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Yeah we all know microsoft spends absolutely no research dollars on UI and design..

Throwing money at a problem doesn't solve it any more than not having any money makes problems impossible to solve. Least of all design problems. Design and research are two very different things -- Paul Graham does a better job of pointing out the difference than I can in this space (especially when I'm responding to an AC.)

Of course every developer out there thinks they always know the best UI

You're right about this. However, I am not a developer with ideas about design. I'm a designer with ideas about design.

(when frankly they are so far out of touch with what is good for the common nontechnical joe it isn't even funny)

You, too, Mr. AC, are out of touch, as you're invoking the myth of the the "common nontechnical joe", as if his needs are vastly different [in design terms] as your own. If you design applications strictly for novices, then not only will it be useless to non-novices, but those novices will stay novices.

When designing interfaces for general use (like a desktop environment), it's a mistake to assume that you have to make things "idiot proof" or "friendly", for some foreign breed of person that is incapable of learning anything and has no desire to do anything with his computer than "browse the web and check email", unless you yourself are like that.

Microsoft probably doesn't have everything perfect when it comes to UI design, but it certainly doesn't "suck" either..

My problem is less with Microsoft's interfaces and more with the blind copying that goes on in OSS. If you copy something without understanding it first, it's probable that you will copy it's mistakes as well. My main point is that copying Windows has a high probability of producing an interface that sucks.

Paul Graham has written about Orbitz. I can't find the essay that I particularly remember and which provides more of a business context (better model blows away competitors' development/business cycles). But here's one with some technical details about what's behind Orbtiz and its success.

http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html

I've used them, and I found their product to do a very good job without getting in my way. And it did this several years ago, when competitors were still, in terms of a polished product, in diapers.

I don't know what's going on with the company these days, but the original founders (still there?) were anything but dumb. Makes me wonder what their real concerns are with regard to deep linking. When smart people act, you pay attention and ask why.

I fear Americans would continue to build Big n' Crappy houses. The reduction in price would mean Bigger n' Crappier houses. Paul Graham mentions this American school of design in his essay.

Maybe some would use the technique to make hobbit-like houses and so on. But we'd see a lot of 5-car garages.

First off, every language has its purpose, and just because some of these languages aren't as well designed as the author's languages, that's not a good enough excuse to bash them.

When someone like Alan Kay, with a very inventive and academic background, criticizes the workhorse stuff out in the "real world", he's pointing out where the ideas don't work, rather than the thing itself. Basically, he's thinking on another level than the one most of us are.

He's not really saying Java just sucks. He's Java sucks insofar as it was founded on some bad ideas. That doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't do real work in it. It just means that there are limits to what you can do with it. Someone like Alan Kay can't really get over this, which is part of what makes him a genius.

Paul Graham (who, of course, is a big fan of Lisp), has written quite a bit on language design. I think I would have reacted to this interview the same way you have had I not read The Hundred-Year Language, and others. I highly recommend them.

(Non-ANSI, but original) Lisp is a language that is implemented in itself in about half a letter page.

What's innovative about that ? It's a browser. People have done browsers
for a long time, and firefox didn't invent the web, nothing new. Sure Firefox has some nice bits here and there, by all means, but very innovative ? No.

Bittorrent, that's somewhat innovative.
So is perhaps the Speex codec.

In the somewhat same area
This
and that

are interresting reads :)

Wouldn't it be more productive to study ways to combat spam? From simple Bayesian techniques to graph theoretic methods? That would teach you a lot of theory and principles you could apply to other courses as well. Right now, it just sounds like they're just doing this for attention...

- sm

as previously reviewed on /., paul graham's book hackers & painters covers this topic.

i'm a coder and my wife is an artist, so we wage this debate on a semi-constant basis... i say code can be poetry.

as previously reviewed on /., paul graham's book hackers & painters covers this topic.

i'm a coder and my wife is an artist, so we wage this debate on a semi-constant basis... i say code can be poetry.

With respect, the new breed of statically typed functional languages do not begin to provide "essentially all of the things that made lisp great in the 60s." To understand why see Paul Graham's article on why programmer productivity is destroyed by requiring type declarations[1]. Even with a REPL, languages like Haskell screw the programmer by not allowing heterogenous lists by default. This requires the programmer to take time away from exploratory programming to do type declaration book keeping to placate the type-obsessed compiler.

[1]For example, it is a huge win in developing software to have an interactive toplevel, what in Lisp is called a read-eval-print loop. And when you have one this has real effects on the design of the language. It would not work well for a language where you have to declare variables before using them, for example. When you're just typing expressions into the toplevel, you want to be able to set x to some value and then start doing things to x. You don't want to have to declare the type of x first. You may dispute either of the premises, but if a language has to have a toplevel to be convenient, and mandatory type declarations are incompatible with a toplevel, then no language that makes type declarations mandatory could be convenient to program in.
- Paul Graham

"There are few things worse than close supervision by someone who doesn't understand what you're doing."

-- Paul Graham, What You'll Wish You'd Known.

Often the case on consulting projects when a client who lacks expertise wants to make design and development decisions that he's not qualified to do.

It's really you, is it? Thanks again for the 'Nerds' essay.

And yes, after I posted that I read Re: What You Can't Say and realized that I'd been trolled, that the essay was meant to have just that effect on me. Well played.

'Course, I could point you to the Bogdanov Affair to point out that physics is not without its fanatics and true believers. But we dorks have such a great big hard-on for physics (and to a lesser extend the other hard sciences) that we'd prefer not to think about that. Sure, the Bogdanov paper was published on a very edgy subject, in a jounral far from the mainstream. So was Sokal's. Neither invalidates the field it purports to criticize.

All the experience I can summon tells me that business majors got credit for learning to use MS Office, and WS majors got credit for reading books and stories, and writing essays expressing their opinions. (I did not have the opportunity to see what would happen if these opinions were anathema to our instructors.) But I'm a little wary of casting aspersions on the humanities as a whole. I think we dorks talk a lot of smack, and I don't feel that all of it is justified.

Fine arts, on the other hand, I'll agree is mostly postmodern crap that could have been done by a disinterested infant. They're like the venial Ayn Rand villains who make endless, offensively banal, incestuously self-referential crap and call it a great work. Irony has replaced sincerity, and art suffers. ('Course, commercial art---comics and the like---have gotten steadily better over the years. I never liked fine artists anyway.)

--grendel drago

There are few articles which have irreversably changed the way I think about society and society's expectations, and this is one of them. I thought it might be appropriate in this thread.
Why Pedophilia Isn't Bad (despite the domain name, this page is safe for work- it's all text).

Maybe it affected me so because I read it shortly after I read What You Can't Say by Paul Graham about taboos and convention.

This reminds me of the wonderful essay of Paul Graham, What You Can't Say (which could be easily transformed in What You Can't Watch).

Reading Paul Graham's excellent essay on what you need to know in highschool, I was left with an unanswered question. Teaching high school kids to look for difficult questions and choose challenging careerpaths is fine, but how do they cope with what is now an extrememly fickle job market? This is the real question I think.

It used to be simpler - companies valued talented people. Nowadays, companies value hot and cold-running talent - there's no concept of nurture, and this is largely due to the nature of capitalism.

As Adam Smith said, "capitalism is a financial workhorse, with blinkers to the past and future. It knows only now and sees only the present."

This has become our reality, and yes, it's ugly. You most likely won't program until retirement, you'll more likely be left out to graze in your early fifties to live off the state.

Is that a waste? Most definitely yes. But no-one ever said capitalism was an efficient workhorse.

hey did you read paul's book?...
hackers and painters goes over all the time management and drive and time/money and worth issues of small to large businesses

Graham writes, "I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about, and the opinion of the rest of the world barely affects me." So when he asked them what they wish someone had told them in high school, he was probably asking other people who have degrees from schools like Cornell and Harvard.

My guess? Most of these types don't want "more time to party and get wasted."

Paul G has a companion essay to this new one you've got to check out:

Why Nerds Are Unpopular

His old essay explains why high school sucks. This new one explains what you can do about it.

Beating the Averages by Paul Graham is a good start. What made Lisp different and On Lisp are also by Graham. Lastly, one from Franz Inc on domain specific languages on top of Lisp. Really, if you've never used Lisp and you want to create your own language, you're missing the boat.

Beating the Averages by Paul Graham is a good start. What made Lisp different and On Lisp are also by Graham. Lastly, one from Franz Inc on domain specific languages on top of Lisp. Really, if you've never used Lisp and you want to create your own language, you're missing the boat.

If you think that extensible programming languages aren't already here, then read On Lisp (some familiarity with Lisp is necessary).

Paul Graham's outstanding book On Lisp is what you want to read if this interests you at all. Indeed, pretty much anything he has written about Lisp is relevant. Lisp's macro system allows you to do this: you can define your own language constructs.

The book is out of print but can be downloaded from Paul's site,

http://paulgraham.com/onlisp.html.

