501–510 of 931 posts
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I see, is there anything you see today that you like? (Coq, Idris maybe?)
While the methods are different from what Alan has espoused in the past, I'd like to believe the goals are very well aligned.
Hi, Alan! Like many here, I'm a big fan of what you've accomplished in life, and we all owe you a great debt for the great designs and features of technologies we use everyday! The majority of us have not accomplished as much in technology, and many of us, though a minority, are in the top end of the age bell curve. I'm in that top end. I've found over the years that I've gone from being frustrated with the churn of…
Hey Alan, you once said that lisp is the greatest single programming language ever designed. Recently, with all the emergence of statically typed languages like Haskell and Scala, has that changed? Why do you think after being around for so long, lisp isn't as popular as mainstream languages like Java, C or Python? And lastly, what are your thoughts on MIT's switch to use Python instead of Scheme to teach their under…
The one thing that makes LISP great is the "functions are data" formulation. Many of the "current best paradigms" of Computer Science are actually fads. LISP was a fad of the 1980s. Java was a fad of the 1990s. NoSQL databases are a current fad. It doesn't mean that one is better than another. It's human nature to think that new technology must be better than old technology. In fact, the programming environment on th…
The "idea of Java" is not special (and it's not clear that you could even say there is an "idea of Java").
Hi Alan, We know you are not a big fan of web. Regardless how we got here, what is your view on how we should address the real world decentralization problems in the context of http://www.decentralizedweb.net/ ?
Hi Alan, There's a lot of economic pressure against building new systems. Making new hardware and software takes longer than building on the existing stuff. As time goes on, it gets harder and harder to match the features of the existing systems (imagine the effort involved in reimplementing a web browser from scratch in a new system, for example), not to mention the massive cost benefits of manufacturing hardware at…
We have a technology in which hacks are easy and can be really easily multiplied by the billions and sent everywhere. If we translate this into the world of medicine and disease and sanitation, what should we do? How far should we go?
(But it is still really hard for me to understand the nature and force of the resistance to "real objects" -- which -- as actual virtual encapsulated machines -- were invented to deal with scaling and replacement to parallel the same kinds of thinking we did for the Internet with physical objects (called "computers")
Yikes!
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SQL is declarative. Compare: for user in table_users: if user.is_active: return user.first_name; vs: SELECT first_name FROM users_table WHERE is_active It's unfortunate that the order of the clauses in SQL is "wrong" (e.g. you should say FROM, WHERE, SELECT: Define the universe of relevant data, filter it down, select what you care about), but it's still quite easy to wrap your mind around. You are asking the compute…
I fail to see a meaningful difference between these two approaches, especially if we transform the first one in a list comprehension: [user.first_name for user in table_users if user.is_active]
Hi Alan, the question that troubles me now and I want to ask you is: Why do you think there is always a difference between: A. the people who know best how something should be done , and B. the people who end up doing it in a practical and economically-successful or popular way? And should we educate our children or develop our businesses in ways that could encourage both practicality and invention? (do you think it'…
The question you are asking is really a societal one -- and about operations that are like strip mining and waste dumping. "Hunters and gatherers" (our genetic heritage) find fertile valleys, strip them dry and move on (this only works on a very small scale). "Civilization" is partly about learning how to overcome our dangerous atavistic tendencies through education and planning. It's what we should be about generally (and the CS part of it is just a symptom of a much larger much more dire situation we are in).
Hi Alan, There's a lot of economic pressure against building new systems. Making new hardware and software takes longer than building on the existing stuff. As time goes on, it gets harder and harder to match the features of the existing systems (imagine the effort involved in reimplementing a web browser from scratch in a new system, for example), not to mention the massive cost benefits of manufacturing hardware at…
One start to this is not to do "a web browser" -- or other software -- with such bad initial conceptions (see elsewhere above). There was nothing necessary about this. We have a technology in which hacks are easy and can be really easily multiplied by the billions and sent everywhere. If we translate this into the world of medicine and disease and sanitation, what should we do? How far should we go? (But it is still…
(And I doubt this is a problem that will go away with time; the web is big enough that it seems unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon.)
In a recent talk, Ivan Sutherland spoke in the lines of, “Imagine that the hardware we used today had time as a first-class concept. What would computing be like?” [1] To expand on Sutherland's point: Today's hardware does not concern itself with reflecting the realities of programming. The Commodore Amiga, which had a blitter chip that enabled high-speed bitmap writes with straightforward software implementation, br…