Re: [fonc] Alan Kay in the news [german]
I should mention that there is both garbling and also lots of fabrication in this report. I didn't say abandon theory -- I did urge doing more real experiments with software (from which the first might have been incorrectly inferred). But where did all the organ stuff come from? I never mentioned it, so it must have been gleaned from the net. And I suddenly became a better organist than I every was. And he had me touring around when I have not been able to play keyboards for four years because of a severe shoulder trauma from a tennis accident. But the University of Paderborn and faculty and students were very hospitable, and it was fun to help them dedicate the building. Cheers, Alan From: Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org To: Fundamentals of New Computing fonc@vpri.org Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 7:19 AM Subject: [fonc] Alan Kay in the news [german] http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Alan-Kay-Nicht-in-der-Theorie-der-Informatik-verharren-1644597.html ___ 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] Alan Kay in the news [german]
Hi Long, I can keep my elbows into my body typing on a laptop. My problem is that I can't reach out further for more than a few seconds without a fair amount of pain from all the ligament tendon and rotator cuff damage along that axis.If I get that close to the keys on an organ I still have trouble reaching the other keyboards and my feet are too far forward to play the pedals. Similar geometry with the piano, plus the reaches on the much wider keyboard are too far on the right side. Also at my age there are some lower back problems from trying to lean in at a low angle -- this doesn't work. But, after a few months I realized I could go back to guitar playing (which I did a lot 50 years ago) because you can play guitar with your right elbow in. After a few years of getting some jazz technique back and playing in some groups in New England in the summers, I missed the polyphonic classical music and wound up starting to learn classical guitar a little over a year ago. This has proved to be quite a challenge -- much more difficult than I imagined it would be -- and there was much less transfer from jazz/steel string technique that I would have thought. It not only feels very different physically, but also mentally, and has many extra dimensions of nuance and color that is both its charm, and also makes it quite a separate learning experience. Cheers, Alan From: Long Nguyen cgb...@gmail.com To: Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com; Fundamentals of New Computing fonc@vpri.org Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 10:47 AM Subject: Re: [fonc] Alan Kay in the news [german] Dear Dr. Kay, May I ask, how would you type on a computer if you cannot play keyboards? Best, Long On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 10:44 AM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: I should mention that there is both garbling and also lots of fabrication in this report. I didn't say abandon theory -- I did urge doing more real experiments with software (from which the first might have been incorrectly inferred). But where did all the organ stuff come from? I never mentioned it, so it must have been gleaned from the net. And I suddenly became a better organist than I every was. And he had me touring around when I have not been able to play keyboards for four years because of a severe shoulder trauma from a tennis accident. But the University of Paderborn and faculty and students were very hospitable, and it was fun to help them dedicate the building. Cheers, Alan From: Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org To: Fundamentals of New Computing fonc@vpri.org Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 7:19 AM Subject: [fonc] Alan Kay in the news [german] http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Alan-Kay-Nicht-in-der-Theorie-der-Informatik-verharren-1644597.html ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
[fonc] Component-based software (was: Historical lessons to escape the current sorry state of personal computing?)
On Sun, 15 Jul 2012, Ivan Zhao wrote: By Victorian plumbing, I meant the standardization of the plumbing and hardware components at the end of the 19th century. It greatly liberated plumbers from fixing each broken toilet from scratch, to simply picking and assembling off the shelf pieces. So far, the discussion has mostly being about how to fix the current situation. They are great, but I am more interesting in the historical precedences that we could use as lessons and analogies. For example, in the plumber case, the lesson could be that standardization of the parts abstract away the need to know to forge a facet, so my mother, probably not a technical person in any century, could go to a hardware store and fix the problem herself. There was (or even still is) a proposition to make software from prefabricated components. Not much different to another proposition about using prefabricated libraries/dlls etc. Anyway, seems like there is a lot of component schools nowadays, and I guess they are unable to work with each other - unless you use a lot of chewing gum and duct tape. