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This very well-written article on the same subject appeared last friday on FEED. The author reports from Hong Kong.

No, that's not true except in a trivial sense. A programming language is not an interface, it it rather a framework and a set of tools for structuring the problem and the solution. That's a very big difference and probably the one that confused Tog.

The distinction isn't so large. Programming languages have several functions. One of them is communicating ideas between one programmer and another. Another is to provide an interface between the human programmer and the computer; it is an interface with (one hopes) considerably greater flexibility than a typical user language, but it is an interface nonetheless.

Would you consider bash a user interface? Of course: it is a command shell, one of the earliest forms of HCI. It is also a programming language. The existence of LISP shells and read/eval/print "interactive programming" environments only makes the commonality between interfaces and languages more apparent. As another example, I challenge you to design a good Web search engine that does not employ some form of query language as an interface.

GUIs are simply an visual/gestural interactive language. People have even worked on "visual" programming languages whose syntax consists of pictures rather than text streams (though they are usually awful).

The distinction between "human interface" and "programming language" is so blurry as to be meaningless. That people regard them as vastly separate realms testifies only to the mental inflexibility (and historical shortsightedness) of most visually oriented designers. Interface thinkers like Stephen Johnson, who (IMHO) has many more interesting things to say about interfaces than Tognazzini, have often pointed out that languages can be an interface. The point and grunt religion, however, has not paid attention.

~k.lee

See Feed Mag for a send up of this very topic. It's set in 2004 and Amazon is still around, but it's selling shelter and berries.

What, then, is the Slashdot community?

It's a handful of funny trolls and a handful of informative coders, sitting atop a vast shitheap of yammering idiots.


Are the various forums and communities that exist all over the Internet totally devoid of intelligentsia?

Well . . . yes. They are. I spent some time subscribed to the Thomas Pynchon listserv this Fall. What a waste of bandwidth. And the net goes downhill from there, the only exceptions being Suck and McSweeney's. Feed has its moments too, I guess. But none of those is a "community" in any sense at all. Hey, wait, there's Neal Stephenson, too; IMHO he's ahead even of the Sucksters in the "internet intellectual" game. He's a thoughtful, intelligent person who groks the damn subject well enough to illuminate it. Jon Katz is endlessly amusing and I think he's a perfect fit for Slashdot, but he's not thoughtful, he's not intelligent, and he sure as hell doesn't grok anything, least of all technology.


I was under the impression that before this 'new economy' came a whole new brand of intelligentsia - the self-teaching, self-enhancing swag of techno-brutes that have been lifting themselves out of the muck of obscurity with the tools of the Internet and creating whole new social spheres, which subsequently resulted in entirely different modes of online economy.

They teach themselves Perl and enhance their t-shirt collections. This has nothing to do with an "intelligentsia". I'm hoping that you're using "economy" in some figurative sense, 'cause if you're not, you've missed the point more thoroughly than I care to contemplate. It's really not about making a quick buck at all. Crack dealers do that. BFD. If you're coming from a hard-core libertarian perspective, that would explain a lot: That viewpoint is fundamentally hostile to intellectualism, and answers all questions with the word "money". Hey, it's a free country, YMMV, it takes all kinds, etc. No problem. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just a very profoundly different thing.


am I missing something here or is Bruce waxing poetic and I'm just being too literal?

Yer waxin' a bit poetic there yourself, my friend :) You're not being literal, he is. He's talking about a phenomenon that hasn't existed in the US for the last few decades, that's all. It's nothing most Americans have ever encountered, at least not since the lad in my .sig shuffled off.

FEED magazine had an article (one of their Deep Read features) some time ago on this very subject. The article addressed the contention that tragedy as a persuasive literary form has been eliminated from modern day literature (everything since Shakespeare's King Lear) due to the influence of technology. One definition of Tragedy, according to the literary types who study this stuff for a living, is at its core related to deistic beliefs: In tragedy God's (perhaps uncaring) shadow falls over Man - the results are tragic. The Greeks celebrated the tragic form in theater, King Lear, according to some, is the last great triumph for tragedy. Technology's obvious role, according to this line of reasoning, is the diminuation of deistic beliefs and the belief that God(s) do(es) not influence our daily lives. This has been an open source of contention between technologists/scientists and the Church(es) since before the days of Gallileo (though he is a famous example).

Following this line of reasoning, one can argue that today, tragedy has been reduced to bumper sticker slogans like "shit happens" rather than King Lear's, "Like flies to wanton boy are we to the Gods. They kill us for their sport." One can argue that this change in world view is due to a coarsening of the level discourse in society, but in my view its really a reflection of influence of technology and science on the worldview of mankind.

Is this a loss for mankind? I dunno. I don't feel a personal sense of loss and I think there's plenty of tragedy that needn't involve God. But perhaps the flavor of modern day tragedy is different than that of King Lear or Oedipus. Perhaps our view of the universe as an essentially stochastic process alters (harms?) what lies at the core of our humanity.

