Re: [fonc] Final STEP progress report abandoned?
I would say that 'life' as we know, and understand, it has 'chosen' robustness and redundancy instead of efficiency. It doesn't matter how efficient you *were* if one glitch kills you. I used quotes are because I am anthromorphizing evolution. It seems to me that some of the ideas here are approaching the same ideas ... glom together stauff that works, even if it not the most efficient solution, but good enough. Choose you goals wisely. David On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 8:17 AM, Carl Gundel ca...@psychesystems.com wrote: I’m not sure why you think I’m attributing special reverence to computing. Break all the rules, please. ;-) ** ** The claim that life is somehow inefficient so that computing should be different begs for qualification. I’m sure there are a lot of ideas that can be gleaned for future computing technologies by studying biology, but living things are not computers in the sense of what people mean when they use the term computer. It’s apples and oranges. ** ** -Carl ** ** *From:* fonc-boun...@vpri.org [mailto:fonc-boun...@vpri.org] *On Behalf Of *David Barbour *Sent:* Thursday, September 05, 2013 10:39 AM *To:* Fundamentals of New Computing *Subject:* Re: [fonc] Final STEP progress report abandoned? ** ** If you treat computing that reverently, you'll never improve it. ** ** On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 6:19 AM, Carl Gundel ca...@psychesystems.com wrote: Design systems that are more efficient than life? More efficient in what ways, for what purposes? For the purposes of computing? Can we define what computing should become? We are only touching the hem of the garment, I think. ;-) -Carl *From:* fonc-boun...@vpri.org [mailto:fonc-boun...@vpri.org] *On Behalf Of *David Barbour *Sent:* Thursday, September 05, 2013 12:05 AM *To:* Fundamentals of New Computing *Subject:* Re: [fonc] Final STEP progress report abandoned? Life is, in some ways, less messy than binary. At least less fragile. DNA cannot encode absolute offsets, for example. Closer to associative memory. In any case, we want to reach useful solutions quickly. Life doesn't evolve at a scale commensurate with human patience, despite having vastly more parallelism and memory. So we need to design systems more efficient, and perhaps more specialized, than life. On Sep 4, 2013 5:37 PM, Casey Ransberger casey.obrie...@gmail.com wrote: John, you're right. I have seen raw binary used as DNA and I left that out. This could be my own prejudice, but it seems like a messy way to do things. I suppose I want to limit what the animal can do by constraining it to some set of safe primitives. Maybe that's a silly thing to worry about, though. If we're going to grow software, I suppose maybe I should expect the process to be as messy as life is:) On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 4:06 PM, John Carlson yottz...@gmail.com wrote:** ** I meant to say you could perform and record operations while the program was running. I think people have missed machine language as syntaxless. On Sep 4, 2013 4:17 PM, John Carlson yottz...@gmail.com wrote: On Sep 3, 2013 8:25 PM, Casey Ransberger casey.obrie...@gmail.com wrote: It yields a kind of syntaxlessness that's interesting. Our TWB/TE language was mostly syntaxless. Instead, you performed operations on desktop objects that were recorded (like AppleScript, but with an iconic language). You could even record while the program was running. We had a tiny bit of syntax in our predicates, stuff like range and set notation. Can anyone describe Minecraft's syntax and semantics? ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc -- CALIFORNIA H U M A N ___ 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] education experimental target
Or maybe this for $60 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11712 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 CPU GPU: OpenGL ES2.0, OpenVG 1.1 Mali 400 core 1GB DRAM Onboard Storage: 2GB Flash, microSD card (TF) slot for up to 32GB Arduino-Style Peripheral Headers (Adapter Needed for Shield Form-Factor) HDMI Video Output Linux3.0 + Ubuntu12.10 Supported 0.1 Spaced GPIO Headers RJ45 Ethernet Connection David On 3/3/13, David Girle davidgi...@gmail.com wrote: Given the interest the Raspberry Pi is enjoying in education, the new platform coming out of TI towards the end of April, might be an interesting target for any fonc experiments runnable on ARM. *http://beagleboard.org/unzipped/ Everything you love about the BeagleBone and more: - Lower price - Higher performance - On-board HDMI to connect directly to TVs and monitors - More and faster memory now with DDR3 - On-board flash storage frees up the microSD card slot - Support for existing Cape plug-in boards * david ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Terminology: Object Oriented vs Message Oriented
