Re: [fonc] goals
On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 3:22 AM, Steve Dekorte wrote: > It seems as if each computing culture fails to establish a measure for it's > own goals which leaves it with no means of critically analyzing it's > assumptions resulting in the technical equivalent of religious dogma. From > this perspective, new technical cultures are more like religious reform > movements than new scientific theories which are measured by agreement with > experiment. e.g. had the Smalltalk community said "if it can reduce the > overall code >X without a performance cost >Y" it's better, perhaps > prototypes would have been adopted long ago. But code size versus performance is only one of many concurrent trade-offs, when it comes to defining 'better'. Different individuals or groups can have legitimately different needs. The more people are involved (and the more invested they are), the more difficult the consensus-building process. Measurements can help, but they are human artifacts as well, in their own way. They don't necessarily pull you up out of the muck of the human political process. I'd say the issue isn't with computing culture per se, but with culture in general. There's a big gap between Science as the rational, disinterested pursuit of knowledge and *any* engaged "technical culture", even of people as enlightened (and as few) as Smalltalkers. -- Max ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] goals
Steve, Something pointed out to me by Microsoft Silverlight -and- Expression Blend architect John Gossman [1] is that eventually these issues get resolved, but the process is pretty ugly. He linked this book as a reference point http://www.amazon.com/Strangest-Man-Quantum-Genius-Farmelo/dp/0571222781 One of Alan's goals is figuring out how we can compress the timespan for going through this process; read the NSF stuff about "from nothing" bootstrapping as an example. [1] John is widely respected inside Redmond, because he is so good at taking complex formulations of ideas and distilling them down into simple formalisms. On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 6:22 AM, Steve Dekorte wrote: > > On 2010-07-10, at 12:25 AM, Hans-Martin Mosner wrote: > > For quite some time I've been pondering the duality of the class/instance > and method/context relations. In some sense, a context is an object created > by instantiating its method, much like a normal object is instantiated from > its class... > > > Self does just that: > >http://labs.oracle.com/self/language.html > > Io (following Self's example) does as well. In this recent video: > >http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop > > Ralph Johnson talks about how long it takes for computing culture to absorb > new ideas (in his example, things like OO, garbage collection and dynamic > message passing) despite them being obvious next steps in retrospect. I > think prototypes could also be an example of this. > > It seems as if each computing culture fails to establish a measure for it's > own goals which leaves it with no means of critically analyzing it's > assumptions resulting in the technical equivalent of religious dogma. From > this perspective, new technical cultures are more like religious reform > movements than new scientific theories which are measured by agreement with > experiment. e.g. had the Smalltalk community said "if it can reduce the > overall code >X without a performance cost >Y" it's better, perhaps > prototypes would have been adopted long ago. > > - Steve > ___ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] goals
On 2010-07-11, at 06:18 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote: > It isn't > about making it smaller (though I also love that - ColorForth is one of > my favorite systems) but making it understandable so it can be built by > humans in such a way that it can become vast. Like the Internet. That's a good point. I'd encourage the development of a *measure* of it. With measures we can iterate. The speed of the feedback loop is only as tight as our measures. Consider the last 40 years of language/tool development vs hardware speed (which can be measured) improvements. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] goals
Steve Dekorte wrote on Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:22:29 -0700 > On 2010-07-10, at 12:25 AM, Hans-Martin Mosner wrote: > > For quite some time I've been pondering the duality of the class/instance > > and > > method/context relations. In some sense, a context is an object created by > > instantiating its method, much like a normal object is instantiated from > > its class... > > > Self does just that: > > http://labs.oracle.com/self/language.html > > Io (following Self's example) does as well. In this recent video: > > http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop Indeed, but these two languages are, perhaps, even better examples: http://www.daimi.au.dk/~beta/ http://www.erights.org/elang/index.html > Ralph Johnson talks about how long it takes for computing culture to absorb > new > ideas (in his example, things like OO, garbage collection and dynamic message > passing) despite them being obvious next steps in retrospect. I think > prototypes > could also be an example of this. > > It seems as if each computing culture fails to establish a measure for it's > own goals > which leaves it with no means of critically analyzing it's assumptions > resulting in the > technical equivalent of religious dogma. From this perspective, new technical > cultures > are more like religious reform movements than new scientific theories which > are > measured by agreement with experiment. e.g. had the Smalltalk community said > "if it > can reduce the overall code >X without a performance cost >Y" it's better, > perhaps > prototypes would have been adopted long ago. When I think about the issue of FONC goals, I always remember Alan's "supersized dog house vs Empire State Building" illustration. It isn't about making it smaller (though I also love that - ColorForth is one of my favorite systems) but making it understandable so it can be built by humans in such a way that it can become vast. Like the Internet. The other day I saw on the local news a three story building collapse as if it had been imploded on purpose. The people who built it had initially made just one floor, and it worked great. Then they added a second floor, and it was nice. Now they were shocked that having a third floor, which looked exactly like the original two, brought down the whole thing. Neither architecture nor engineering were part of this story, as far as I could tell. But this could be said of essentially all programmers, computer scientists and "software engineers" that I know. Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. -- Jecel ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc