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Remember the Computer Science Past Or Be Condemned To Repeat It?
theodp writes "In the movie Groundhog Day, a weatherman finds himself living the same day over and over again. It's a tale to which software-designers-of-a-certain-age can relate. Like Philip Greenspun, who wrote in 1999, 'One of the most painful things in our culture is to watch other people repeat earlier mistakes. We're not fond of Bill Gates, but it still hurts to see Microsoft struggle with problems that IBM solved in the 1960s.' Or Dave Winer, who recently observed, 'We marvel that the runtime environment of the web browser can do things that we had working 25 years ago on the Mac.' And then there's Scott Locklin, who argues in a new essay that one of the problems with modern computer technology is that programmers don't learn from the great masters. 'There is such a thing as a Beethoven or Mozart of software design,' Locklin writes. 'Modern programmers seem more familiar with Lady Gaga. It's not just a matter of taste and an appreciation for genius. It's a matter of forgetting important things.' Hey, maybe it's hard to learn from computer history when people don't acknowledge the existence of someone old enough to have lived it, as panelists reportedly did at an event held by Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us last Friday!"
John Graham-Cumming gave a talk at OSCON 2013 titled "Turing's Curse" that speaks to this same idea. Worth a watch.
Here's some worthwhile reading on why Lisp has trouble staying put—possibly a little flamebait-y: Lisp is not an acceptable Lisp, The Lisp Curse, and Revenge of the Nerds. The core arguments seem to be (a) it's really easy to invent things in Lisp so no one can agree on how to do it, and (b) the lack of a coherent standard platform means there is no easy target for university courses or job descriptions.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Actually, it was Babbage who faced such idiocy from Parliament:
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
And you thought the clogged tubes thing was bad.
What past were you from? When I had DOS 3.3 running on my XT (on a hard drive), it booted in a few seconds after POST. When I loaded Windows 3.1 (no network at home at the time, so didn't run W3.11) on an XT with 1M RAM, it would take forever. And DOS 3.3 from floppy was slow, and loud. But 3.3 from HD on an ancient XT was much faster than Windows is today. DOS programs loaded fast, granted I was running 300k programs, not 300 MB programs, but they were still fast on DOS 3.3 back in the day. What were you running on your ancient computer?
Learn to love Alaska
Macsyma? Emacs itself is more Lisp than C. Zork was a Lisp dialect. Mirai is lisp, and was used to do animation in Lord of the Rings. Lots of expert systems. Several CAD systems and other modelling programs. Data analysis stuff. Whoever uses Clojure is using Lisp and it seems to have some traction. And Orbitz is apparently using a lot of Lisp internally (just to throw out a web site since some people think it's not real if it's not a web site or PC app).