This sounds suspiciously like Unit Testing, which is basically When I say this, you should answer that.Thos are precomputed answers, but could be computed I suppose -- so a bit like your Postscript example ... you send the Testing-Agent down the pipe. David On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 7:26 AM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: Hi Thiago I think you are on a good path. One way to think about this problem is that the broker is a human programmer who has received a module from half way around the world that claims to provide important services. The programmer would confine it in an address space and start doing experiments with it to try to discover what it does (and/or perhaps how well its behavior matches up to its claims). Many of the discovery approaches of Lenat in AM and Eurisko could be very useful here. Another part of the scaling of modules approach could be to require modules to have much better models of the environments they expect/need in order to run. For example, suppose a module has a variable that it would like to refer to some external resource. Both static and dynamic typing are insufficient here because they are only about kinds of results rather than meanings of results. But we could readily imagine a language in which the variable had associated with it a dummy or stand-in model of what is desired. It could be a slow version of something we are hoping to get a faster version of. It could be sample values and tests, etc. All of these would be useful for debugging our module -- in fact, we could make this a requirement of our module system, that the modules carry enough information to allow them to be debugged with only their own model of the environment. And the more information the model has, the easier it will be for a program to see if the model of an environment for a module matches up to possible modules out in the environment when the system is running for real. Cheers, Alan -- *From:* Thiago Silva tsi...@sourcecraft.info *To:* fonc fonc@vpri.org *Sent:* Wednesday, February 13, 2013 2:09 AM *Subject:* Re: [fonc] Terminology: Object Oriented vs Message Oriented Hello, as I was thinking over these problems today, here are some initial thoughts, just to get the conversation going... The first time I read about the Method Finder and Ted's memo, I tried to grasp the broader issue, and I'm still thinking of some interesting examples to explore. I can see the problem of finding operations by their meanings, the problem of finding objects by the services they provide and the overal structure of the discovery, negotiation and binding. My feeling is that, besides using worlds as mechanism, an explicit discovery context may be required (though I can't say much without further experimentations), specially when trying to figure out operations that don't produce a distinguishable value but rather change the state of computation (authenticating, opening a file, sending a message through the network, etc) or when doing remote discovery. For brokering (and I'm presuming the use of such entities, as I could not get rid of them in my mind so far), my first thought was that a chain of brokers of some sorts could be useful in the architecture where each could have specific ways of mediating discovery and negotiation through the levels (or narrowed options, providing isolation for some services. Worlds come to mind). During the binding time, I think it would be important that some requirements of the client could be relaxed or even be tagged optional to allow the module to execute at least a subset of its features (or to execute features with suboptimal operations) when full binding isn't possible -- though this might require special attention to guarantee that eg. disabling optional features don't break the execution. Further, different versions of services may require different kinds of pre/post-processing (eg. initialization and finalization routines). When abstracting a service (eg. storage) like this, I think it's when the glue code starts to require sophistication (because it needs to fill more blanks)...and to have it automated, the provider will need to make requirements to the client as well. This is where I think a common vocabulary will be more necessary. -- Thiago Excerpts from Alan Kay's message of 2013-02-12 16:12:40 -0300: Hi Jeff I think intermodule communication schemes that *really scale* is one of the most important open issues of the last 45 years or so. It is one of the several pursuits written into the STEPS proposal that we didn't use our initial efforts on -- so we've done little to advance this over the last few years. But now that the NSF funded part of STEPS has concluded, we are planning to use much of the other strand of STEPS to look at some of these neglected issues. There are lots of facets, and one has to do with
Re: [fonc] Design of web, POLs for rules. Fuzz testing nile