XML is not God's Gift. XML has had delusions of grandeur pushed upon it. A nice simple representation has morphed into a horrible monster. Ugh.

Programmable programming languages? I'm sure it'll make the lisp-macro master Paul Graham smile.

Without getting into the argument whether he's right or no, I'd like to point out that the public outbreak that followed his comments is incredibly stupid, and completely unnecessary. Paul Graham has a very interesting article on this subject: What you can't say

To make sciences look cool, you need to fix the problem that causes nerds to be unpopular.

As if

I recommend to you "On Lisp". If you read it and still do not see the power of macros, then I do not know... ;)

http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

Ruby seems to be very Common Lisp-oriented but without parentheses and thus macros. This removes very much from it. Can you implement a new Object System with multiple inheritance in Ruby?

Please read this.

Hard workers can eventually solve a given problem. But what if the problem isn't given? That would describe most of Google's current projects, I'd imagine.

All the attention focused on who sends the spam and how, and from where it comes, leads nowhere.

Filtering, if you get really good at it, keeps your inbox fairly clean but does nothing about the huge volumes of spam flying around the Internet.

The only tactics that have hurt spammers are those that have increased the costs of the sponsoring Websites. The Lycos screen saver was delicious but failed because it depended on a central server and because a bunch of complete nitwits clucked and wrung their hands over the appropriateness or lack of same in hammering spamvertized Websites. Meanwhile spam continues and those same whiners do nothing meaningful about it.

The one controlling fact that seems to have escaped most of the discussion about spamfighting tactics is that almost all spam contains explicit invitations to visit sponsors' URLs. It's really that simple. If a sponsoring Website hires a spammer to send out millions of emails advertising the Website, the sponsor can't complain if millions of people accept the invitations and visit. Visitors to a Website have no obligation to buy anything.

Active spamfighting was first articulated in 2003 by Paul Graham in Filters That Fight Back. Graham is the person who popularized Bayesian filtering in 2002, about a year before he suggested that filters might actively punish the spamvertized sites they identify. To date no good tools have emerged for independent, distributed spamfighting of this type although many individuals have built scripts for using curl or wget to download files from spamvertized sites.

Until an open source, personal spamfighter is developed and released, the best way to fight back against spam is to use one of the Web-based "vampire" pages, either as maintained by someone else or customized to hit the sponsors of the spam you receive. They are called "vampires" because the suck bandwidth from the spamsites, thus increasing the costs of running spamvertized businesses.

• SpamVampire
• LadVampire downloads files from fake bank sites
• Spam Research Tool downloads files from current spamvertized sites

Any of the SpamVampire-type pages may be saved locally and modified. Once you have one of them running in your browser just right click and Save As to your desktop or other convenient place, then edit the list of sites/files at the end of the HTML page. The pages run just as well from your own hard drive as they do from servers.

Of course it's a pain in the butt to keep such an HTML page current, so there's something to be said for running someone else's updated page if it targets spamvertized sites of interest to you. LadVampire, for instance, targets fake bank sites that scam people out of millions. The Spam Research Tool is updated to target spamvertized sites and redirectors manually identified from spam received at its several hosted domains.

One of these days someone will build a bridge between the excellent URL de-obfuscation and identification contained in many of the filtering tools on the one hand and local spamsite downloaders like the SpamVampire genre. Then we'll be able to quickly and easily verify our own spamsite targets and pass the information to our own spammerhammers.

All the attention focused on who sends the spam and how, and from where it comes, leads nowhere.

Filtering, if you get really good at it, keeps your inbox fairly clean but does nothing about the huge volumes of spam flying around the Internet.

The only tactics that have hurt spammers are those that have increased the costs of the sponsoring Websites. The Lycos screen saver was delicious but failed because it depended on a central server and because a bunch of complete nitwits clucked and wrung their hands over the appropriateness or lack of same in hammering spamvertized Websites. Meanwhile spam continues and those same whiners do nothing meaningful about it.

The one controlling fact that seems to have escaped most of the discussion about spamfighting tactics is that almost all spam contains explicit invitations to visit sponsors' URLs. It's really that simple. If a sponsoring Website hires a spammer to send out millions of emails advertising the Website, the sponsor can't complain if millions of people accept the invitations and visit. Visitors to a Website have no obligation to buy anything.

Active spamfighting was first articulated in 2003 by Paul Graham in Filters That Fight Back. Graham is the person who popularized Bayesian filtering in 2002, about a year before he suggested that filters might actively punish the spamvertized sites they identify. To date no good tools have emerged for independent, distributed spamfighting of this type although many individuals have built scripts for using curl or wget to download files from spamvertized sites.

