No, it began with businesses buying and managing Unix workstations for their staff.
No he was right it was mini and mainframes. Unix workstations were never part of most corporate infrastructures in large degrees. There are exceptions but most of them were during the PC era anyway, for example Xenix shops.
Actually Apple has support for mass provisioning. They have the entire Enterprise SDK and they features for Mac server management. But... it is a totally Apple centric solution and doesn't go beyond that in terms of melding with the rest of the infrastructure. If you were going to mass provision a bunch of smart phones:
-- Blackberry is excellent -- Apple is good -- Most android phone suck.
Re:I like gvim, except...
on
Vim Turns 20
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· Score: 1
gvim is the xwindows version of vim.
Re:I like gvim, except...
on
Vim Turns 20
·
· Score: 1
Awesome Vim story. Mods mod up please this one should be the lead.
And I agree with you on Athena. As an aside it looks like the latest macports no longer has the athena option though it still has motif.
Linux lost out on netbooks because Microsoft reduced the price of Windows XP sufficiently to make the cost-saving fairly trivial (twenty pounds or so in the UK) and familiarity won out.
Certainly the price competition helped. I've heard rumors that they essentially gave it away. But I don't think it was just familiarity. In general netbook users had a better user experience under Windows XP. That was with Linux having had a year head start on implementing on netbooks. Given more focus the Linux experience should have been much much better, it wasn't.
Linux can be a low cost alternative which is not much worse than the Microsoft product, like Open Office is to MS Office. Or Linux can be an overall better product at similar prices like Linux workstations & small servers were to Sun workstations / small servers.
The idea of "I don't believe in what you are saying, but I will fight for the right for you to say it" concept is going away
I can't think of anytime during my life when there was more free speech. What is going away is a desire to engage with contrary opinions, actual surpression has been mostly abandoned in the west.
But they disagree with their message so they will do anything possible to make them seem like one sided idiots.
Well yes. That is propaganda. People have casual gentrified conversations about things of non consequence. How armies are going to be deployed and where trillions of dollars is going to be spent, is going to be a heated debate.
I don't think that is why Linux lost. Linux IMHO lost on the netbooks because they couldn't get a simple debugged interface that small done quick. Far too many apps had assumed a big screen, and while everything was modifiable it wasn't easy or simple and in a timeframe of months,,, they just didn't make it.
I think it is uncool to praise RIM right now, but I think they were right about QNX being the right kernel for phones. They couldn't execute in time but they had the right choice as far as going with a RTOS with recovery, fast and a small footprint.
As far as userland.... First off XFCE is the 3rd biggest. It is just 10% of the size of KDE or Gnome. I haven't played with ROX much but that desktop is about the size of Windows 3.1, so... there are still some Linux desktops that are small. LXDE is very popular, I have used it and it comes in at a few megs.
The purpose of Dart is fundamentally to create a language which is easier to optimize from the browser perspective against. It is taking stuff out of Javascript. So the early community are going to be people who know Javascript, but are more focused on the sorts of low level C programmers that write high performance interpreters. They are going to love having a junior level guy to test their ideas with if you hang out with them, and identify yourself as such. You will likely learn a lot from these experienced and knowledgeable developers.
What you won't learn is web development since they are into browser construction. Later on as Dart gets more mainstream it will move towards web developers. You don't know enough though to get a job doing that sort of low level stuff. That being said though, your paying job will probably come from the Javascript world. But the Dart people will help you there.
And of course being an early user of Dart might be a gateway in 5 years or so.
Linux is generally pretty easy to install on Macbooks. There is a limited amount of hardware so it is well documented (do check though). Mint tends to do an excellent job in terms of everything working right out of the box.
TVs not being updated has been a disaster for programming. We could have switched over to universal high-def by the mid 1980s, most shows are still mainly regular definition.
-- Is this the common trend of Lisp usage: language of extension and customization?
Absolutely. LISP was the language that monocircular evaluation (a crucial step in the evolution of compilers) was invented on. The effect is that most people that ever taken a compiler 101 course have learned to write a compiler in LISP and learned to write LISP compilers in most other languages. And it is far easier to write a LISP than just about any other language.
This is where Greenspun's tenth rule comes from: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
I'd argue the main idea of LISP are essentially used in all important applications. It is just too early / fundamental to computer evolution to even think about separately.
All the dynamic languages Perl, Python, Ruby, Javascript are unquestionably great grandchildren of LISP and still show lots of the genes. LISP as a language is not doing well, though there finally in Clojure is a modern LISP with professional features. But... the influence is immense.
Don't forget Ritchie and Thompson worked together. It is not like Unix could have been built on another platform.