What we need is not more people like Edison but more like those whom few people have ever heard of -- Cox, Dijkstra, Hoare, Knuth, McCarthy, Stallman, Torvalds, Wirth. Edison was a technologival pop star and prototype for Bill Gates according to this essay.

Feed Magazine has a great column about the end of MST3K and its cultural significance. You can find it here.

Feed Magazine has a great column about the end of MST3K and its cultural significance. You can find it here.

His attitude is a typical media-elite mocking dismissal of the numbing-down of what's socially acceptable. GnrcMan's comments about the Childhood Action Project's review also smack of politically correct "what's the big deal?" posturing. And replies to GnrcMan's comments reinforce the "what a funny, harmless movie" lock-step opinion. But words and images have consequences. A tragic example of that is the story on the Reuters wire yesterday about a 7-year-old boy killing his 3-year-old brother by copying a move he saw in televised pro wrestling.

I have no desire to see the movie. I can't even sit through the TV show. I never made it through an episode of Beavis & Butthead, either. Heh, heh, heh. Click. I seem to be one of the rare Slashdotters who sympathizes with Childhood Action Project (CAP), though, ( I'm a Christian raising two sons with my stay-at-home wife) so into the fray I go...

CAP is trying to quantify their analysis of the film. They offer their reviews as a tool for parents like me so I can decide which movies we'd like to take our family to see. (I'm not alone, BTW. Financial analysis shows that R-rated movies make less money than G, PG, or PG-13. Nowadays, Hollywood has to make R- and NC-17-rated movies to puff themselves up and say they've created "art." Of course, occasionally those ratings merely serve to attempt to make up for bad writing with less-than-mass-appeal shock value, too.) CAP makes subjective measures of Wanton Violence/Crime, Impudence/Hate, Sex/Homosexuality, Drugs/Alcohol, Offense to God, and Murder/Suicide. Sure, such metrics look like foolishness to the so-called "modern" worldview. In Katz' world, Wanton Violence/Crime and Murder/Suicide are harmless unless they happen in RL; Impudence/Hate is lauded as long as it's targeted at people of faith or anyone with conventional authority; Sex/Homosexuality and Drugs/Alcohol -- the more the better; and Offense to God -- well, he's dead, so he's an easy target.

Am I a repressed fanatic because I do my best to keep my kids innocent and to teach them what I know to be the truth? Hardly. It's my job as a parent to raise them with the values that I believe will serve them best. Do I teach my kids the value of free speech? Certainly, but freedom comes with responsibility.

Those values, BTW, do include tolerance. Intolerant Christians need to be confronted with Jesus' own central teachings -- he freely associated with the outcasts of society while he sharply condemned religious self-righteousness and hypocrisy. But Jesus taught tolerance in the context of having a personal, obedient relationship with God, denying our self-centered nature, and loving -- that's agape (look up the meaning of the Greek) -- one another. Such ideals can hardly be understood by a culture that doesn't even believe in God, celebrates selfishness and self-absorption, and lusts after one another without ever knowing what the word agape means.

My kids will have plenty of opportunities as teenagers to rebel against my values and choose for themselves. But it's still my job as a parent to show them where I stand on moral issues and to teach them responsibility.

Katz declares that, instead of being a comedy, South Park is actually a sharp, political film that exposes the self-righteousness and hypocrisy of the so-called "Morality Industry." It's a sad, sad thing that people fall short of perfection. The only perfect man got nailed to a cross for his trouble. But careless critics confuse the Perfect Message with imperfect followers. Let anyone hold up a standard for (conventional) morality, and today he or she is denounced as an intolerant, self-righteous hypocrite.

As I once heard Ravi Zacharias say, "Before you tear down fences, be careful that you know why they were put up in the first place." Ethics and morals -- whether they are based on examples set by Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, old, dead Greek philosophers, or Bill Clinton -- exist to draw boundaries for social behavior. South Park, it seems, wants to show what it's like without bondaries. And ... Parker and Stone want to show me this because ...?

The Apostle Paul sums it up: "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things." ( Philipians 4:8)

As has also been said, "If you swim in the sewer, you're bound to get dirty."

One final comment -- if you think hackers can't be Christians, what is to be done with Larry Wall?

Davis also had an excellent piece in Feed on Star Wars.

See: LARRY WALL Divine Invention Author Erik Davis talks to Perl creator Larry Wall http://www.feedmag.com/re/re172_master.ht ml Larry explains it all. Go Brother Larry! -Peace

(Remember a song, "Me and my Arrow", used many years ago in a car commercial? It was from a film called "The Point," which takes place in the Land of Point.

If only it wasn't Windoze-only! ... well, I know my C and my XLib, I should write something similar.... and form an Internet startup... and have a million-dollar IPO...

Does anyone know of any other sites with these people (or others of their ilk) discussing the underlying framework of the free software/open source communities?

FYI - there are other comments on the feedmag site that /.ers might find interesting.

bnf