Until an open source, personal spamfighter is developed and released, the best way to fight back against spam is to use one of the Web-based "vampire" pages, either as maintained by someone else or customized to hit the sponsors of the spam you receive. They are called "vampires" because the suck bandwidth from the spamsites, thus increasing the costs of running spamvertized businesses.

• SpamVampire
• LadVampire downloads files from fake bank sites
• Spam Research Tool downloads files from current spamvertized sites

Any of the SpamVampire-type pages may be saved locally and modified. Once you have one of them running in your browser just right click and Save As to your desktop or other convenient place, then edit the list of sites/files at the end of the HTML page. The pages run just as well from your own hard drive as they do from servers.

Of course it's a pain in the butt to keep such an HTML page current, so there's something to be said for running someone else's updated page if it targets spamvertized sites of interest to you. LadVampire, for instance, targets fake bank sites that scam people out of millions. The Spam Research Tool is updated to target spamvertized sites and redirectors manually identified from spam received at its several hosted domains.

One of these days someone will build a bridge between the excellent URL de-obfuscation and identification contained in many of the filtering tools on the one hand and local spamsite downloaders like the SpamVampire genre. Then we'll be able to quickly and easily verify our own spamsite targets and pass the information to our own spammerhammers.

If there's anything I dislike more than Microsoft it's monoculture. Why do so many members of the GPL camp attempt to position the GPL as the monoculture of open source?

You can't simply slap a "monoculture" label on anything that's used predominantly or exclusively, and jump right to the conclusion that it's a bad thing.

Unicode seems pretty common these days. Is our Unicode monoculture bad?

All the computers I've used in the past 10 years or so have had 32-bit processors. Cripey, we've got a 32-bit CPU monoculture, too.

Binary is pretty popular for computers. All my computers use it. Entire computer companies are built on this "binary monoculture". Horrible design, huh? Our systems are doomed, doomed, doomed.

It's fun to label things on slashdot -- "monoculture", "GPL camp", "standards", "side of the fence" -- but it's hardly productive, or promoting actual thought.

Features are objective, what interfaces you like or don't like on the other hand seems to be very subjective.

Features are objective, what interfaces you like or don't like on the other hand seems to be very subjective.

We have folks suggesting Macs.

We have folks suggesting that you make your own, and you could have for example a wooden computer that looks like 1970s DIY crap, or a plastic case with lights and a window.

We have folks suggesting enthusiast cases, like AlienWare, Lian-li's aluminum behemoth, or "the shark", which looks even cheaper than AlienWare's 1959 Cadillac Eldorado crap.

Apparently hoojum & hush are the best you're going to do around here. Shuttle only passes imho because you could stow it somewhere out of view.

I am reminded by a quote from Paul Graham.
"But VCs are mistaken to look for the next Microsoft, because no startup can be the next Microsoft unless some other company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be the next IBM."

"I don't mean to sond cynical, but there is not a whole lot that has to do with science and technology that would excite most students."

You're probably right. Everybody needs to read Paul Graham's essay on Nerds and Popularity right now. I like to think of it as a smarter version of Jon Katz's rants about the high school hellmouth.

I have no idea what to do for a science fair, but to the wider question of what interests high school students and what parents could do about it, I'd say racing, like motocross and go-karts. I think a lot of discipline problems at that age like failing classes and petty crime come from being bored. Classes are boring. The suburbs are boring. Give them something fun on which to focus their energy and find their talents. You could say the same about all sports, but with dirt bikes are more technical and you could them interesting in mechanical engineering or something similar.

All of the Lisp hackers have been left out. What I don't understand is why not even the mention of Paul Graham (bayesian spam filtering, yahoo stores) or Peter Norvig (AIAMA & PAIP).

http://paulgraham.com/popular.html

Personally, I agree with Paul Graham's opinion when he said that schools (in particular, High School) exist as holding pens to keep kids from bothering adults during the day.

If you haven't done so already, I suggest you read Paul Graham's Why nerds are unpopular.

Very interesting reading. I wonder what Korea did to achieve such different results.

Why Nerds are Unpopular" by Paul Graham.

If anybody out there wants to come up with a NEW Lisp dialect with a specific goal of making all other Lisps and Schemes obsolete, and with a specific goal of superceding Ruby, Python, Perl, etc. PLEASE do it!!!

Working on it... ;-)

Mr. Graham, thank you for taking the time to pause your essay writing and descend from your tower to let us know that you are still working on Arc, but the Vages odds are on several other extremely events coming to pass prior to the first release of Arc.

