MacLISP, ZetaLISP, etc., were all attempts to take a purely theoretical language and turn it into a language useful for productive tasks. Why do you consider this to be an example of LISP's flexibility causing forks?
LISP 1.5 was an early-60s phenomenon. There was a siginificant bloom of LISP dialects in the 70s (heck, RUTGERS-10 half a dozen so alone!), more if you count the derived languages like Scheme and Emacs LISP. Common LISP did a nice job of pulling the community back together, but it was a long time coming.
People, people, people! Flame off! Don knows whereof he speaks. For chrissakes, the man wrote a debugger in Postscript for NeWS! And Pie Menus, in Postscript and a bunch of other languages. And speaking of Pie Menus, he's got serious human-factors cohones. So listen up.
BTW, Perl did imitate the worst languages. In the very beginning it started as an awk replacement, and the first versions were 100% source-compatible with awk! I can't think of a worse starting point (OK, I can, but I try not to).
When Knuth set out to reinvent publishing, he had to decide what language to write TeX et al. in, and wanted others to be able to use it (or he'd probably have coded in MIX). In later years, he explained that he asked everyone he respected to name their three favorite languages. There was a wide range of #1s, but most folks put Pascal as #2. So he wrote in the language that everyone liked less than something else.
On the other hand, if Pascal is good enough for the gods, it's good enough for us grunt coders.
Look at LISP, in which pretty much any part of the language can be overloaded. Nobody's ever complained that this linguistic flexibility has harmed LISP; in fact, this linguistic flexibility is almost universally hailed as one of LISP's strengths.
Excuse me? The only environment more fractious than Unix is (well, was for 20 years or so) LISP. Common LISP was an attempt to heal the wounds caused by all the rampant language-redefinition, in many ways a similar idea to Single Unix Specification, X/Open PG et al., albeit more successful.
No one actually proposed implementing numbers as lists in practice. In fact, McCarthy's 1960 paper was not, at the time, intended to be implemented at all. It was a theoretical exercise, an attempt to create a more elegant alternative to the Turing Machine. When someone did, unexpectedly, take this paper and translate it into a working Lisp interpreter, numbers certainly weren't represented as lists; they were represented in binary, as in every other language.
But that's just not true. McCarthy not only intended LISP to be implemented, the CACM April 1960 paper's introduction begins:
A programming system called LISP (for LISt Processor) has been developed for the IBM 704 computer by the Artificial Intelligence group at M.I.T. The system was designed to facilitate experiments with a proposed system called the Advice Taker, whereby a machine could be instructed to handle declarative as well as imperative sentences and could exhibit ``common sense'' in carrying out its instructions. The original proposal [1] for the Advice Taker was made in November 1958. The main requirement was a programming system for manipulating expressions representing formalized declarative and imperative sentences so that the Advice Taker system could make deductions.
(emphasis mine)
If he can't even get that right, how can you possibly credit a claim like:
Semantically, strings are more or less a subset of lists in which the elements are characters. So why do you need a separate data type? You don't, really. Strings only exist for efficiency. But it's lame to clutter up the semantics of the language with hacks to make programs run faster. Having strings in a language seems to be a case of premature optimization.
Anyone who's done more than a little programming knows that strings need to be "first class" objects. The lack of genuine strings is one of the worst problems in the C language, and the source of most of the published vulnerabilities at CERT.
Every time I see the GNU icon on the SlashDot front page, it looks to me like he's ready for a nap. He's got his big fuzzy slippers on, and he's dragging his blankie around.
Back in the day, when VA Linix had their IPO, several members of the GNU and Linux communities were offered "friends and family" shares - the moral equivalent of a large bag of cash. Eric Raymond took the stock - Open Source afficianados have no problem with making money. Richard Stallman refused the offer, supposedly because he objected to use of non-Free software in their products.
In hindsight, RMS might have been the smarter investor!
The FSF has never taken a position against software patents, and has actually been rather restrained in its critism of them. For example, when the W3C tried to deal with the problem of incorporating patented technology into their standards, the FSF's only objection was that the patent license was too narrow.
Now, the League for Programming Freedom has a completely different take on the topic. Since it can be hard to tell its core members from those of the FSF, you're excused from the mistake this time:-)
Long ago and far away, R. Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller designed a building that consisted of a central spire and floors suspended from it by cables. He intended this system to be delivered by dirigibles (i.e. blimps on steroids). You can find lots of discussion and his drawings in "The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller" (Doubleday, 1973).
Why can't people get it straight that "inter" is "between" and "intra" is "within"? This "automatic inter-office delivery" is actually "automatic intra-office delivery".