Alan -- Yes, we seem to slowly getting back the the NeWS (Network extensible Windowing System) paradigm which used a modified Display Postscript to allow the intelligence, including user input, to live in the terminal (as opposed to the X-Windows model). But I am sure I am teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, here, sorry :-) . David [[ NeWS = Network extensible Windowing System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS ]] On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 7:37 AM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: Hi John Or you could look at the actual problem a web has to solve, which is to present arbitrary information to a user that comes from any of several billion sources. Looked at from this perspective we can see that the current web design could hardly be more wrong headed. For example, what is the probability that we can make an authoring app that has all the features needed by billions of producers? One conclusion could be that the web/browser is not an app but should be a kind of operating system that should be set up to safely execute anything from anywhere and to present the results in forms understandable by the end-user. After literally decades of trying to add more and more features and not yet matching up to the software than ran on the machines the original browser was done on, they are slowly coming around to the idea that they should be *safely executing programs written by others*. It has only been in the last few years -- with Native Client in Chrome -- that really fast programs can be safely downloaded as executables without having to have permission of a SysAdmin. So another way to look at all this is to ask what such an OS really needs to have to allow all in the world to make their own media and have it used by others ... Cheers, Alan -- *From:* John Carlson yottz...@gmail.com *To:* Fundamentals of New Computing fonc@vpri.org *Sent:* Tuesday, February 12, 2013 9:00 PM *Subject:* [fonc] Design of web, POLs for rules. Fuzz testing nile Although I have read very little about the design of the web, things are starting to gel in my mind. At the lowest level lies the static or declarative part of the web. The html, dom, xml and json are the main languages used in the declarative part. Layered on top of this is the dynamic or procedural part of the web. Javascript and xslt are the main languages in the procedural part. The final level is the constraints or rule based part of the web, normally called stylesheets. The languages in the rule based web are css1, 2, 3 and xsl. Jquery provides a way to apply operations in this arena. I am excluding popular server side languages...too many. What I am wondering is what is the best way to incorporate rules into a language. Vrml has routes. Uml has ocl. Is avoiding if statements and for/while loops the goal of rules languages--that syntax? That is, do a query or find, and apply the operations or rules to all returned values. Now, if I wanted to apply probabilistic or fuzzy rules to the dom, that seems fairly straightforward. Fuzz testing does this moderately well. Has there been attempts at better fuzz testing? Fuzz about fuzz? Or is brute force best? We've also seen probablistic parser generators, correct? But what about probablistic rules? Can we design an ultimate website w/o a designer? Can we use statistics to create a great solitaire player--i have a pretty good stochastic solitaire player for one version of solitaire...how about others? How does one create a great set of rules? One can create great rule POLs, but where are the authors? Something like cameron browne's thesis seems great for grid games. He is quite prolific. Can we apply the same logic to card games? Web sites? We have The Nature of Order by c. Alexander. Are there nile designers or fuzz testers/genetic algorithms for nile? Is fuzz testing a by product of nile design...should it be? If you want to check out the state of the art for dungeons and dragons POLs check out fantasy grounds...xml hell. We can do better. ___ 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] Naive question
Hi All-- Just wanted to say that there is some cross-over here to electronic bus systems, and the related Producer-Consumer paradigm (PC). Some bus systems broadcast all messages to all connected nodes, ie they are unaddressed. In particular Bosch's CAN bus, used in cars, trucks, industry, and science, was designed this way. While each message (frame) has a header and body, and the header is used to select messages of interest, as originally designed the header did *not* contain a destination address, but rather a bit-pattern which each connected node can choose to accept. This is very flexible, and can be used in various ways. The Producer-Consumer paradigm broadcasts Events from one or more Producers to zero or more Consumers. A Producer sends an Event on on state *change*. Rather than using a bit-encoded meaning, it uses an arbitrary number (set of bits) to represent that meaning. The meaning of the message is the sum total of the originating change and the resultant actions as a response to the Event. Neither the Producers nor Consumers are aware of each others activities. We are adapting both of the above for use in model railroading. An example of an Event might be Evening is falling. The