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component-based_software_engineering I guess the only real analogy to your mother doing her own repairs by herself would require some standarization body, like ANSI or ECMA, and the rest of interested parties to obey. Now, the truth is parties will obey when they have money to be gambled from obedience. BTW, I think much better analogy would be to compare software with electronics. There are some common elements, sure, but how they are aligned and linked matters a lot. Even when there are common structural meta-elements like voltage regulators, they are not necessarilly interchangeable. And so far, I cannot see a total amateur repairing her own TV or radio. Oh, wait, back when there were lamps in TV sets, I did some monkey-type repairs :-). Also, I guess this approach to programming when one connects stuff built by others can be both good and disastrous, this blog entry gives me a clue: Complexity - or how hard is it to display a list of 3,000 items in a table on MacOS X anyway? http://chaosinmotion.com/blog/?p=620 (And we get this results from programmers who should know something about their craft, yet sorting/browsing few thousand items is too hard and requires upgrade from a supercomputer - truly a prelude to pitiful disaster). So far, it looks that IT is still in it's inflation stage and everybody is trying to bite into everybody's else share. Any kind of stability-oriented thinking is not scheduled for this year or this decade, IMHO. Even if inflation is slowing or stopping, it will take years for everybody to realize this and start playing differently. While I never researched this, I am sure in the early days of hydraulic/plumbing business, there were many shops which only agreed on common elements much later. And the same was with competing solutions for city lights 110+ years ago. And the same is still happening in auto industry, where the only really standardized elements are gasoline and lead-acid battery, AFAIK. Also, by programming, I did not meant text, visual, or any other forms of computer programming per say, but rather an attitude towards the computing medium in general -- to less of a passive button pusher, more a deliberate assembler and manipulator. Ivan There are some efforts like Scratch or Squeak-based eToys. They are interesting from my point of view, not sure how they fit into this attitude thing. I'd say, we now have quite a few devices programmable - microwave owens, video casette recorders (and their dvd/br offsprings), automated washing machines, robot vacuum cleaners. So the idea is not so alien to common folk, I guess. This is, however, still only about pushing predefined buttons. To make large scale change into humanity able to create their own buttons like I nowadays write a two line bash script, just to save me a need to type those two lines every day, I really don't know if this is possible. Like I already have said, whoever wanted to play with computer as programmable device, could have a lot of options and I don't think there is really a need to make it even easier. Visual programming looks cool on a surface, but I doubt it really gives any freedom. Departing from land of program=text idea may lead you into land of write a book by choosing from a table with 1000 predefined pictures. Apart from experimental poetry, I wouldn't find such books very interesting or worth my time. If there is any other hint, it's maybe about programmable calculators. Some time ago, they looked like a killer app - at least for me. Nowadays, it is a bit hard to spot them on one popular Polish auctioning site. There are cheap engineers/scientific calculators for literally few bucks, but no programmables. One could argue, this is because with the advent of cell phones they are capable of becoming a programmable
Re: [fonc] Component-based software
On 7/18/2012 4:04 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote: Tomasz Rola wrote: On Sun, 15 Jul 2012, Ivan Zhao wrote: By Victorian plumbing, I meant the standardization of the plumbing and hardware components at the end of the 19th century. It greatly liberated plumbers from fixing each broken toilet from scratch, to simply picking and assembling off the shelf pieces. There was (or even still is) a proposition to make software from prefabricated components. Not much different to another proposition about using prefabricated libraries/dlls etc. Anyway, seems like there is a lot of component schools nowadays, and I guess they are unable to work with each other - unless you use a lot of chewing gum and duct tape. It's really funny, isn't it - how badly software components have failed. The world is littered with component libraries of various sorts, that are unmitigated disasters. Except. when it actually works. Consider: - all the various c libraries - all the various java libraries - all the various SDKs floating around - cpan (perl) Whenever we use an include statement, or run a make, we're really assembling from huge libraries of components. But we don't quite think of it that way for some reason. yeah. a few factors I think: how much is built on top of the language; how much is mandatory when interacting with the system (basically, in what ways does it impose itself on the way the program is structured or works, what sorts of special treatment does it need when being used, ...). libraries which tend to be more successful are those which operate at a level much closer to that of the base language, and which avoid placing too many special requirements on the code using the library (must always use memory-allocator X, object system Y, must register global roots with the GC, ...). say, a person building a component library for C is like: ok, I will build a GC and some OO facilities; now I am going to build some generic containers on top of said OO library; now I am going to write a special