We should never forget that the first big Internet worm spread itself largely though a back door written into sendmail. The author, Eric Allman, deliberately put in two backdoors as SMTP commands, "DEBUG" and "WIZ", one of which (DEBUG) was used by Robert Morris's worm. While Google can't seem to locate it, there was a contemporary statement by Allman that the reason for those two commands was a Berkeley sysadmin who wouldn't give him privileges to update sendmail, so he did it himself, the hard way.
Anyone who writes a backdoor should be fired ASAP and the door should be closed. Failing to do so can easily make your company liable for damages caused by someone using it. It's a miracle that Allman didn't get prosecuted with Morris - he probably would today, but the legal folks were more clueless about computing risks in those days.
Dual/triple/whatever licensing doesn't give Intel any new rights. The GPL doesn't put any restrictions on use of the code by its licensor. That's why it's possible to dual-license code in the first place.
All that's happened is that Intel has successfully established a practice for Linux kernel code that the license granted by the author is the license of the component. Linus Torvalds has stated that he won't accept license-narrowing patches into his source tree, and that's as close to Official Policy as you'll ever get. Intel has always been free to do what they like with the code, and to make whatever requirements they like of those who send them patches. Requirements like allowing dual licensing, or even assignment of rights (a good thing if a complex piece of GPLed code ever has to face a copyright-defense lawsuit).
This is a good thing. Everyone who believes in the GPL should support the right of an author to set the terms of use for his or her code. That should include patches - they're modifications of his or her code: in GPL terms, they create a derivative work.
It makes no sense that a patch should not be available to the original author of the code being altered.
My daughter is in her second year of HS Comp Sci, and will be taking the AP exam in a few months (we have high hopes of a 4, and think a 5 isn't out of reach). The AP-CS class is just over 20 students, with 5 girls (~25%). For an academic elective class with a killer exam at the end, that's considered a high level of female participation.
Amen, brother! I've been programming professionally for 22 years and hiring programmers for about half that. In that time, I've learned that the sole indicator of a programmer's skill or likely success is how their eyes light up when geeking out. Programming can be taught, and journeyman programmers can be created, but genuinely creative and gifted programmers are born.
You're absolutely right that IT and CS are largely unrelated.
In 22 years of post-college IT and software development work, I've only ever had to use higher math once (the "winding number" problem, for HTML image-map random polygons), and a one-day web search found me everything I couldn't remember. But IT as practiced in the last 10 years isn't even that close to CS - I know large numbers of MIS folks who can't program at all. And their work doesn't suffer from that! Much of "IT" these days is software installation and trouble-shooting. The same thing happened in the late 1980s in the mainframe world, so it shouldn't be any surprise.
On the flip side, Comp Sci is an academic discipline, like physics, philosophy and mathematics. The primary goal of undergraduate CS departments at the university level (ignoring community colleges etc.) is the production of graduate students, who will eventually become researchers in the field. Their goal is not generally to create COBOL or VB programmers for business applications. In many universities, that's a function of the business schools.
Go read the cited article. There's no change, OS/2 is still dead. This is IBM taking good care of its customers in the afterlife. The first part of the article ("What are the OS/2 Plans for 2003?") says:
"Hardware and Device Driver Enhancements: IBM plans to provide OS/2 device driver enhancements. IBM plans to provide reserved Software Choice device drivers to customers with then current software subscriptions."
This is IBM-speak for "we're going to enhance some drivers, you'll be able to get them if you're paying for software maintenance". That's good, but it isn't a revival.
"Transition and product enhancement services:"
Nuff said - "transition" means "to something else".
"OS/2 Defect Support: IBM plans to provide Program defect support for OS/2 Warp 4 Convenience Packages and for Warp Server for e-business Convenience Packages through 31 December 2004 for customers with software subscriptions."
More IBM-speak, this time meaning that existing customers paying for maintenance will get support for two more years. IBM never terminates support on less than one year's notice - a good thing when you're using a system for more than just pr0n-surfing.
All in all, just what IBM customers expect during a platform's death throes - plans and help in moving to some other IBM platform:-)
So are you telling me that if I write my own HOWTO or publish a book on, say, Perl or Sendmail... I can expect legal action from O'Reilly?
That depends on how heavily you use their property to create your own. But theoretically, yes. "Quote" too much, use their outline, do other things that make it clear you're reproducing their work, and they'd have rights in your work.
Copyright is insidious - that's why the GPL can be also.
