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Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup

0=nulla

https://smorgasborg.artlung.co...

Scott was one of the many greedy people to profit from Stroustrup's clever industry cons! Read this revealing leaked interview (Invention of C++) from 1998 and learn the truth!

Sarcasm mode off...
Thanks Scott! You will be missed!

http://artlung.com/smorgasborg...

It seems to me that the new trend is to congregate on exclusive networks, like facebook.

That trend is not new. See AOL, Compuserve, and others going back to the dawn of the internet. Companies see the internet, and all the users, and realise that if only they could get all those netizens as their own exclusive customers, they'd make a mint. So they create some proprietary closed off system which, to be fair, does often fill an unmet (or poorly met) need, which people flock to.

What the companies don't entirely realise is that the most important part of internet's success is its openness; that the ability for anyone to talk to anyone else without the need for any specific intermediaries is the reason for the existence of all the applications which give the internet its value. The openness is the underlying reason that the customers are there. Eventually, other people will find a way to fill the need that that company fills. It might take a while, but it happens. Inevitably, it happens. The end result is less restrictive and cheaper than the original proprietary version, because it is more open.

So the proprietary company dies. Or, if it is very lucky, transforms itself into a player in the open market. And everything is open again.

Until a new company comes along with a new proprietary system to fill a new unmet need. And the cycle starts again...

(See also, In The Beginning Was The Command Line, chapter "The Technosphere", particularly: "Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that is too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below." and the paragraph on "temporal arbitrage" - keeping in mind that the essay is 12 years old now...)

Progress, in your sense of the word, means "making it easy for dumb people". Whereas progress in my sense of the word means "making dumb people unnecessary." So, maybe you should stop blaming everyone else and start realizing that it's you that's not good enough for Unix, not the other way around! Unix is perfect. The community is solid. We don't need any more designers! We don't need more bloggers! We need real creations, automations, and real code and that's just not point and click stuff. Sorry, go study it for another year and your opinion WILL change. We don't want you right now (but please come again). Pft, also, I'd say there's been some progress when there's around 10-20 million linux phones, 50+ million linux routers, and most of the people using them don't even know they're running linux.

Also, read a probably 20 year old but insightful essay, by Neal Stephenson, which will open your eyes to actual purpose of an operating system, which is a library of common functions. Which, by the way, the most extensive of which in existence is GNU stuff, which was wrought and given away for free, often copied for commercial purposes. Because they can't do better for money. Oracle, uh, that's a fork of ingres isn't it?

Really, Microsoft has done more than any other company I can think of to actually create new stuff from scratch. Too bad it all duplicates functionality that's been in Unix for EVER, and less completely. But it is mostly original. Unfortunately, we can never know for sure since it's...a trade secret. Luckly, as you'll read in that story above, Operating systems are useless without extensive documentation of the functions they provide to the developer (not the end user). Unfortunately the best documentation is the source code, so you can actually see what it does, not what some writer says it does. But, Microsoft is getting better, and learning. I hear they even have a new "Command Line Only" installer for Server 2008, because (who would have thought this, I'm sure you're surprised) there's apparently no real point to having a big GUI running on a web server. Turns out a command line "mess" is the most efficient way to manage it. Weird. But true.

Diagrammatic/Node-base programming is an idea that's been pushed as the future for a long time. I don't buy it. If it was going to work, it would be common place now, and it's not. Input method has nothing to do with it. The reason I think it never became common is that it only works in special cases. Believe it or not, I was once a nodal believer, about six years ago, and wrote a plug/node system (game middleware engine/editor thing) as a home project (with optional relative pointers so encapsulated node systems (as a node) could be copied to and from disk/memory easily). It's damn hard to do without adding lots of cost. It's harder to keep things clear. I would write a node system again in the right places, but it's not something that is ever going to replace text based programming. Try doing something large with an existing node/diagrammatic system and compare it with one done in a normal text based language. Your argument mirrors that GUIs are better than CLIs for everything, which I'm sure you don't believe either. Text is the simplest place computers and humans meet. Quite a good light read on this is http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml (In the Beginning There Was the Command Line)

It is early in HCI development, but it's not for nothing things have changed little since: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs

Right, enough, if you still believe this, that is your own problem. You'll have to take my keyboard from my cold dead hands!

In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed...

"Fuck it, we're evil," said Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls. "But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it's pretty and it's cool and it works. It's not like youâ(TM)ll go back to a Windows Mobile phone. Ha! Ha!"

It's foolish to have expected anything else. As Neal Stephenson put it in In The Beginning Was The Command Line:

THE NOT-SO-CHARITABLE EXPLANATION has to do with Apple's corporate culture, which is rooted in Bay Area Baby Boomdom.

Now, since I'm going to talk for a moment about culture, full disclosure is probably in order, to protect myself against allegations of conflict of interest and ethical turpitude: (1) Geographically I am a Seattleite, of a Saturnine temperament, and inclined to take a sour view of the Dionysian Bay Area, just as they tend to be annoyed and appalled by us. (2) Chronologically I am a post-Baby Boomer. I feel that way, at least, because I never experienced the fun and exciting parts of the whole Boomer scene--just spent a lot of time dutifully chuckling at Boomers' maddeningly pointless anecdotes about just how stoned they got on various occasions, and politely fielding their assertions about how great their music was. But even from this remove it was possible to glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as regularly as an urban legend was the one about how someone would move into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing flower children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably more sinister, ways.

Applying this to the case of Apple Computer will be left as an exercise for the reader, and not a very difficult exercise.

It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels?