preprocessor to make it easier to use; ... while ignoring issues like: what if the programmer still wants or needs to use something like malloc or mmap?; how casual may the programmer be regarding the treatment of object references?; what if the programmer wants to use the containers without using the OO facilities?; what if for some reason the programmer wants to write code which does not use the preprocessor, and call into code which does?; ... potentially, the library can build a large collection of components, but they don't play well with others (say, due to large amounts of internal dependencies and assumptions in the design). this means that, potentially, interfacing a codebase built on the library with another codebase may require an inordinate amount of additional pain. in my case I have tried to, where possible, avoid these sorts of issues in my own designs, partly by placing explicit restrictions on what sorts of internal dependencies and assumptions are allowed when writing various pieces of code, and trying to keep things, for the most part, fairly close to the metal. or such... ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
[fonc] Deployment by virus
I just had a weird though, maybe there is some precedence? If we were to do software development in a more organic manner, accepting the nature of complex systems as being... complex. In such a setting we might have no blue-print (static source code) to usable for instantiating new live systems ex nihilo, or the option to take down existing systems to deploy an upgrade. The code running the nodes can be the result of wild mutation or complex generative algorithms. A mode of development could be to work on prototypes in a lab, a clone or an isolated node from the production system. When the desired properties are created in the prototype they would then spread through the production system by means of a virus which would adapt the new properties to the running instances individually according to their unique configuration. Is it feasible? Would it provide new options? Any research done in this direction? BR, John ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Alan Kay in the news [german]
I was wondering why you picked up guitar again. DId not know you were sidelined on the keyboards. Guitar certainly has its own charm, and switching from a pick to finger picking is a very interesting transition. Hope to see you next Wednesday. David On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 2:01 PM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: Hi Long, I can keep my elbows into my body typing on a laptop. My problem is that I can't reach out further for more than a few seconds without a fair amount of pain from all the ligament tendon and rotator cuff damage along that axis. If I get that close to the keys on an organ I still have trouble reaching the other keyboards and my feet are too far forward to play the pedals. Similar geometry with the piano, plus the reaches on the much wider keyboard are too far on the right side. Also at my age there are some lower back problems from trying to lean in at a low angle -- this doesn't work. But, after a few months I realized I could go back to guitar playing (which I did a lot 50 years ago) because you can play guitar with your right elbow in. After a few years of getting some jazz technique back and playing in some groups in New England in the summers, I missed the polyphonic classical music and wound up starting to learn classical guitar a little over a year ago. This has proved to be quite a challenge -- much more difficult than I imagined it would be -- and there was much less transfer from jazz/steel string technique that I would have thought. It not only feels very different physically, but also mentally, and has many extra dimensions of nuance and color that is both its charm, and also makes it quite a separate learning experience. Cheers, Alan -- *From:* Long Nguyen cgb...@gmail.com *To:* Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com; Fundamentals of New Computing fonc@vpri.org *Sent:* Wednesday, July 18, 2012 10:47 AM *Subject:* Re: [fonc] Alan Kay in the news [german] Dear Dr. Kay, May I ask, how would you type on a computer if you cannot play keyboards? Best, Long On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 10:44 AM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: I should mention that there is both garbling and also lots of fabrication in this report. I didn't say abandon theory -- I did urge doing more real experiments with software (from which the first might have been incorrectly inferred). But where did all the organ stuff come from? I never mentioned it, so it must have been gleaned from the net. And I suddenly became a better organist than I every was. And he had me touring around when I have not been able to play keyboards for four years because of a severe shoulder trauma from a tennis accident. But the University of Paderborn and faculty and students were very hospitable, and it was fun to help them dedicate the building. Cheers, Alan From: Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org To: Fundamentals of New Computing fonc@vpri.org Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 7:19 AM Subject: [fonc] Alan Kay in the news [german] http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Alan-Kay-Nicht-in-der-Theorie-der-Informatik-verharren-1644597.html ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ 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] Historical lessons to escape the current sorry state of personal computing?