The site is slashdotted, so I can't check the agreement, but the original statement makes it sound like a service is being subscribed to, not that a book is being sold. Unpublished information isn't necessarily only protected by copyright, and there's no fair use doctrine absent copyright.
It's become obvious over the last few years that one of the ways to make money with FS/OSS is to write books about it. Copyrighted books. Books that cannot be reproduced without the publisher's permission (ever heard of that being granted?). Books that, if "reverse engineered" and rewritten, would result in derivative works under law and still be protected. But the community doesn't seem to have a problem with that. So what's wrong here?
MVS messages in spin loops? No way no how!
on
Gnarly Error Messages
·
· Score: 2, Informative
'We are experiencing MVS processor spin loops, the programs are running while holding a disabled CPU. This is causing XCF communication delays to the point where we are losing VTAM RTP routing, are suffering OSPF adjacency failures on TCP/IP dynamic routing and MIM VCF failures. Whatever this code is, it should NOT be propagated to production or we run the risk of losing the development plex if XCF signaling is adversely impacted by processor disabled spin loops'.
You're confusing an error message with an operator's description of a problem. MVS can't display error messages while in disabled spin loops, the I/O interrupts are blocked by the "disabled" part!
You want a good example of bad error messages? How about anything except MVS messages? I'm serious - the MVS "Messages and Codes" manuals are huge, and list every message issued by the software complete with advice on what to do when you receive the message! How, one asks, can you find the right advice? Easy: every message begins with a "message identifier" - a short alphanumeric sequence that uniquely identifies it and points directly to the place where the doc lives.
Try that with your average Open Source project. Hell, try to just get a list of the errors reported, let alone advice on what to do when they are reported.
A related problem is "cup size inflation". Way Back Whe, Starbucks offered "short", "tall" and "grande". When the "short" vanished, "tall" shrank and became "regular", "grande" shrunk to "tall" size and "venti" arrived. Since "venti" is Italian for "20", I sure hope it never shrinks!
Given a slew of BBD capabilities -- from silent running, diminished drag, elimination of sonic shockwaves, to operation from ground level to full vacuum -- NIDS calls for pushing this black world technology out into daylight for commercial benefit.
"full vacuum"? HEL-LO! Last time I checked, helium was heavier than "full vacuum". These things get their lift from displacement, just like ships at sea. You don't see boats floating around the sky because they're too massive for the amount of air they'd displace. But put one down on the sea, and it floats just fine. Same with an airship - all that helium still has mass and weight.
The xxx for Dummiesvolumes are great resources. I've used them tons of times for survey-level forays into unfamiliar teritories. If you're a Reader (two-foot tall stack of pending material on your nightstand, a bedroom "decorated with books", and a lust for Henry Higgins' library from the Rex Harrison/Audrey Hepburn version of My Fair Lady), you should be able to scan through one of these tomes in an hour or two and come away with enough of an understanding of the subject to go find better, more in-depth material easily.
Plus, your local public library has many of them on the shelves, saving you the investment in books you'd rather not display in your bookcases!
Standards compliance is an excellant tool for measuring compatibility, etc., but what really matters about a commercial website isn't whether it's standards-compliant but whether the desired customers can make use of it. My bank has recently upgraded their net-banking site such that Opera works perfectly with it, where it hadn't just a few months ago. Yet another reason not to use Netscape Navigator! (I never use MS-Internet Explorer, it's too untrustworthy).
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MacLISP, ZetaLISP, etc., were all attempts to take a purely theoretical language and turn it into a language useful for productive tasks. Why do you consider this to be an example of LISP's flexibility causing forks?
LISP 1.5 was an early-60s phenomenon. There was a siginificant bloom of LISP dialects in the 70s (heck, RUTGERS-10 half a dozen so alone!), more if you count the derived languages like Scheme and Emacs LISP. Common LISP did a nice job of pulling the community back together, but it was a long time coming.
People, people, people! Flame off! Don knows whereof he speaks. For chrissakes, the man wrote a debugger in Postscript for NeWS! And Pie Menus, in Postscript and a bunch of other languages. And speaking of Pie Menus, he's got serious human-factors cohones. So listen up.
BTW, Perl did imitate the worst languages. In the very beginning it started as an awk replacement, and the first versions were 100% source-compatible with awk! I can't think of a worse starting point (OK, I can, but I try not to).
When Knuth set out to reinvent publishing, he had to decide what language to write TeX et al. in, and wanted others to be able to use it (or he'd probably have coded in MIX). In later years, he explained that he asked everyone he respected to name their three favorite languages. There was a wide range of #1s, but most folks put Pascal as #2. So he wrote in the language that everyone liked less than something else.
