you obviously know more history than most slashdotters, so why the inflammtory bits?
but its model of applications and data was not much different from your average DOS machine.
event loops? resource forks? no segments/extended memory/expanded memeory crapola? the list of differences between the Mac and DOS applications and data of the time was huge, although you are certainly correct that the Mac was much more of a hack than the Lisa, let alone the Xerox D-machines.
(And the more I explore NT, the more I see thinly veiled impersonations of Unix.)
Actually, the NT design team was composed mainly of imports from DEC who had worked on VMS. You know that UNIX is not the only archaic text-based industrial-strength operating system, don't you?
I really enjoyed your rant. I went to your home page to learn more about your personal philosophy since your are clearly a wise man. However, my browser was unable to render it properly. I use Mosaic v1.0. Do you know what is wrong?
Read Gabriel's "Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community" for one man's search for beauty in a lot of places -- his code, his company, the arts, his life.
Beautiful code is a subject worth contemplating, not speeding by with the standard crap answers above. Here are two quite-different places to find beautiful code:
(1) The "Programming Pearls" books by Bentley.
(2) "On Lisp" by Paul Graham
Also, Here are some quotes of relevance:
The [benefit] which rhyme has over blank verse...is, that it bounds and circumscribes the fancy. For imagination in a poet is a faculty so wild and lawless, that, like an high-ranging spaniel, it must have clogs tied to it, lest it outrun the judgment. -- John Dryden
The central task of a natural science is to make the wonderful commonplace: to show that complexity, correctly viewed, is only a mask for simplicity; to find pattern hidden in apparent chaos. - Herb Simon
The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics...It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is just as true of beauty of any kind -- we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent is from recognizing one when we read it. -- G. H. Hardy
Joseph LaGrange..."believed that a mathematician has not thoroughly understood his own work till he has made it so clear that he can go out and explain it effectively to the first man he meets on the street." -- E. T. Bell
When judging a physical theory, I ask myself wether I would have made the Universe in that way had I been God. -- Einstein
Beauty is the proper conforminty of the parts to one another and to the whole. - Hesienberg
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion! - Francis Bacon
Simplex sigillum veri - The simple is the seal of the true. And Pulchritudo splendor veritatis - Beauty is the splendour of truth. - S. Chandrasekhar
The Scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living... I mean the intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts. -- Poincare
My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or another, I usually chose the beautiful. -- Hermann Weyl
Beauty is truth,
truth beauty - that is all
Ye know on earth,
And all ye need to know.
-- Keats
There are some great men of science whose charm consists in having said the first word on a subject, in having introduced some new idea which has proved fruitful; there are others whose charm consists perhaps in having said the last word on a subject, and who have reduced the subject to logical consistency and clearness. -- J. J. Thomson
Do you know we're sitting on 4 million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon, and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder? Makes you feel good, doesn't it? -- Steve Buscemi ("Rockhound") in "Armageddon."
They might be fulfilling to the programmer, but that does not necessarily mean that games programming is the highest form of programming.
In addition to the errors in this statement that have been pointed out by others, also note that he said that games push the limits of hardware (700 Mhz processors and 3D accelerators) more than most other kinds of software. In other words, games are not a higher form a program, but they do consume more of the computing resources than most other categories of program.
Lisp has had object-oriented facilities for at least as long as C++ has existed (e.g., Flavors). Common Lisp is an object-oriented programming language with several unique properties. As I understand it, Common Lisp was technically the first object-oriented language that fully passed ANSI standardization. Lispers think of their language as multi-paradigm (functional, procedural, object-oritented).
A third monolith has been spotted in Redmond, in the middle of the Microsoft campus. Early reports indicate a small but statistically reliable drop in the number of bugs being found by quality assurance specialists in Microsoft software. Related reports from the Gates compound indicate that Melinda is finding Bill "more human" than usual.
(1) through (9) are just from the past few years. Apple's history of innovation is much longer than this. Here are some more features that Apple established in the marketplace:
10. 3.5 inch floppy
11. GUI
12. Built-in networking on all machines.
13. Laser printing.
14. (Mechanical) mouse standard on all systems.