Hi Ivan, Please forgive the speculativeness and abstruseness of my response to your question ... but it's the best I can do! The question that's really being asked here is, 'What is the future of computing?' -- and I'm not sure it is possible to answer that question in the abstract, just in the same way it wasn't possible to answer the question 'What is the future of painting?' if it had been asked in the studio of Cimabue before Giotto turned up. Without actually answering the question, it's possible to speculate on the potential of the medium. To my mind, the first distinction to make is between the instrumental and the essential nature of the medium; by that I mean, between the purposes to which the medium can be put as a tool -- the computations that can be made with it, its mere utility -- and the possibilities of the medium as a medium for thinking and imagining in. So to continue the art example, the art of painting is itself the medium, and the introduction of, say, oil paints into Italy in the beginning of the 15th century, while it was a huge technical advance that allowed greater expressiveness, experimentation and delicacy -- and lead to some genres of painting that were not practical before with tempera -- it didn't represent the birth of a new field as such. The essential advance happened arguably centuries earlier in the art of Nicolo Pisano in sculpture and Giotto in painting in the awareness of the possibilities of space and form, and in the reabsorption of the Greek notions of studied rational observation of nature. Flatness in painting -- when it isn't an aesthetic choice but a miserable inability -- is also a kind of flatness, a weakness, a feebleness -- a sub-realism -- from a mental point of view. Giotto's paintings have many masterly qualities but perhaps the paradigmatic significance was his tremendous assertion of volume. Volume represented not just solidity, or merely an advance in making something look three-dimensional -- it literally advanced the art of painting by a power -- it showed that it was possible to think of forms in the round, to be aware of their sides, even of the backs of figures, while simultaneously depicting them from a single viewpoint. Giotto's achievement also demonstrates that this sense of volume -- while of course it exists in potential in everybody -- had to be first imagined by him and brought into existence by sheer force of will. To my mind it also suggests that things like the sense of volume can actually be regarded as 'senses' of a kind -- 'virtual senses', if you like, willed into existence by the mind -- and I think this is literally true if you think about a sense as not merely a sense organ but a cognitive process for which neuronal machinery exists in the brain, which we call cortexes. So what is the relevance of this to the future of computing? My point above is that although instrumental advances are powerful and important they are fundamentally incremental, and that paradigm shifts only occur when essential advances are made -- and essential advances are first intuited, imagined, and then willed into existence -- and function like 'virtual senses' in the sense that they both perceive sense data as well as actively organise data into new concepts. This brings us back to the question of computing as a medium in the instrumental and essential sense, and the general question of what effect do instruments and tools have on the ability to conceptualise. What medium does computing represent? Oil paints and brushes are the instruments of painting -- arguably a flat surface is the essential medium, as it is the essential difference between painting and sculpture. Computers can of course be used as tools to create in these media -- digital paint programs, 3D modelling software, etc., are instrumental equivalents -- but these are extensions of existing tools, and arguably less artistically efficient than traditional media (paints, violins, chisels, etc). Of course, computers can digitally manipulate images, sounds, words, etc., in ways that are cumbersome or practically impossible traditionally and you can argue that this certainly opens up new avenues of expression -- but not necessarily new realms of expression. I think Dr. Kay has pointed out that one thing that a computer can do uniquely that is more than an extension, refinement, or virtualisation of what traditional tools currently do is simulation -- the ability to project interactive information spaces, to run models through simulations, to carry out virtual experimentation. And it's arguable that the greatest enabler of experimentation in this space is not so much predefined software so much as computer languages, which provide an interactive syntax for thinking in that medium. Regards, Iian On 15 July 2012 05:36, Ivan Zhao nini...@gmail.com wrote: 45 years after Engelbart's demo, we have a read-only web and Microsoft Word 2011, a gulf between users and programmers
Re: [fonc] Deployment by virus
John Nilsson j...@milsson.nu writes:
I just had a weird though, maybe there is some precedence?
If we were to do software development in a more organic manner,
accepting the nature of complex systems as being... complex. In such a
setting we might have no blue-print (static source code) to usable for
instantiating new live systems ex nihilo, or the option to take down
existing systems to deploy an upgrade. The code running the nodes
can be the result of wild mutation or complex generative algorithms.
A mode of development could be to work on prototypes in a lab, a clone
or an isolated node from the production system. When the desired
properties are created in the prototype they would then spread through
the production system by means of a virus which would adapt the new
properties to the running instances individually according to their
unique configuration.
That's exactly what's happening with most big software editors: Apple,
Microsoft, Adobe, Firefox, etc.
They develop new strands in their laboratories, and then virally spread
over all the computers of the world thru the Internet, automatically.
Well, sometimes you have to pay for big changes, but they let the small
changes spread for $free.
Is it feasible? Would it provide new options? Any research done in
this direction?
Joke apart, people are still resiting a lot to stochastic software.
One problem with random spreading of updates is that its random.
--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.
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Re: [fonc] Deployment by virus
Random as in where it's applied or random in what's applied? I was thinking that the viral part was a means to counter the seeming randomness in an otherwise chaotic system. Similar in spirit in how gardening creates some amount of order and predictability, a gardener who can apply DNA tweaks as well as pruning. As I understand it CFEngine does something like this wile limited to simple configuration. BR, John On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 3:55 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon p...@informatimago.com wrote: Joke apart, people are still resiting a lot to stochastic software. One problem with random spreading of updates is that its random. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