And thanks for equating everyone who doesn't use Lisp to people who have to take "the little bus" to do their programming work. I get a chuckle out of that all the time when I hear people arguing about programming languages.


--
Snobol kicks ass!

Ruby def foo (n)
lambda {|i| n += i } end

210 # File is a subclass of IO. "foreach" is a class method
211 # that opens the file, executes the block of code once
212 # for each line, and closes the file.
213 IO.foreach(ARGV[0]) { | line |
214 line.chomp!()
215 puts "insert into table values ("
216 print "\t'"
217 print line.split(/,/).join("',\n\t'")
218 puts "'\n)"
219 }

A Lisp is a Lisp (is a Lisp... ;-) )

The longer answer is that the project is now in the third of four stages. The plan was (a) to make a crappy initial version of Arc, (b) use that for a while in real applications, then (c) go back and write a complete, cleaned up language spec, and (d) use that as the basis of a fairly good implementation.

I'm in phase (c) now. I don't know how much longer it will take to finish the spec.

What would be better would be to make Thunderbird's Bayesian filter read the site and use the site's content as supplemental information for determining whether a message is spam or not. A filter that fights back. If enough people used this feature it would increase the cost of running a spamvertised site and put a bigger dent in spam revenue possibilities.

I think 9/10 is "nothing to complain about."

I think 10/10 is "good in ways I didn't expect." WoW is definitely that. I keep finding things I didn't even know I wanted.

Side note: Made in USA by Paul Graham has some good points.

Then again, reviewing systems are all different. I spent a while thinking about them as a sub-topic of grading systems. The whole thing depends on your philosophy.

I think part of the reason we put in numerical or categorical grades is to give a light to view the rest of the review by - I've read some 90% reviews that read like condemnations of bugs and misfeatures, and some 60%'s that seemed like praise. At least when you have the number, you know the tone of the article.

A fair few of programming language geeks seem to be fans, but as someone posted here once before (sorry, can't remember who), functional programming has yet to find its Larry Wall.
can you say Paul Graham ?

It seems to me that a LOT of people in these comments are remarking that David's choice of Haskell makes darcs a no-go. I would make this comment:

If someone told you to use <Tool X> for a project, you would say, "No way, <Tool Y> is more suitable for this job, and it's what I want to use." (substitute X and Y with whatever - C/Java/Perl/VB - you want).

I think David chose what he felt was the best tool for the job, taking the problem-to-solve and his own expertise into consideration. In the light of Paul Graham's insights I really think he should be applauded rather than criticised.

While "Darcs is written in a Haskell, a functional language that is relatively unknown compared to C or Perl", this really does hurt it's common use.

Not being able to get a larger group of developers such as C, C++, or even some interpreted projects means that it becomes one or a few developers working on this project

I've been surprised by the number and quality of contributors darcs has had. There seem to be quite a few people out there just looking for somewhere to use Haskell! :) And in fact, there have also been developers who learned Haskell expressly for the purpose of contributing to darcs. It's such a pleasant language to work with that I think it's more of a draw to developers than a put-off.

Why does nobody use it?
ITASoftware the people behind Orbitz (the 2nd/3rd largest online travel agency depending on who you ask) and a host of Airline web sites (Northwest at a minimum) use lisp. But apart from them I am aware of no big players.

yes the Japanese games are different but there is a good reason. Firstly the system is not capable of running a full blown title as per PS2. So the designers are really forced to rethink their game style (and do they think) to fit the limitations of the hardware format. Take for instance konami with MG. They release MG but not *solid*, but Acid. Same franchise, different game style (with a card twist).

Konami already make a slew of GBA games so they pretty well unersand their market. Its a different market to PS/XB.

Remember Digimon , small animals, monsters fighting, computers and CARDS ... it's a bit like a digital D&D for those old enough /young enough to remember. All appeal to a very specific market.

After attending a ACMI game time symposium in Melbourne this year I had the chance to hear/see Tetsuya Mizuguchi [gamespot interview] ). He talked for about an hour about game design and a bit about some upcoming titles for PSP. I now understand a bit more about *Japanese* game style and take my hat off to true innovators. No cheesy ports of your [insert your top 10 title here] PS2, PC games here. All *new* original ideas.

For the first releases the games are squarely aimed at *kids* and certainly those with a sense for Japanse style (manga, pokemon, digimon, cards, et.-al.) and good taste (read the paul graham article, taste to understand what I mean).I already have a 6 year old drooling over my shoulder wondering how to get one of these.