15. SCSI.
16. Quicktime
This list goes on and on and on, although there was a conspicuous lack of innovation during the non-Jobs years. The fact is that Apple is the one company in the industry that has consistently pushed innovative technologies into the mainstream, and not just caved to conservative inertia. I shudder to think what Wintel machines would be like today if they hadn't had to keep pace with Apple. This computer is now available with three (count 'em THREE) 5.25 floppy drives AND a 30x100 monochrome display, both industry firsts!
The big, Big, BIG former Apple/Macintosh employees behind Nautilus appear to be Andy Hertzfield and Guy "Bud" Tribble. They lend instant GUI credibility to Nautilus. Perhaps Sun noticed this.
More likely, it's an insider thing. It says in Tribble's bio that he has "held several VP-level positions at Sun during the past seven years" and was "VP and chief technology officer for the Sun-Netscape Alliance".
I can't believe it. Sure, Wordstar was a popular program, but historically, it's no more important for word processing than dBase II was for databases or Visicalc for spreadsheets. So why not dBase II or Visicalc?
I was then working on the development of APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and I was committed to the idea that what we were doing with computers was making languages that were better than natural languages for procedural thought.
I assume APL2 is a descendant of APL. APL is one of the most cryptic languages ever invented, just ridiculously dense. If this is this guy's idea of a good computer language...
The idea was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of knowledge, and to help people think in more precise and clear ways.
There is no "mental logic". This is one of those common fallacies. There is no evidence that teaching children logic, latin, logo, or whatever subject people at the time think exercises the "mental muscle" improves thinking in any general sense. Read any textbook on cognitive psychology for the details. Of course, because most computer programmers are rather good at abstract and mathematical thinking, they egocentrically think this is the way all people think, or all people should think, or that is best.
What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt.
sigh.I just finished a recent book on the history of Xerox PARC, Dealers of Lightning by Hiltzik. It traces the motivation behind the development of the GUI. I recommend it to you all for more insight than this quote offers.
For what it's worth, I see the GUI as a win over command languages in many situations because it makes the intentions of actions clear. The desktop metaphor works because people know the purposs of the various objects on one's real desktop, and so there's no need to infer the consequences of the paralle objects of their GUI. On the other hand, to learn the intentionality of key combinations is to start from scratch. As far as the visual versus linguistic nature of GUIs versus command languages, well, the folks at Xerox were trying to capitalize on the tremendously higher bandwidth of human vision versus the teletype keyboard. They weren't trying to make artifacts for pre-linguistic, primitive cultures.
This was to my mind a terribly socially retrogradething to do, and I have not changed my mind about that.
And why would you? It's quite easy to cling to one's initial, elitist impressions, isn't it?
Check this out: companies producing commercial (read, off the shelf) software in the early 80's included... well, MS was about it.
What are you talking about?!? Even if we restrict this discussion to business software for the PC in the early 1980s, I suggest you investigate the marketshare of products like Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar, dBase II, Wordperfect, etc. MS Word and Excel weren't introduced until the mid/late 1980s, and didn't start dominating the IBM PC market until Windows 3.0, around 1990.
Look, I use MS Word and Excel everyday, and think they're good enough products. I've got nothing against Microsoft's applications. But you can't rewrite history to suit your view of the present...
That is exactly my point. And the IBM PC ran... hang on... Microsoft DOS. Before that, there was the TRS-80, but oops, that ran Microsoft's BASIC.
The IBM PC ran...hang on...PC-DOS. Yeah, Microsoft made it. Do you know which Taiwanese company made the obscure chip that interfaces your computer and keyboard? Probably not, because it's a commodity product. Microsoft's contribution stood in precisely this relation in most people's minds back then. People were just waiting for Digital Research, or whatever they were called, to reduce their own product, and they eventually released a few. (DR-DOS and CP/M-86, or something like that.) The point is, in the early 1980s, Microsoft was riding other companies' coattails. They were completely dispensible.
(By the way, there were lots of other platforms before the IBM PC besides the various TRS-80s. Apple IIs and CP/M (S-100) machines had large followings. As I recall, Jobs and Woz directly ripped off Gates's BASIC for their Applesoft basic.)
I'm just saying most geeks wouldn't have jobs if it wasn't for Microsoft getting copyright status for software back in the early 80's.
I really don't know what this means; perhaps you're thinking of some case I'm not familiar with? I'd appreciate it if you enlightened me (seriously).
But admit it -- computers didn't become big business until Bill Gates got copyright protection on BASIC back in the early 80's.
wrong. computers didn't become big business until: 1. visicalc on the apple II+ showed accountants at least the value of pcs. 2. ibm introduced their pc, legitimizing pcs. (not just for hobbyists anymore!) 3. lotus 1-2-3 cruystallized (1) and (2). at least that's how i remember it. at that time, gates was thought of as something of a selfish bastard for not sharing his code among other hobbyists and nascent capitalists, and microsoft was just one of many software houses.
I've had a university account for the last decade, and I use it for exaclty this purpose.
the andrew system at carnegie mellon worked this way back in the late 1980s. everyone had an account, which entitled you to some hard drive space. you could sit at any andrew terminal, log in, and it was as if you were at your own graphical work station. your email and newsgroups and everything would come up just as you indicated in your preferences. the windowing system was nice, an early competitor to X. the andrew file system, which was distributed, drove the whole thing -- i think it's still in use, and at least mentioned in tanenbaum's book on networks. i can't remember the flavor of unix that was used, but i think it was berkeley-ish and not, at the time anyway, mach. also, i think the workstations has local disks to which your files were cached, so that there wasn't a huge performance hit for all disk access.
it was my first exposure to unix, workstations, networks, etc., and i realize only in retrospect how advanced it all was.
i don't know what to make of the.NET deal. it does sound like the old mainframe/terminal, but if it leans more towards what the andrew system was, then it will offer windows users a better way (modulo security issues and general microsoft bugginess, of course).
Hmmm. So movies and music will be free in the future, countering recent history. Great.
But why just music? Doesn't the net simplify the distribution of all (artistic) media?
I've been holding out paying twenty-odd dollars for Gibson's latest novel, "All Tomorrow's Parties." (I'm a poor grad student, you see.) Perhaps I'll see if ol' Bill's latest and greatest is available out there gratis. Perhaps that'll wipe the smirk off his face.
Here are a few others, some of which have been mentioned before:
1. "Similarity" based algorithms like hashing and radix sort. It still seems magical to me that hashing is constant-time and radix sort O(n). They are reminders that if you know a bit about the data you'll be handed as input, you can often do better than more general algorithms.
2. Using dynamic programming to solve certain kinds of optimization problems in polynomial time. Show-stopping examples (for me) are "memoization," the Earley parsing algorithm, and Korf's work on macroperator induction.
3. Everyone has their favorite recursive algorithm. Mine is the ID3 algorithm (now, C4.5) developed by Quinlan. It's simple (a page or two of Lisp) and it works well.
Reverse polish notation is the most idiotic thing anyone ever came up with.
agreed. i really like having to parenthesize arithmetical expressions and memorize obscure (and, in the case of C, broken) precedence rules. it's a lot more fun than actually programming.
the slide i find most interesting is the one titled "standards." there are a host of externally-imposed constraints that any new OS must meet to earn a seat at the table. they constraint future OSes more tightly than they've been constrained before. while we deeply explore one region of the possible OS space, our tunnel vision keeps us from seeing other, radically different solutions to the problem of managing a computer's resources.
this seems related to christopher alexander's idea -- at least back in the 1970s -- that any artifact constrained too-tightly from the beginning by an externally-suppplied master plan (i.e., set of of standards) will suffer from at least two problems.
first, it will alienate users, for by definition their freedom to adapt the artifact to meet their personal needs will be minimal. mr. pike clearly feels chafed by this.
second, any such design is by its very nature brittle. you can't anticipate the future fully, and minor design decisions you make now will wind up as insurmountable bottlenecks in the future. and then what are you gonna do? the master plan will offer no help.
i read mr. pike as sounding a relatively early warning call. it's not so much that your beloved OS ??? stinks as it is advice to reduce the growth rate of "must have" external constraints to allow more time to contemplate radical refactorings or reorganziations of current systems.
Slashdot Mirror
you obviously know more history than most slashdotters, so why the inflammtory bits?
but its model of applications and data was not much different from your average DOS machine.
event loops? resource forks? no segments/extended memory/expanded memeory crapola? the list of differences between the Mac and DOS applications and data of the time was huge, although you are certainly correct that the Mac was much more of a hack than the Lisa, let alone the Xerox D-machines.
(And the more I explore NT, the more I see thinly veiled impersonations of Unix.)
Actually, the NT design team was composed mainly of imports from DEC who had worked on VMS. You know that UNIX is not the only archaic text-based industrial-strength operating system, don't you?
Mr. G. Funk,
I really enjoyed your rant. I went to your home page to learn more about your personal philosophy since your are clearly a wise man. However, my browser was unable to render it properly. I use Mosaic v1.0. Do you know what is wrong?
Sincerely,
sv0f
Read Gabriel's "Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community" for one man's search for beauty in a lot of places -- his code, his company, the arts, his life.
Beautiful code is a subject worth contemplating, not speeding by with the standard crap answers above. Here are two quite-different places to find beautiful code:
(1) The "Programming Pearls" books by Bentley.
(2) "On Lisp" by Paul Graham
Also, Here are some quotes of relevance:
The [benefit] which rhyme has over blank verse...is, that it bounds and circumscribes the fancy. For imagination in a poet is a faculty so wild and lawless, that, like an high-ranging spaniel, it must have clogs tied to it, lest it outrun the judgment. -- John Dryden
The central task of a natural science is to make the wonderful commonplace: to show that complexity, correctly viewed, is only a mask for simplicity; to find pattern hidden in apparent chaos. - Herb Simon
The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics...It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is just as true of beauty of any kind -- we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent is from recognizing one when we read it. -- G. H. Hardy
Joseph LaGrange..."believed that a mathematician has not thoroughly understood his own work till he has made it so clear that he can go out and explain it effectively to the first man he meets on the street." -- E. T. Bell
When judging a physical theory, I ask myself wether I would have made the Universe in that way had I been God. -- Einstein
Beauty is the proper conforminty of the parts to one another and to the whole. - Hesienberg
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion! - Francis Bacon
Simplex sigillum veri - The simple is the seal of the true. And Pulchritudo splendor veritatis - Beauty is the splendour of truth. - S. Chandrasekhar
The Scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living... I mean the intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts. -- Poincare
My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or another, I usually chose the beautiful. -- Hermann Weyl
Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all Ye know on earth, And all ye need to know. -- Keats
There are some great men of science whose charm consists in having said the first word on a subject, in having introduced some new idea which has proved fruitful; there are others whose charm consists perhaps in having said the last word on a subject, and who have reduced the subject to logical consistency and clearness. -- J. J. Thomson
Do you know we're sitting on 4 million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon, and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder? Makes you feel good, doesn't it? -- Steve Buscemi ("Rockhound") in "Armageddon."
And in any case define porn some of the pictures on a breast cancer site would be considered by someone like my Grandmother porn.
Mmmmmh. breast cancer porn. delicious.
They might be fulfilling to the programmer, but that does not necessarily mean that games programming is the highest form of programming.
In addition to the errors in this statement that have been pointed out by others, also note that he said that games push the limits of hardware (700 Mhz processors and 3D accelerators) more than most other kinds of software. In other words, games are not a higher form a program, but they do consume more of the computing resources than most other categories of program.
Lisp has had object-oriented facilities for at least as long as C++ has existed (e.g., Flavors). Common Lisp is an object-oriented programming language with several unique properties. As I understand it, Common Lisp was technically the first object-oriented language that fully passed ANSI standardization. Lispers think of their language as multi-paradigm (functional, procedural, object-oritented).
A third monolith has been spotted in Redmond, in the middle of the Microsoft campus. Early reports indicate a small but statistically reliable drop in the number of bugs being found by quality assurance specialists in Microsoft software. Related reports from the Gates compound indicate that Melinda is finding Bill "more human" than usual.
(1) through (9) are just from the past few years. Apple's history of innovation is much longer than this. Here are some more features that Apple established in the marketplace:
10. 3.5 inch floppy
11. GUI
12. Built-in networking on all machines.
13. Laser printing.
14. (Mechanical) mouse standard on all systems.
15. SCSI.
16. Quicktime
This list goes on and on and on, although there was a conspicuous lack of innovation during the non-Jobs years. The fact is that Apple is the one company in the industry that has consistently pushed innovative technologies into the mainstream, and not just caved to conservative inertia. I shudder to think what Wintel machines would be like today if they hadn't had to keep pace with Apple. This computer is now available with three (count 'em THREE) 5.25 floppy drives AND a 30x100 monochrome display, both industry firsts!
(1) Beer.
(2) Stock in MSFT.
The big, Big, BIG former Apple/Macintosh employees behind Nautilus appear to be Andy Hertzfield and Guy "Bud" Tribble. They lend instant GUI credibility to Nautilus. Perhaps Sun noticed this.
More likely, it's an insider thing. It says in Tribble's bio that he has "held several VP-level positions at Sun during the past seven years" and was "VP and chief technology officer for the Sun-Netscape Alliance".
More here.
I can't believe it. Sure, Wordstar was a popular program, but historically, it's no more important for word processing than dBase II was for databases or Visicalc for spreadsheets. So why not dBase II or Visicalc?
Sashank
I was then working on the development of APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and I was committed to the idea that what we were doing with computers was making languages that were better than natural languages for procedural thought.
I assume APL2 is a descendant of APL. APL is one of the most cryptic languages ever invented, just ridiculously dense. If this is this guy's idea of a good computer language...
The idea was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of knowledge, and to help people think in more precise and clear ways.
There is no "mental logic". This is one of those common fallacies. There is no evidence that teaching children logic, latin, logo, or whatever subject people at the time think exercises the "mental muscle" improves thinking in any general sense. Read any textbook on cognitive psychology for the details. Of course, because most computer programmers are rather good at abstract and mathematical thinking, they egocentrically think this is the way all people think, or all people should think, or that is best.
What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt.
sigh.I just finished a recent book on the history of Xerox PARC, Dealers of Lightning by Hiltzik. It traces the motivation behind the development of the GUI. I recommend it to you all for more insight than this quote offers.
For what it's worth, I see the GUI as a win over command languages in many situations because it makes the intentions of actions clear. The desktop metaphor works because people know the purposs of the various objects on one's real desktop, and so there's no need to infer the consequences of the paralle objects of their GUI. On the other hand, to learn the intentionality of key combinations is to start from scratch. As far as the visual versus linguistic nature of GUIs versus command languages, well, the folks at Xerox were trying to capitalize on the tremendously higher bandwidth of human vision versus the teletype keyboard. They weren't trying to make artifacts for pre-linguistic, primitive cultures.
This was to my mind a terribly socially retrogradething to do, and I have not changed my mind about that.
And why would you? It's quite easy to cling to one's initial, elitist impressions, isn't it?
In fact, I learned programming on it. RPN is superior to the "normal" way
close. prefix notation is superior to the "normal" way. go learn more about the programming language lisp.
(does it even have a name?).
the "normal" was is called "infix".
Check this out: companies producing commercial (read, off the shelf) software in the early 80's included... well, MS was about it.
What are you talking about?!? Even if we restrict this discussion to business software for the PC in the early 1980s, I suggest you investigate the marketshare of products like Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar, dBase II, Wordperfect, etc. MS Word and Excel weren't introduced until the mid/late 1980s, and didn't start dominating the IBM PC market until Windows 3.0, around 1990.
Look, I use MS Word and Excel everyday, and think they're good enough products. I've got nothing against Microsoft's applications. But you can't rewrite history to suit your view of the present...
That is exactly my point. And the IBM PC ran ... hang on ... Microsoft DOS. Before that, there was the TRS-80, but oops, that ran Microsoft's BASIC.
The IBM PC ran...hang on...PC-DOS. Yeah, Microsoft made it. Do you know which Taiwanese company made the obscure chip that interfaces your computer and keyboard? Probably not, because it's a commodity product. Microsoft's contribution stood in precisely this relation in most people's minds back then. People were just waiting for Digital Research, or whatever they were called, to reduce their own product, and they eventually released a few. (DR-DOS and CP/M-86, or something like that.) The point is, in the early 1980s, Microsoft was riding other companies' coattails. They were completely dispensible.
(By the way, there were lots of other platforms before the IBM PC besides the various TRS-80s. Apple IIs and CP/M (S-100) machines had large followings. As I recall, Jobs and Woz directly ripped off Gates's BASIC for their Applesoft basic.)
I'm just saying most geeks wouldn't have jobs if it wasn't for Microsoft getting copyright status for software back in the early 80's.
I really don't know what this means; perhaps you're thinking of some case I'm not familiar with? I'd appreciate it if you enlightened me (seriously).
