Re: [fonc] Richard Gabriel Guy Steele, 50 in 50 talk
On 6/24/2011 9:07 PM, Julian Leviston wrote: On 24/06/2011, at 11:42 PM, Bert Freudenberg wrote: They gave that presentation more than once (I saw it a OOPSLA). Awesome :) Here's a version from JAOO'08, streams fine in Germany: http://blog.jaoo.dk/2008/11/21/art-and-code-obscure-or-beautiful-code/ - Bert - I actually thought the presentation was terrible, not very accessible and incredibly cliquey... it was so referential that you had to almost have lived through the things they were talking about to get whatever it was they were talking about - sort of self-defeating if they were aiming at instruction, which their last few words would indicate. sadly, I will mostly have to agree... actually, not only were many of the languages they were presenting from the 60s and 70s, but also their presentation style seems to be borrowing a lot from that time-frame. so, a lot of it seemed a bit, tacky... sadly, it could have been a fairly interesting topic apart matters of presentation. going a bit OT here... more so from the POV of someone who did not yet exist when this stuff was going on. I don't have much nostalgia for pastel or old-style music... maybe I might have nostalgia for NiN and Marilyn Manson, because I remember them and was around when they were new (then again, my parents were also big into NiN and Manson as well). meanwhile, there is older music (Metallica, Judas Priest, ...) which my parents liked (since they were around when these were still new, and I guess they were rather into metal when they were younger, and I guess they generally despised the hippies and hippie music). however, I don't as much relate to these either. mostly I am left listening to Trance and House. in the past I did listen to a lot of Goth and Industrial, but a lot of times it clashed with my religious sensibilities, creating internal conflict. many people (who hold religious beliefs) generally also like country-western, but I just don't really like this style and see little reason for why it would be any better than, say, House (although... a hybrid could be interesting... say combining C/W cliches with a house-style back-beat...) not that it would necessarily not suck though... past decades sometimes seem rather strange though... also, past decades seem like they probably rather sucked as well, since most things people currently often take for granted were not around. for example, for nearly my whole life (that I am generally able to remember at least) there has been desktop PCs and the internet. a world without them seems like it would probably rather suck... but then again, I have seen the world change over time: the rise of faster and better internet (I remember dial-up...); laptops going from being a novelty to being common; the rise of WiFi; games transitioning from being relatively simple (low detail worlds and sprite graphics) to being much more graphically detailed; computers get faster (technically), and at the same time, slower (in the sense of being responsive and completing operations in a timely manner); ... and, meanwhile, I sit around being torn between the past and the future. or such... ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Richard Gabriel Guy Steele, 50 in 50 talk
I concur. It was mildly entertaining at points, but mostly I kept hoping they would speed up the pace while slowing down the camera switching. Since some smart people recommended it, I kept plugging away. I got a bit over half way before bailing. Cheers, Bob On 6/25/11 12:07 AM, Julian Leviston wrote: On 24/06/2011, at 11:42 PM, Bert Freudenberg wrote: They gave that presentation more than once (I saw it a OOPSLA). Awesome :) Here's a version from JAOO'08, streams fine in Germany: http://blog.jaoo.dk/2008/11/21/art-and-code-obscure-or-beautiful-code/ - Bert - I actually thought the presentation was terrible, not very accessible and incredibly cliquey... it was so referential that you had to almost have lived through the things they were talking about to get whatever it was they were talking about - sort of self-defeating if they were aiming at instruction, which their last few words would indicate. ___ 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] Richard Gabriel Guy Steele, 50 in 50 talk
On 6/25/2011 3:27 AM, Bob Arning wrote: I concur. It was mildly entertaining at points, but mostly I kept hoping they would speed up the pace while slowing down the camera switching. Since some smart people recommended it, I kept plugging away. I got a bit over half way before bailing. I found the pseudo-Shakespeare skit kind of annoying... also, I am more a fan of potentially useful languages, rather than esoteric/joke languages. they seemed to be focusing a lot on esoteric and joke languages though, and not so much on more practical languages. but, the thing is that, often, the more a language moves towards being practical and useful, the more it will likely tend to resemble more mainstream languages. which I suspect more work through a sort of long-term distilation/refinement process, where useful features tend to be added eventually, and non-useful features tend to be dropped, leading to incremental improvement. although, it is possible that a very useful language could appear which is also very unconventional, but in a general sense this is unlikely, and it is unlikely to emerge from a joke language. a partial exception though is character-driven finite-state-machines, which are fairly useful for implementing special-purpose logic (one has a small task-specific interpreter, and writes the control logic in terms of ASCII strings, where there is no real separation between source and bytecode). my assembler and some of my lower-level VM machinery is implemented this way. I have also used languages similar to the above in personal tests involving genetic programming, but have yet to find any practical use for it (GP is generally far too slow and limited IME to really be directly useful for all that much...). the advantage though of using ASCII strings though is that most mutations can then be string operations (generally with pairs of strings, usually swapping characters between them, randomly inserting or removing characters, ...). usually, the string interpreter is for a simplistic stack-machine. IIRC, a few may have supported callable blocks as well, ... or such... ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Richard Gabriel Guy Steele, 50 in 50 talk
On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 6:00 AM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: ... the more a language moves towards being practical and useful, the more it will likely tend to resemble more mainstream languages. which I suspect more work through a sort of long-term distilation/refinement process, where useful features tend to be added eventually, and non-useful features tend to be dropped, leading to incremental improvement. The fact that successful languages tends to resemble each other is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the things I enjoyed about the presentation was the reminder of the potential diversity in both meaning and mode of expression in computer languages. A healthy amount of diversity makes an eco-system more resilient. It seems to me that we were, until the last few years, converging on a dangerously unstable mono-culture of languages. I'm encouraged to see that we may be heading into a new period of expansion and experimentation, which I expect will eventually lead to another period of consolidation, as the cycle proceeds. Richard Gabriel had some interesting things to say about this http://dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternOfLanguageEvolution.pdf ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