On the other hand, if Pascal is good enough for the gods, it's good enough for us grunt coders.
Look at LISP, in which pretty much any part of the language can be overloaded. Nobody's ever complained that this linguistic flexibility has harmed LISP; in fact, this linguistic flexibility is almost universally hailed as one of LISP's strengths.
Excuse me? The only environment more fractious than Unix is (well, was for 20 years or so) LISP. Common LISP was an attempt to heal the wounds caused by all the rampant language-redefinition, in many ways a similar idea to Single Unix Specification, X/Open PG et al., albeit more successful.
For example, he writes:
But that's just not true. McCarthy not only intended LISP to be implemented, the CACM April 1960 paper's introduction begins:
(emphasis mine)If he can't even get that right, how can you possibly credit a claim like:
Anyone who's done more than a little programming knows that strings need to be "first class" objects. The lack of genuine strings is one of the worst problems in the C language, and the source of most of the published vulnerabilities at CERT.Gimme a break!
Every time I see the GNU icon on the SlashDot front page, it looks to me like he's ready for a nap. He's got his big fuzzy slippers on, and he's dragging his blankie around.
Aww, isn't he cute?
Back in the day, when VA Linix had their IPO, several members of the GNU and Linux communities were offered "friends and family" shares - the moral equivalent of a large bag of cash. Eric Raymond took the stock - Open Source afficianados have no problem with making money. Richard Stallman refused the offer, supposedly because he objected to use of non-Free software in their products.
In hindsight, RMS might have been the smarter investor!
The FSF has never taken a position against software patents, and has actually been rather restrained in its critism of them. For example, when the W3C tried to deal with the problem of incorporating patented technology into their standards, the FSF's only objection was that the patent license was too narrow.
:-)
Now, the League for Programming Freedom has a completely different take on the topic. Since it can be hard to tell its core members from those of the FSF, you're excused from the mistake this time
Long ago and far away, R. Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller designed a building that consisted of a central spire and floors suspended from it by cables. He intended this system to be delivered by dirigibles (i.e. blimps on steroids). You can find lots of discussion and his drawings in "The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller" (Doubleday, 1973).
Once again, Bucky was there first!
Why can't people get it straight that "inter" is "between" and "intra" is "within"? This "automatic inter-office delivery" is actually "automatic intra-office delivery".
Geez, learn the language, dudz!
We should never forget that the first big Internet worm spread itself largely though a back door written into sendmail. The author, Eric Allman, deliberately put in two backdoors as SMTP commands, "DEBUG" and "WIZ", one of which (DEBUG) was used by Robert Morris's worm. While Google can't seem to locate it, there was a contemporary statement by Allman that the reason for those two commands was a Berkeley sysadmin who wouldn't give him privileges to update sendmail, so he did it himself, the hard way.
Anyone who writes a backdoor should be fired ASAP and the door should be closed. Failing to do so can easily make your company liable for damages caused by someone using it. It's a miracle that Allman didn't get prosecuted with Morris - he probably would today, but the legal folks were more clueless about computing risks in those days.
Dual/triple/whatever licensing doesn't give Intel any new rights. The GPL doesn't put any restrictions on use of the code by its licensor. That's why it's possible to dual-license code in the first place.
All that's happened is that Intel has successfully established a practice for Linux kernel code that the license granted by the author is the license of the component. Linus Torvalds has stated that he won't accept license-narrowing patches into his source tree, and that's as close to Official Policy as you'll ever get. Intel has always been free to do what they like with the code, and to make whatever requirements they like of those who send them patches. Requirements like allowing dual licensing, or even assignment of rights (a good thing if a complex piece of GPLed code ever has to face a copyright-defense lawsuit).
This is a good thing. Everyone who believes in the GPL should support the right of an author to set the terms of use for his or her code. That should include patches - they're modifications of his or her code: in GPL terms, they create a derivative work.
It makes no sense that a patch should not be available to the original author of the code being altered.
My daughter is in her second year of HS Comp Sci, and will be taking the AP exam in a few months (we have high hopes of a 4, and think a 5 isn't out of reach). The AP-CS class is just over 20 students, with 5 girls (~25%). For an academic elective class with a killer exam at the end, that's considered a high level of female participation.
Amen, brother! I've been programming professionally for 22 years and hiring programmers for about half that. In that time, I've learned that the sole indicator of a programmer's skill or likely success is how their eyes light up when geeking out. Programming can be taught, and journeyman programmers can be created, but genuinely creative and gifted programmers are born.
You're absolutely right that IT and CS are largely unrelated.
In 22 years of post-college IT and software development work, I've only ever had to use higher math once (the "winding number" problem, for HTML image-map random polygons), and a one-day web search found me everything I couldn't remember. But IT as practiced in the last 10 years isn't even that close to CS - I know large numbers of MIS folks who can't program at all. And their work doesn't suffer from that! Much of "IT" these days is software installation and trouble-shooting. The same thing happened in the late 1980s in the mainframe world, so it shouldn't be any surprise.
On the flip side, Comp Sci is an academic discipline, like physics, philosophy and mathematics. The primary goal of undergraduate CS departments at the university level (ignoring community colleges etc.) is the production of graduate students, who will eventually become researchers in the field. Their goal is not generally to create COBOL or VB programmers for business applications. In many universities, that's a function of the business schools.
This is IBM-speak for "we're going to enhance some drivers, you'll be able to get them if you're paying for software maintenance". That's good, but it isn't a revival.
Nuff said - "transition" means "to something else".
More IBM-speak, this time meaning that existing customers paying for maintenance will get support for two more years. IBM never terminates support on less than one year's notice - a good thing when you're using a system for more than just pr0n-surfing.
All in all, just what IBM customers expect during a platform's death throes - plans and help in moving to some other IBM platform :-)
So are you telling me that if I write my own HOWTO or publish a book on, say, Perl or Sendmail... I can expect legal action from O'Reilly?
That depends on how heavily you use their property to create your own. But theoretically, yes. "Quote" too much, use their outline, do other things that make it clear you're reproducing their work, and they'd have rights in your work.
Copyright is insidious - that's why the GPL can be also.
The site is slashdotted, so I can't check the agreement, but the original statement makes it sound like a service is being subscribed to, not that a book is being sold. Unpublished information isn't necessarily only protected by copyright, and there's no fair use doctrine absent copyright.
It's become obvious over the last few years that one of the ways to make money with FS/OSS is to write books about it. Copyrighted books. Books that cannot be reproduced without the publisher's permission (ever heard of that being granted?). Books that, if "reverse engineered" and rewritten, would result in derivative works under law and still be protected. But the community doesn't seem to have a problem with that. So what's wrong here?
'We are experiencing MVS processor spin loops, the programs are running while holding a disabled CPU. This is causing XCF communication delays to the point where we are losing VTAM RTP routing, are suffering OSPF adjacency failures on TCP/IP dynamic routing and MIM VCF failures. Whatever this code is, it should NOT be propagated to production or we run the risk of losing the development plex if XCF signaling is adversely impacted by processor disabled spin loops'.
You're confusing an error message with an operator's description of a problem. MVS can't display error messages while in disabled spin loops, the I/O interrupts are blocked by the "disabled" part!
You want a good example of bad error messages? How about anything except MVS messages? I'm serious - the MVS "Messages and Codes" manuals are huge, and list every message issued by the software complete with advice on what to do when you receive the message! How, one asks, can you find the right advice? Easy: every message begins with a "message identifier" - a short alphanumeric sequence that uniquely identifies it and points directly to the place where the doc lives.
Try that with your average Open Source project. Hell, try to just get a list of the errors reported, let alone advice on what to do when they are reported.
Idunno, I thought the iBrator story was pretty funny.
A related problem is "cup size inflation". Way Back Whe, Starbucks offered "short", "tall" and "grande". When the "short" vanished, "tall" shrank and became "regular", "grande" shrunk to "tall" size and "venti" arrived. Since "venti" is Italian for "20", I sure hope it never shrinks!
What kind of crack-pots wrote this stuff?
The xxx for Dummiesvolumes are great resources. I've used them tons of times for survey-level forays into unfamiliar teritories. If you're a Reader (two-foot tall stack of pending material on your nightstand, a bedroom "decorated with books", and a lust for Henry Higgins' library from the Rex Harrison/Audrey Hepburn version of My Fair Lady), you should be able to scan through one of these tomes in an hour or two and come away with enough of an understanding of the subject to go find better, more in-depth material easily.
Plus, your local public library has many of them on the shelves, saving you the investment in books you'd rather not display in your bookcases!
Standards compliance is an excellant tool for measuring compatibility, etc., but what really matters about a commercial website isn't whether it's standards-compliant but whether the desired customers can make use of it. My bank has recently upgraded their net-banking site such that Opera works perfectly with it, where it hadn't just a few months ago. Yet another reason not to use Netscape Navigator! (I never use MS-Internet Explorer, it's too untrustworthy).