491–500 of 931 posts
My understanding was that you were there at the keynote where Steve Jobs launched the iPad. From what we've heard Steve came up to you after the event and asked you what you thought (implicitly acknowledging your work on the Dynabook).
Subsequent interviews suggested you thought that the iOS range of products "were the first computers good enough to criticise".
My question is: what has to happen next for the iPad to start achieving what you wanted to do with the Dynabook?
Comparing how you think about doing research now with how you thought when you were starting out, what is the biggest change in your thinking?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could someone give hints/pointers that help me understand the following? "parsing non-command messages in each process ... not a strong attempt to intertwine a real language around the message structures (this very same thing happened with http" Does that mean the messages should have been part of a coherent protocol or spec? That there should have been some thought behind how messages compose into new messages?
Smalltalk was an early attempt at non-command-messages to objects with the realization that you get a "programming language" if you take some care with the conventions used for composing the messages.
Hi Alan, 1. what do you think about the hardware we are using as foundation of computing today? I remember you mentioning about how cool was the architecture of the Burroughs B5000 [1] being prepared to run on the metal the higher level programming languages. What do hardware vendors should do to make hardware that is more friendly to higher level programming? Would that help us to be less depending on VM's while sti…
If you start with "desirable process" you can eventually work your way back to the power plug in the wall. If you start with something already plugged in, you might miss a lot of truly desirable processes. Part of working your way back to reality can often require new hardware to be made or -- in the case of the days of microcode -- to shape the hardware. There are lots of things vendors could do. For example: Intel…
If you make the L1 cache larger, it will become slower and will be renamed to "L2 cache". There are physical reasons why the L1 cache is not larger, even though programs written in non-highlevel languages would profit from larger caches (maybe even moreso than HLL programs).
> Right now a plug-in or available FPGA could be of great use in many areas.
FPGAs are very, very HLL-unfriendly, despite lots of effort from industry and academia.
Have you ever made serious mistake? That if given an opportunity, you would start over with a different approach.
Especially we are losing the initial generation of programmers.
What turning points in the history of computing (products that won in the marketplace, inventions that were ignored, technical decisions where the individual/company/committee could've explored a different alternative, etc.) do you wish had gone another way?
(a) Intel and Motorola, etc. getting really interested in the Parc HW architectures that allowed Very High Level Languages to be efficiently implemented. Not having this in the 80s brought "not very good ideas from the 50s and 60s" back into programming, and was one of the big factors in:
(b) the huge propensity of "we know how to program" etc., that was the other big factor preventing the best software practices from the 70s from being the start of much better programming, operating systems, etc. in the 1980s, rather the reversion to weak methods (from which we really haven't recovered).
(c) The use of "best ideas about destiny of computing" e.g. in the ARPA community, rather than weak gestures e.g. the really poorly conceived WWW vs the really important and needed ideas of Engelbart.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
About categorical change, I agree... seems like everybody is just busy optimizing stuff invented in the 70s.
Or less -- I think UIs have really gone downhill. But, it's also worth looking at places where there's been enough change of one kind or another to constitute "qualitative". This has certainly happened in many areas of engineering and in science. How about in computering?