[fonc] Eternal computing
I've been thinking about eternal computing not so much in the context of software, but more from a cultural level. Software ultimately runs on some underlying physical computing machine, and physical machines are always changing. If you want a program to run for a long time, the software needs to be flexible enough to move from host to host without losing its state. That's more of a requirements statement than an insight, and it's not a particularly steep hurdle (given some expectation of down time), so I'll leave it at that for now. I recently stumbled across the work of Quinlan Terry, whom I had never heard of until I did a search for an inscription in a print that caught my eye. I found this essay helps capture what makes him different from most people designing buildings today: http://www.qftarchitects.com/essays/sevenmisunderstandings.php I don't make any claims that these observations have anything do with software, except in a more general sense of the cultural values that influence design. I suppose the pitfalls of trivializing something because it seems familiar applies to software as well as any other design discipline. We have an engineering culture that pursues change at an ever increasing rate. The loss of eternal values in physical architecture is sad indeed, especially in the context of urban sprawl and the now rampant deterioration of buildings that were built a generation ago, to last only a single generation. The ongoing global financial mess is arguably a result of short-term thinking. Economics matters. One of the intriguing facets of computing is the incredible amount of money the industry generates and consumes. And nowhere is short-term thinking more generously rewarded than in the continual churn of new computing devices and software. Personally I find it overwhelming and I have been trying to keep up for 30 years. Clearly it's not slowing down. I think there's a good reason for the ever-increasing rate of change in computer technology, and that it is the nature of computation itself. Seth Lloyd has a very interesting perspective on revolutions in information processing: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lloyd06/lloyd06_index.html If you consider that life itself is computational in nature (not a big leap given what we know about DNA), it's instructive to think about the amount of energy most organisms expend on the activities surrounding sexual reproduction. As our abilities to perform artificial computations increase, it seems that more and more of our economic life will be driven by computing activities. Computation is an essential part of what we are. In this context, I wonder what to make of the 10,000 year clock: http://www.1yearclock.net/learnmore.html First, I'm skeptical that something made of metal will last 10,000 years. But suppose it would be possible to build a clock that lasts that long. If in a fraction of a second I have a device that can execute billions of instructions, what advantage does stone-age (or iron-age) technology offer beyond longevity? I think the key advantage is that no computation takes place in isolation. Every time you calculate a result, the contextual assumptions that held at the start of that calculation have changed. Other computations by other devices may have obviated your result or provided you with new inputs that can allow you to continue processing. Which means running for a long time is no longer a simple matter of saving your state and jumping to a new host, since all the other hosts that you are interacting with have made assumptions about you too. It starts to look like a model of life, where the best way to free up resources is to allow obsolete hosts to die, so that new generations can continue once they've learned everything their parents can teach them. So instead of a model of computation based around industrial metaphors from the 19th century (with registers and stores) we need to recognize that computer science is more than an engineering discipline. That should be apparent by now, given the extent to which almost all human endeavors now depend on computers, but there's something more important. We often see people lamenting the fact that software development isn't more like engineering, where there are blueprints and top-down design processes that can produce predictable results with realistic cost estimates. Instead, we should understand that software is different because it is fundamental. Software serves industry, but at the same time, it has a profound impact on the way our social organizations are constructed. Over time, the computational abilities of organizations will move to where we can lead them with software. The challenge is to build upon new metaphors that are not unduly constrained by the assumptions of the past. Cheers, Steve ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Richard Gabriel Guy Steele, 50 in 50 talk
On 2011-06-25, at 3:27 AM, Bob Arning wrote: I concur. It was mildly entertaining at points, but mostly I kept hoping they would speed up the pace while slowing down the camera switching. Since some smart people recommended it, I kept plugging away. I got a bit over half way before bailing. You got further than I did. I've seen them do something similar live at OOPSLA, although that was a debate about OO (and it suffered from Gabriel having a bad cold at the time). This was unbearable, though, in pacing, in presentation, and what little detectable content there was. The whole we're each going to present 50 statements of exactly 50 words seems like it would only result in something stilted and forced, and why should we care? Is that the most important thing about your presentation (I guess so, since that's the title). It's too bad, since both these men are capable of giving great presentations and have inspiring ideas. And it is important to try new things--they don't all have to succeed. This one didn't, at least from my perspective. Nothing wrong with that, but I don't really get why it is so recommended. --Dethe Cheers, Bob On 6/25/11 12:07 AM, Julian Leviston wrote: On 24/06/2011, at 11:42 PM, Bert Freudenberg wrote: They gave that presentation more than once (I saw it a OOPSLA). Awesome :) Here's a version from JAOO'08, streams fine in Germany: http://blog.jaoo.dk/2008/11/21/art-and-code-obscure-or-beautiful-code/ - Bert - I actually thought the presentation was terrible, not very accessible and incredibly cliquey... it was so referential that you had to almost have lived through the things they were talking about to get whatever it was they were talking about - sort of self-defeating if they were aiming at instruction, which their last few words would indicate. ___ 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