But admit it -- computers didn't become big business until Bill Gates got copyright protection on BASIC back in the early 80's.
wrong. computers didn't become big business until:
1. visicalc on the apple II+ showed accountants at least the value of pcs.
2. ibm introduced their pc, legitimizing pcs. (not just for hobbyists anymore!)
3. lotus 1-2-3 cruystallized (1) and (2).
at least that's how i remember it. at that time, gates was thought of as something of a selfish bastard for not sharing his code among other hobbyists and nascent capitalists, and microsoft was just one of many software houses.
I've had a university account for the last decade, and I use it for exaclty this purpose.
.NET deal. it does sound like the old mainframe/terminal, but if it leans more towards what the andrew system was, then it will offer windows users a better way (modulo security issues and general microsoft bugginess, of course).
the andrew system at carnegie mellon worked this way back in the late 1980s. everyone had an account, which entitled you to some hard drive space. you could sit at any andrew terminal, log in, and it was as if you were at your own graphical work station. your email and newsgroups and everything would come up just as you indicated in your preferences. the windowing system was nice, an early competitor to X. the andrew file system, which was distributed, drove the whole thing -- i think it's still in use, and at least mentioned in tanenbaum's book on networks. i can't remember the flavor of unix that was used, but i think it was berkeley-ish and not, at the time anyway, mach. also, i think the workstations has local disks to which your files were cached, so that there wasn't a huge performance hit for all disk access.
it was my first exposure to unix, workstations, networks, etc., and i realize only in retrospect how advanced it all was.
i don't know what to make of the
Hmmm. So movies and music will be free in the future, countering recent history. Great.
But why just music? Doesn't the net simplify the distribution of all (artistic) media?
I've been holding out paying twenty-odd dollars for Gibson's latest novel, "All Tomorrow's Parties." (I'm a poor grad student, you see.) Perhaps I'll see if ol' Bill's latest and greatest is available out there gratis. Perhaps that'll wipe the smirk off his face.
Here are a few others, some of which have been mentioned before:
:)
1. "Similarity" based algorithms like hashing and radix sort. It still seems magical to me that hashing is constant-time and radix sort O(n). They are reminders that if you know a bit about the data you'll be handed as input, you can often do better than more general algorithms.
2. Using dynamic programming to solve certain kinds of optimization problems in polynomial time. Show-stopping examples (for me) are "memoization," the Earley parsing algorithm, and Korf's work on macroperator induction.
3. Everyone has their favorite recursive algorithm. Mine is the ID3 algorithm (now, C4.5) developed by Quinlan. It's simple (a page or two of Lisp) and it works well.
4. The British Museum Algorithm
Reverse polish notation is the most idiotic thing anyone ever came up with.
agreed. i really like having to parenthesize arithmetical expressions and memorize obscure (and, in the case of C, broken) precedence rules. it's a lot more fun than actually programming.
CMUCL := Carnegie Mellon University Common Lisp. it's a free implementation of lisp known for speed.
I'm a professor at the most famous Ivy League University (along with being a partner at a software startup).
well, i'm a redneck in a trailer (along with owning a seadoo with my brother cletus).
i agree with everything you said. does that make me part of yer "intelligentsia"?
the slide i find most interesting is the one titled "standards." there are a host of externally-imposed constraints that any new OS must meet to earn a seat at the table. they constraint future OSes more tightly than they've been constrained before. while we deeply explore one region of the possible OS space, our tunnel vision keeps us from seeing other, radically different solutions to the problem of managing a computer's resources.
this seems related to christopher alexander's idea -- at least back in the 1970s -- that any artifact constrained too-tightly from the beginning by an externally-suppplied master plan (i.e., set of of standards) will suffer from at least two problems.
first, it will alienate users, for by definition their freedom to adapt the artifact to meet their personal needs will be minimal. mr. pike clearly feels chafed by this.
second, any such design is by its very nature brittle. you can't anticipate the future fully, and minor design decisions you make now will wind up as insurmountable bottlenecks in the future. and then what are you gonna do? the master plan will offer no help.
i read mr. pike as sounding a relatively early warning call. it's not so much that your beloved OS ??? stinks as it is advice to reduce the growth rate of "must have" external constraints to allow more time to contemplate radical refactorings or reorganziations of current systems.