapon of Utah
btw) or Armalite (nod to Vietnam Vets itchy trigger fingers cum
insurrectionists) try to out-compete them in that market. You just can't
beat "free" and "ubiquitous"?
An interesting article on Open Source design and Path Dependent Lockin:
https://www.wired.com/2007/06/open-source-ak4/ and a more technical
paper on the global market for Assault Rifles:
https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/266561468141574815/pdf/wps4202.pdf
<https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/266561468141574815/pdf/wps4202.pdf>
Meanwhile, trivial Internet Research discovered that Glenn Reid has put
*himself* into a rich (but mundane?) pasture designing/marketing
Marathon <https://glennreid.com/>, an IoT washer-dryer appliance! I
wonder if it has a PostScript interpreter embedded in it and is building
a globe-spanning distributed AI written in PS and spying on humans from
the laundry room?
</careening tangents>
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM
On Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 3:08 PM Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote:
FWIW, I dipped into the higher levels of real-time-systems
development
several times in my career. The earliest being a control system
(circa
1981) for the LANL Proton Storage Ring where one naturally can't
afford
anything *but* failsafe implementations, etc. The stakes are just too
'ffing high and the coupling to electrooptomechanical systems quite
intimate.
The "digital" components of such systems might have had the
opportunity
to ignore timing issues and simply "execute the same steps"
regardless
of timing. But in fact many software-driven (sub)systems represented
time-critical processes and sometimes were up agains the timing
limits
of the analog components which had no leeway in their "execution".
There are all kinds of analogies in federated (distributed)
simulation
environments which Glen (and others here) probably know much
better than
I, where different "clocks" matter, and different levels of
synchronization and reproducibility are in play. The Postscript
interpreters, printers, and film recorders were also pseudo real-time
systems since some of the timing components were in fact software
controlled (for example, the film recorders were "stroke" devices
with
software driving D-A converters to "sweep" out vectors and "clip" the
on/off of the beam with appropriate analog component
delays/biases/gains
needing to be calibrated for. Fortunately failures in this step did
not (usually) damage anyone or risk anyone's health and safety
(like the
beam in the PSR did).
Regarding identity and equivalence, I prefer the phrase: "close
enough
for who it's for"...
On 10/21/22 11:18 AM, glen wrote:
> Ha! If we're going to argue about words, then let's stick with the
> word "identity" and skip the "metaphor" nonsense. You and Frank
seem
> to be using the word in a weird way. Identity means "the exact same
> particular thing over any differencing available" or somesuch. I
mean,
> it's used that way in phrases like "identity theft" as well as
> mathematical identity. It's equivalence sets all the way down. I
just
> can't imagine any working computationalist would ever say anything
> like "executed identically" unless ... well ... the exact same
> process, with the exact same steps, happened.
>
> I suppose there are deep philosophical intuitions pried at by the
> words "emulation" versus "simulation". And one can argue (again
with
> help from Christian List) about whether there exist fully closed
> ontological walls like we try to create with things like Jails,
> HyperV, Docker, VM's like Java's, etc. But "execute identically"
is a
> phrase that would only be used by someone who worked *way* above
such
> levels (assuming levels even exist at all). It's a bit like
talking to
> the kids programming websites these days, with access to
infinite disk
> space, infinite memory, steeped in continuous delivery, etc. [⛧]
>
> Layers of abstraction are fine. Use 'em when you need 'em. But we
> shouldn't posture by invoking things like "instruction sets" and
> "execute identically" in the same breath. (Not that you did that
...
> just sayin'.)
>
>
> [⛧] Rant: This is a good talk
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s>. But I get super
> irritated when people use *toy* code in their rhetoric and leave
large
> scale deployment as an exercise for the reader. Yeah, fine. The
REPL
> is cool and all. But when my simulation takes a fvcking WEEK to
> execute, it's difficult to sympathize. I've recently been playing
> around with VSCodium, which is pretty cool. But whatever, man. I
still
> have to upload the code somewhere and execute it. Get off my lawn!
>
> On 10/21/22 09:24, Steve Smith wrote:
>>
>> As a counter-example, we ran film recorders whose "guts" were
built
>> by Ed Fredkin's Information International company and were
built to
>> the spec of Dec PDP-11 (I think 11?) and it was anecdotally agreed
>> among the user community (of a few thousand delivered units in the
>> world?) that these PDP-clones *never* failed to execute the code
>> identically to the machines they were patterned after. I don't
>> remember the details of implementation of these 70's era hardware
>> designs, but I understood that they III designed their own PCBs
but
>> (obviously?) used the same CPU chips... I don't know about all the
>> other support components... A likely answer to this pondering
is that
>> these machines did not run a general purpose OS and the III
>> software/system people probably made up for any differences in
>> Software/Timing/Error Handling?
>>
>> If Owen is listening in here, I think he was there for more than a
>> little of this from inside Apple/Sun?
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>> PS. To concede/confront glen's sentiment that: " 'Metaphor'
is an
>> evil word, used only by manipulators and gaslighters", I would
>> offer that the use of *conceptual metaphor* is to thinking as
noise
>> is to simulated annealing, and his point about "tighter or looser
>> equivalence" might well be the best argument *for* the use of
>> metaphorical thinking? I can't believe I'm stirring/kicking
this can
>> of worm-hornets down the street again...
>>
>
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