It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them. It also raises the question of why Microsoft is so bad at PR, when the history of Apple demonstrates that, by writing large checks to good ad agencies, you can plant a corporate image in the minds of intelligent people that is completely at odds with reality. (The answer, for people who don't like Damoclean questions, is that since Microsoft has won the hearts and minds of the silent majority--the bourgeoisie--they don't give a damn about having a slick image, any more then Dick Nixon did. "I want to believe,"--the mantra that Fox Mulder has pinned to his office wall in The X-Files--applies in different ways to these two companies; Mac partisans want to believe in the image of Apple purveyed in those ads, and in the notion that Macs are somehow fundamentally different from other computers, while Windows people want to believe that they are getting something for their money, engaging in a respectable business transaction).

It's as applicable now as it was in the late 1990s. That bit of Apple's corporate culture is straight from Steve Jobs.

You ALMOST fooled me, but the "Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain your sanity" bit gave you away.

You might think twice about using C++ after reading this interview with Mr. Stroustrup.

...Here! :)

Why do people keep dismissing C++? http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/Invention_of_Cplusp lus.shtml

I couldn't possibly agree more.

Rome was not built in a day.

Language can only be acquired gradually, whether it be verbal or programmatic.

Start with the BASICs (pun fully intended) and work your way up, BUT NOT VB OR JAVA! Graphical controls and an intimidating IDE like Visual Studio will only scare the novice, and there is a good reason why printing "Hello World!" to the screen is the ubiquitous introduction to programming. Any modern-day beginning programmer really should read "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson, for a good primer.

Back when I was in diapers I taught myself BASIC by typing in code listings from computer magazines. By the time acne developed I felt ready to tackle OOP. 20 years later I'm as overworked as any, but I can actually say I like what I do.

I'd let him comment on my writing, too. Just because it would make me look great.

His writing is so abysmal that it just makes Stephenson look even smarter by comparison. I stopped after he turned the car dealer metaphor into a monkey metaphor.

Monkeys? Chauffering me around? Dude, I'm freaking out. Car dealers I get. Linux, OS X, BeOS and Microsoft, I get.

Chauffer monkeys? I don't get. Never had one, never want to have one. I don't even want to think about little blue-suit monkey-men driving me around. What kind of world do you live in??

I'm stuck now, because I want to go back and re-read the original, but I can't take more of the monkeys. Google gave me this link: perhaps you all will appreciate it as well. Original Command Line essay without the monkeys.

Especially your last paragraph: 'Granted CLI is nice and powerful. When I used a UNIX machine more intensively, I liked CLI. But when I stopped using UNIX intensively (dropped below 5 hrs per week of Unix use), I found that I quickly forgot all the commands and spent most of my time grepping man pages. CLI is mega keen and faster if you're doing batch file transfer, but for single file transfer, I can drag and drop faster than I can try and remember and then type the correct command, path, and file name.

The bottom line is I want to "use" my computer, not "learn" my computer. Although *nix requires you learn before using, some OSes don't have such a steep learning curve. What I like is Bill Joy's statement in a recent wired article about Linux vs. Mac -- he chooses the Mac because it "just works."'

is what Stephenson concludes too, and basicly what the whole essay is about.

I agree with your comments about the Diamond Age. Neal Stephenson is insightful and fun to read to boot. A non fiction work of his, In the beginning there was the CLI is available online ;) A good read, and pertinent to the discussion of tanks and Ferrari's.

I've personally seen the demand for handmade objects over machine made ones. I hand make custom knives and swords, and even as a nameless competitor I can command significantly more for a knife than you would typically see in a store.

A friend of mine up in Seattle sells machine made swords fabricated by a former Boeing machinist by the name of Angus Trim.. You can see his work here All Saints Blades. Very nice stuff, and in my opinion some of the best machine made swords out there. These swords run about 350-550$, with some aftermarket customization that might take them up towards 750$.

When you look toward the finer hand made blades, you'll notice a steep step in price. Check out this rapier by Kevin Cashen, an American Bladesmith's Society mastersmith. IIRC, this went for about 3000$, and would probably be more now.

And for those of you who are fond of Katana (c'mon, Fanboy, I know you're out there), look at Howard Clark's work Here. Also an ABS mastersmith, Howard makes katana's that can bend a into a full U before seriously warping.. An article documenting that, and Howard's swords is at the Swordforum. In addition to the suffering that the blade alone would set you back (about $3K), a fully polished and mounted blade would run you upwards of 6000$.

Of course, you can get hand made swords for cheaper, but they are going to be made in China, or else where under dubious working conditions (smithing is tough enough work, even when you get paid what you should for it), and not of the same level of craftsmanship. You can take a look and see what I mean.

The demand for hand made goods is all ready rising, and I predict that this trend will grow as more of the goods and services are provided to us by machines.

er, some of best sci fi is actually reality now, so finding a fantastical story that has the *just right* blend of reality and future social implications seems that much harder.

the command line by Neal Stephenson is a nice example. You might want to print it out, its long.

For anyone who has not read Neal Stephenson, In The Beginning Was The Command Line is an essay he wrote dealing with the evolution of the UI from the command line to windows based. It is a funny and interesting rant on how the graphical widgets we use today have softened us.

You may not use the Software in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia or their products of services, infringe any intellectual property or other rights of these parties, violate any state, federal, or international law, or promote racism, hatred or pornography.
source: mspur.pdf found via google by way of ev and infoworld.

I feel all smart 'cause I scooped /.

This will never happen without a major philosophy change at MS. Right now, for better or worse, MS views their proprietary OS as the keystone in their monopoly^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H dominant market position. Neal Stephenson talkes about this in his essay In the beginning was the command line (also available in dead tree format

-y