So lets play what-if. Unix isn't invented and the PDP doesn't offer Unix as an alternative to VMS.... VMS becomes the high end workstation language, most likely i.e. Digital never loses the top spot to people like Sun. So the Unix server becomes the VMS server, and the mini computer era extends.
Now the question is in that world what does SGI do? I think they put a GUI on a very high end single user version of CPM, sort of like a DOS-32 with GUI. Essentially they invent the the Apple Lisa a year or two earlier. This makes GUIs on home machines (PCs) come sooner but the popularity of business applications a bit later.
I'm not sure what happens from there. Do we converge towards Windows for Workgroups or do we fork off with home machines moving in the direction of Xbox and business machines being even more tied down?
I agree with you. The fact that the Common LISP, Common Library was outstanding prevented the emergence of little libraries to fill in gaps and ended up sidetracking LISP. That's why I think Clojure is such a good idea, a LISP with full access to Java libraries and structures. JAVA/JVM is the only thing out there that beats CPAN in terms of library size
DB2 has really nice COBOL features, so there is no question that Relational databases would have happened. But they would have been a 2nd tier option like Network databases (now called NoSQL), Associative Databases, Object Databases, Flat... are today.
Ahhh.... I don't know. Jobs was a great artist and designer. But C and LISP were fundamental to the evolution of computers. Had they not come along computers could have developed in totally different ways. Lets play what if:
For example if C doesn't emerge then Algol style languages don't catch on as much. COBOL and Fortran and better understood and the transition from Network databases never happens. So at a crucial moment in history the spreadsheet doesn't become the dominant data storage paradigm since databases are not young. Because storage is more important than CPU the transition from mini computers and dumb terminals to PCs happens a few years later and the platform is more mature....
McCarthy did both. No one had actually thought through what a church calculus machine would look like. He discovered many details that pure mathematicians hadn't noticed they hadn't addressed.
This is a constant question. Math invented or discovered? Church calculus I'd say was discovered. How to implement church calculus on a digital computer (?). The specific implementation like cons, car and cdr definitely invented.
Slashdot Mirror
No he was right it was mini and mainframes. Unix workstations were never part of most corporate infrastructures in large degrees. There are exceptions but most of them were during the PC era anyway, for example Xenix shops.
How is that any different from any other piece of IT distributed hardware that an end user has hacked because they have physical access?
If you don't want to support hackable hardware then go to dumb terminals only.
Actually Apple has support for mass provisioning. They have the entire Enterprise SDK and they features for Mac server management. But... it is a totally Apple centric solution and doesn't go beyond that in terms of melding with the rest of the infrastructure. If you were going to mass provision a bunch of smart phones:
-- Blackberry is excellent
-- Apple is good
-- Most android phone suck.
gvim is the xwindows version of vim.
Awesome Vim story. Mods mod up please this one should be the lead.
And I agree with you on Athena. As an aside it looks like the latest macports no longer has the athena option though it still has motif.
Certainly the price competition helped. I've heard rumors that they essentially gave it away. But I don't think it was just familiarity. In general netbook users had a better user experience under Windows XP. That was with Linux having had a year head start on implementing on netbooks. Given more focus the Linux experience should have been much much better, it wasn't.
Linux can be a low cost alternative which is not much worse than the Microsoft product, like Open Office is to MS Office.
Or Linux can be an overall better product at similar prices like Linux workstations & small servers were to Sun workstations / small servers.
I agree with you. Well said. Politics is a rough game and Julian has done well with it.
I can't think of anytime during my life when there was more free speech. What is going away is a desire to engage with contrary opinions, actual surpression has been mostly abandoned in the west.
Well yes. That is propaganda. People have casual gentrified conversations about things of non consequence. How armies are going to be deployed and where trillions of dollars is going to be spent, is going to be a heated debate.
I agree with you. Of course Microsoft could help fix that by offering a clean version of windows for anyone with an OEM license....
I don't think that is why Linux lost. Linux IMHO lost on the netbooks because they couldn't get a simple debugged interface that small done quick. Far too many apps had assumed a big screen, and while everything was modifiable it wasn't easy or simple and in a timeframe of months,,, they just didn't make it.
I think it is uncool to praise RIM right now, but I think they were right about QNX being the right kernel for phones. They couldn't execute in time but they had the right choice as far as going with a RTOS with recovery, fast and a small footprint.
As far as userland.... First off XFCE is the 3rd biggest. It is just 10% of the size of KDE or Gnome. I haven't played with ROX much but that desktop is about the size of Windows 3.1, so ... there are still some Linux desktops that are small. LXDE is very popular, I have used it and it comes in at a few megs.
The purpose of Dart is fundamentally to create a language which is easier to optimize from the browser perspective against. It is taking stuff out of Javascript. So the early community are going to be people who know Javascript, but are more focused on the sorts of low level C programmers that write high performance interpreters. They are going to love having a junior level guy to test their ideas with if you hang out with them, and identify yourself as such. You will likely learn a lot from these experienced and knowledgeable developers.
What you won't learn is web development since they are into browser construction. Later on as Dart gets more mainstream it will move towards web developers. You don't know enough though to get a job doing that sort of low level stuff. That being said though, your paying job will probably come from the Javascript world. But the Dart people will help you there.
And of course being an early user of Dart might be a gateway in 5 years or so.
Oh if only. Slashdot 10 years ago just used HTML and would run in like 50x faster than today's version.
And I get this irony of this post. Oh well.
-- Better reception
-- Dual core processor
-- double or more the amount of storage
Linux is generally pretty easy to install on Macbooks. There is a limited amount of hardware so it is well documented (do check though). Mint tends to do an excellent job in terms of everything working right out of the box.
If you think about many of the Haskell libraries they replace the functions of the Common Lisp ones.
TVs not being updated has been a disaster for programming. We could have switched over to universal high-def by the mid 1980s, most shows are still mainly regular definition.
Sort of. Lets call Lambda calculus / Church calculus LISP's father (possibly grandfather).
The original implementation of if is eval and
TRUE := xy.x := xy.y
FALSE
so if a then b else c
becomes (if-then-else a b c) becomes (a b c)
If a is true the true expression evaluates to (b) if false it becomes (c).
That predates McCarthy. And certainly both Machine, Assembly, ... had if. But... the way we think of if-then-else today came from LISP.
-- Is this the common trend of Lisp usage: language of extension and customization?
Absolutely. LISP was the language that monocircular evaluation (a crucial step in the evolution of compilers) was invented on. The effect is that most people that ever taken a compiler 101 course have learned to write a compiler in LISP and learned to write LISP compilers in most other languages. And it is far easier to write a LISP than just about any other language.
This is where Greenspun's tenth rule comes from:
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
I'd argue the main idea of LISP are essentially used in all important applications. It is just too early / fundamental to computer evolution to even think about separately.
All the dynamic languages Perl, Python, Ruby, Javascript are unquestionably great grandchildren of LISP and still show lots of the genes. LISP as a language is not doing well, though there finally in Clojure is a modern LISP with professional features. But... the influence is immense.
Don't forget Ritchie and Thompson worked together. It is not like Unix could have been built on another platform.
So lets play what-if. Unix isn't invented and the PDP doesn't offer Unix as an alternative to VMS.... VMS becomes the high end workstation language, most likely i.e. Digital never loses the top spot to people like Sun. So the Unix server becomes the VMS server, and the mini computer era extends.
Now the question is in that world what does SGI do? I think they put a GUI on a very high end single user version of CPM, sort of like a DOS-32 with GUI. Essentially they invent the the Apple Lisa a year or two earlier. This makes GUIs on home machines (PCs) come sooner but the popularity of business applications a bit later.
I'm not sure what happens from there. Do we converge towards Windows for Workgroups or do we fork off with home machines moving in the direction of Xbox and business machines being even more tied down?
I agree with you. The fact that the Common LISP, Common Library was outstanding prevented the emergence of little libraries to fill in gaps and ended up sidetracking LISP. That's why I think Clojure is such a good idea, a LISP with full access to Java libraries and structures. JAVA/JVM is the only thing out there that beats CPAN in terms of library size
DB2 has really nice COBOL features, so there is no question that Relational databases would have happened. But they would have been a 2nd tier option like Network databases (now called NoSQL), Associative Databases, Object Databases, Flat ... are today.
Ahhh.... I don't know. Jobs was a great artist and designer. But C and LISP were fundamental to the evolution of computers. Had they not come along computers could have developed in totally different ways. Lets play what if:
For example if C doesn't emerge then Algol style languages don't catch on as much. COBOL and Fortran and better understood and the transition from Network databases never happens. So at a crucial moment in history the spreadsheet doesn't become the dominant data storage paradigm since databases are not young. Because storage is more important than CPU the transition from mini computers and dumb terminals to PCs happens a few years later and the platform is more mature....
McCarthy did both. No one had actually thought through what a church calculus machine would look like. He discovered many details that pure mathematicians hadn't noticed they hadn't addressed.
This is a constant question. Math invented or discovered? Church calculus I'd say was discovered. How to implement church calculus on a digital computer (?). The specific implementation like cons, car and cdr definitely invented.