sending of such an event might be triggered by a button-press, a clock, or software (each an independent Producer). Similarly, the resultant actions might be: a change in the train schedule, house and lights coming on, changed traffic signal operation, dimming of the room lights, etc. Again, each of these are independent from each other. The similarities to publish and subscribe are striking, although there is no central control. Obviously braodacasting every message to every connected node is not scalable, so, we are also implementing an interest-based routing of messages onto only those bus-segments, which have nodes interested n a particular message, to reduce traffic. While the lower-level firmware and hardware are relatively fixed, the upper protocols and software start looking a lot like Fonc concepts. The upper layer protocols are quite independent, and they could easily be relabeled as domain-specific-languages. This just makes me think that this group is on the right track, and the software/hardware fraternities aren't that far apart. David OpenLCB.org On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: Hi Benoit This is basically what publish and subscribe schemes are all about. Linda is a simple coordination protocol for organizing such loose couplings. There are sketches of such mechanisms in most of the STEPS reports Spreadsheets are simple versions of this The Playground language for the Vivarium project was set up like this For real scaling, one would like to move to more general semantic descriptions of what is needed and what is supplied ... Cheers, Alan -- *From:* Benoît Fleury benoit.fle...@gmail.com *To:* Fundamentals of New Computing fonc@vpri.org *Sent:* Monday, March 19, 2012 1:10 PM *Subject:* [fonc] Naive question Hi, I was wondering if there is any language out there that lets you describe the behavior of an object as a grammar. An object would receive a stream of events. The rules of the grammar describe the sequence of events the object can respond to. The semantic actions inside these rules can change the internal state of the object or emit other events. We don't want the objects to send message to each other. A bus-like structure would collect events and dispatch them to all interested objects. To avoid pushing an event to all objects, the bus would ask first to all objects what kind of event they're waiting for. These events are the possible alternatives in the object's grammar based on the current internal state of the object. It's different from object-oriented programming since objects don't talk directly to each other. A few questions the come up when thinking about this: - do we want backtracking? probably not, if the semantic actions are different, it might be awkward or impossible to undo them. If the semantic actions are the same in the grammar, we might want to do some factoring to remove repeated semantic actions. - how to represent time? Do all objects need to share the same clock? Do we have to send tick events to all objects? - should we allow the parallel execution of multiple scenarios for the same object? What does it make more complex in the design of the object's behavior? What does it make simpler? If we assume an object receive a tick event to represent time, and using a syntax similar to ometa, we could write a simplistic behavior of an ant this way: # the ant find food when there is a food event raised and the ant's position is in the area of the food # food indicates an event of type food, the question mark starts a semantic predicate findFood= food ?(this.position.inRect(food.area)) # similar rule to find the
Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA
Alan --- I appreciate both you explanation and what you are doing. Of course jealousy comes into it, because you guys appear to be having a lot of fun mixed in with your hard work, and I would love to part of that. I know where I would be breaking down the doors if I was starting a masters or doctorate. However, I have made my choices, a long time ago, and so will have live vicariously through your reports. The constraint system, a la Sketchpad, is a laudable experiment and I would love to see a hand-constructible DBjr. You seem to be approaching a much more understandable and malleable system, and achieving more of the promise of computers as imagined in the sixties and seventies, rather than what seems to be the more mundane and opaque conglomerate that is generally the case now. Keep up the excellent work, David On Monday, February 27, 2012, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: Hi Julian I should probably comment on this, since it seems that the STEPS reports haven't made it clear enough. STEPS is a science experiment not an engineering project. It is not at all about making and distributing an operating system etc., but about trying to investigate the tradeoffs between problem oriented languages that are highly fitted to problem spaces vs. what it takes to design them, learn them, make them, integrate them, add pragmatics, etc. Part of the process