Re: [fonc] goals

2010-07-11 Thread Max OrHai
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

2010-07-11 Thread John Zabroski
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

2010-07-11 Thread Steve Dekorte

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

2010-07-11 Thread Jecel Assumpcao Jr.
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