is trying many variations in interesting (or annoying) areas. Some of these have been rather standalone, and some have had some integration from the start. As mentioned in the reports, we made Frank -- tacking together some of the POLs that were done as satellites -- to try to get a better handle on what an integration language might be like that is much better than the current use of Squeak. It has been very helpful to get something that is evocative of the whole system working in a practical enough matter to use it (instead of PPT etc) to give talks that involve dynamic demos. We got some good ideas from this. But this project is really about following our noses, partly via getting interested in one facet or another (since there are really too many for just a few people to cover all of them). For example, we've been thinking for some time that the pretty workable DBjr system that is used for visible things - documents, UI, etc. -- should be almost constructable by hand if we had a better constraint system. This would be the third working DBjr made by us ... And -- this year is the 50th anniversary of Sketchpad, which has also got us re-thinking about some favorite old topics, etc. This has led us to start putting constraint engines into STEPS, thinking about how to automatically organize various solvers, what kinds of POLs would be nice to make constraint systems with, UIs for same, and so forth. Intellectually this is kind of interesting because there are important overlaps between the functions + time stamps approach of many of our POLs and with constraints and solvers. This looks very fruitful at this point! As you said at the end of your email: this is not an engineering project, but a series of experiments. One thought we had about this list is that it might lead others to conduct similar experiments. Just to pick one example: Reuben Thomas' thesis Mite (ca 2000) has many good ideas that apply here. To quote from the opening: Mite is a virtual machine intended to provide fast language and machine-neutral just-in-time translation of binary-portable object code into high quality native code, with a formal foundation. So one interesting project could be to try going from Nile down to a CPU via Mite. Nile is described in OMeta, so this could be a graceful transition, etc. In any case, we spend most of our time trying to come up with ideas that might be powerful for systems design and ways to implement them. We occasionally write a paper or an NSF report. We sometimes put out code so people can see what we are doing. But what we will put out at the end of this period will be very different -- especially in the center -- that what we did for the center last year. Cheers and best wishes, Alan From: Julian Leviston jul...@leviston.net To: Fundamentals of New Computing fonc@vpri.org Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2012 6:48 PM Subject: Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA As I understand it, Frank is an experiment that is an extended version of DBJr that sits atop lesserphic, which sits atop gezira which sits atop nile, which sits atop maru all of which which utilise ometa and the worlds idea. If you look at the http://vpri.org/html/writings.php page you can see a pattern of progression that has emerged to the point where Frank exists. From what I understand, maru is the finalisation of what began as pepsi and coke. Maru is a simple s-expression language, in the same way that pepsi and coke were. In fact, it looks to have the same syntax. Nothing is the layer underneath that is
Re: Terseness, precedence, deprogramming (was Re: [fonc] languages)
Alan- I expect you lost a few readers there. I have fond memories of APL on an IBM 360/145 with APL microcode support and Selectric terminals. David On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 7:13 PM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: Hi David I've always been very fond of APL also -- and a slightly better and more readable syntax could be devised these days now that things don't have to be squeezed onto an IBM Selectric golfball ... Cheers, Alan -- *From:* David Leibs david.le...@oracle.com *To:* Fundamentals of New Computing fonc@vpri.org *Sent:* Sun, June 5, 2011 7:06:55 PM *Subject:* Re: Terseness, precedence, deprogramming (was Re: [fonc] languages) I love APL! Learning APL is really all about learning the idioms and how to apply them. This takes quite a lot of training time. Doing this kind of training will change the way you think. Alan Perlis quote: A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. There is some old analysis out there that indicates that APL is naturally very parallel. Willhoft-1991 claimed that 94 of the 101 primitives operations in APL2 could be implemented in parallel and that 40-50% of APL code in real applications was naturally parallel. R. G. Willhoft, Parallel expression in the apl2 language, IBM Syst. J. 30 (1991), no. 4, 498–512. -David Leibs ___ 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] Alternative Web programming models?
Didn't this debate happen with windowing systems (eg X vs NeWS, dumb vs smart windows-server). David On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 7:30 AM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: Hi Cornelius There are lots of egregiously wrong things in the web design. Perhaps one of the simplest is that the browser folks have lacked the perspective to see that the browser is not like an application, but like an OS. i.e. what it really needs to do is to take in and run foreign code (including low level code) safely and coordinate outputs to the screen (Google is just starting to realize this with NaCl after much prodding and beating.) I think everyone can see the implications of these two perspectives and what they enable or block Cheers, Alan -- *From:* Cornelius Toole cornelius.to...@gmail.com *To:* Fundamentals of New Computing fonc@vpri.org *Sent:* Tue, May 31, 2011 7:16:20 AM *Subject:* Re: [fonc] Alternative Web programming models? Thanks Merik, I've read/watch the OOPSLA'97 keynote before, but hadn't seen the first video. I'm having problems with the first one(the talk at UIUC). Has anyone been able to watch past the first hour. I get up to the point where Alex speaks and it freezes. I've just recently read Roy Fielding's dissertation on the architecture of the Web. Two prominent features of web architecture are the (1) client-server hierarchical style and (2) the layering abstraction style. My take away from that is how all of abstraction layers of the web software stack get in the way of the applications that want to use the machine. Style 1 is counter to the notion of the 'no centers' principle and is very limiting when you consider different classes of applications that might involve many entities with ill-defined relationships. Style 2, provides for separation of concerns and supports integration with legacy systems, but incurs so much overhead in terms of structural complexity and performance. I think the stuff about web sockets and what was discussed in the Erlang interview that Micheal linked to in the 1st reply is relevant here. The web was designed for large grain interaction between entities, but many application domain problems don't map to that. Some people just want pipes or channels to exchange messages for fine-grained interactions, but the layer cake doesn't allow it. This is where you get the feeling that the architecture for rich web apps is no-architecture, just piling big stones atop one another. I think it would be very interesting for someone to take the same approach to networked-based application as Gezira did with graphics (or the STEP project in general) as far assessing what's needed in a modern Internet-scale hypermedia architecture. On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 4:53 PM, Merik Voswinkel a...@knoware.nl wrote: Dr Alan Kay addressed the html design a number of times in his lectures and keynotes. Here are two: [1] Alan Kay, How Complex is Personal Computing?. Normal Considered Harmful. October 22, 2009, Computer Science department at UIUC. http://media.cs.uiuc.edu/seminars/StateFarm-Kay-2009-10-22b.asx (also see http://www.smalltalk.org.br/movies/ ) [2] Alan Kay, The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet, October 7, 1997, OOPSLA'97 Keynote. Transcript http://blog.moryton.net/2007/12/computer-revolution-hasnt-happened-yet.html Video http://ftp.squeak.org/Media/AlanKay/Alan%20Kay%20at%20OOPSLA%201997%20-%20The%20computer%20revolution%20hasnt%20happened%20yet.avi (also see http://www.smalltalk.org.br/movies/ ) Merik On May 26, 2011, at 8:38 PM, Cornelius Toole wrote: All, A criticism by Dr. Kay, has really stuck with me. I can't remember the specific criticism and where it's from, but I recall it being about the how wrong the web programming model is. I imagine he was referring to how disjointed, resource inefficient it is and how it only exposes a fraction of the power and capability inherent in the average personal computer. So Alan, anyone else, what's wrong with the web programming mode and application architecture? What programming model would work for a global-scale hypermedia system? What prior research or commercial systems have any of these properties? The web is about the closest we've seen to a ubiquitous deployment platform for software, but the confluence of market forces and technical realities endanger that ubiquity because users want full power of their devices plus the availability of Internet connectivity. -Cornelius -- cornelius toole, jr. | ctoo...@tigers.lsu.edu | mobile: 601.212.3045 ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc -- cornelius toole, jr. | ctoo...@tigers.lsu.edu | mobile: 601.212.3045
Re: [fonc] Software and Motivation
Here is a very interesting 'cartoon' of what, in general, motivates people - certainly applicable to what you are talking about. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc David On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 3:30 PM, Casey Ransberger casey.obrie...@gmail.comwrote: I've been thinking a lot about why I like to code, and how that relates to the fact that I will program for money. The programming for money part isn't nearly as satisfying to me for some reason as some of the stuff I've been doing for free. I did the groundwork for a themes engine which went into Cuis 3.0. That was ultra-fulfilling, because I liked the feel of Cuis a lot better than that of mainline Squeak (the keyboard navigation is a lot better, there's a lot less stuff everywhere in the UI layer, etc) but I absolutely had to do *something* about the look, as it seemed trapped in the 80's everywhere except for the lovely antialiased fonts. So it was a bit like the nice feeling you get after redoing a deck and inviting some people to hang out on it. It got me thinking about an interview I saw on the tubes that Alan did on collective cognition, where he mentioned a list of human motivators that anthropologists had identified. Does anyone know where a list like that might be found? Maybe in a book or a research paper with a title like _? I decided it would be a fun experiment to ask the people on this list if they might share some of their own motives for making and studying software. What makes your inner programmer tick? ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
