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Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

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Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#111

Post by tannhaeuser »

chrisseaton wrote: post #89
tannhaeuser wrote: post #70

In 2021, we're having difficulties to surface even the history of computing and canonical documentation of the last two decades or so. Go search anything about early HTML, early JavaScript, research results in CompSci not even ten years old, POSIX reference docs, or even up-to-date JVM javadoc pages using your favorite search engine. It'll bring up all kinds of content marketing, naive march-of-progress advertising f…

What do you think is the difference between 'research results in CompSci not even ten years old' and 'academic pseudo science publications'? Do you just disagree with the research of the last ten years for some reason so dismiss it as not the real research and think there's some kind of under-appreciated research out there?

Please don't put words in my mouth. What I've said is that publication cadence is overwhelming, and academic, much less general-purpose search isn't up to it.

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#112

Post by pjmlp »

mikewarot wrote: post #27

Unlike Medicine, many of the ideas that we had in the past were better than the commonly accepted way things are done now. Capability based security, for example was something that allowed you to run any program, with no danger to your system. It's not part of any common OS. They had it at Xerox PARC, but Steve Jobs chose not to take that part. On the other hand, the PARC focus on replicating paper was a step backwar…

The Burroughs mentioned by Knuth, already had tagged memory, a systems programming language with unsafe code blocks, co-routines, bounds checking, the whole package, Go like compile speed (for 1961 hardware), compiler intrisics instead of Assembly, the whole package.

Nowadays still available as Unisys ClearPath MCP, with high level security as selling point, while it will take generations to fix UNIX and C's adoption at large, if ever.

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#113

Post by JoeAltmaier »

blt wrote: post #10

As a computer science graduate student, I am always surprised by how rarely my peers seem to know or care about the history of our field. I doubt many of them would write papers about computer science history even if the incentives were better. I think it is somehow related to the power of computer science to change the human condition. Everyone is thinking about the future. Mathematicians also crave novelty, but I d…

Compared to those employed in an industry, few write about the history of trains, or wifi, or road building, and on and on. It's normal for only a few academics to be interested.

There are only a couple of fields that are different - media (movies/broadcast), military, medicine. Probably because of the built-in human drama that's easily accessible?

As others have mentioned, Computer Science has a little human drama but few have sacrificed their lives or appeared heroic. It's a pretty dry field to document - more similar to road building.

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#114

Post by pjmlp »

mikewarot wrote: post #34
jdsalaro wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Capability based security, for example was something that allowed you to run any program, with no danger to your system. It's not part of any common OS. They had it at Xerox PARC, but Steve Jobs chose not to take that part. For FreeBSD there's Capsicum(1) and for Linux, although the implementation is not strictly capabily-based, there's SE-Linux which depending on the usecase resembles capability-based restrictions…

SE-Linux is the worst possible way to secure a linux system, its like when Microsoft went overboard on warnings, instead of actually trying to solve the problem. The main implementation difference in a capability based system is using a PowerBox to select files to give to a process, instead of letting the process access everything the user has rights to.

On Android you get no option, SE-Linux and seccomp are enabled by default and there are other measures in place that top any other Linux based OS.

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#115

Post by pjmlp »

doctorbaum wrote: post #63
mikewarot wrote: post #27

Unlike Medicine, many of the ideas that we had in the past were better than the commonly accepted way things are done now. Capability based security, for example was something that allowed you to run any program, with no danger to your system. It's not part of any common OS. They had it at Xerox PARC, but Steve Jobs chose not to take that part. On the other hand, the PARC focus on replicating paper was a step backwar…

How do you go about digging old PARC papers?

You start here,

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xerox

And then go over to symbolics, Borland, whatever.

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#116

Post by scott_s »

auggierose wrote: post #106
svat wrote: post #24

To be clear about the "(2014)", although Knuth gave this talk in 2014, this transcript of the talk is from the upcoming (February 2021) issue of Communications of the ACM. The whole sequence of articles/talks is interesting: - (2007, Martin Campbell-Kelly), "The History of the History of Software" (DOI: 10.1109/MAHC.2007.4407444 ) — the trigger for what follows. - (2014, Donald Knuth): "Let's Not Dumb Down the Histor…

So, what Haigh is saying, what historians as a field do, is useless. I agree.

That is an absurd take. For all fields, most people are on the outside. Historical work for most people - produced by those on the outside - is how our society and culture understands itself.

I recently finished an excellent one volume history of the Civil War, "Battle Cry of Freedom." It was written by James McPherson, a historian. This book has informed my understanding of not just the Civil War, but also the lead up to it. I believe this context is essential for understanding where we are now.

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#117

Post by Shorel »

wernercd wrote: post #23
blt wrote: post #10

As a computer science graduate student, I am always surprised by how rarely my peers seem to know or care about the history of our field. I doubt many of them would write papers about computer science history even if the incentives were better. I think it is somehow related to the power of computer science to change the human condition. Everyone is thinking about the future. Mathematicians also crave novelty, but I d…

I like history but how is history going to get me a functional game released or land a job interview? I don't need to know about DARPA to create a wordpress page or a C# Windows Service...

If you ever need to read something in one of Knuth's books, that's useful history for you.

I know because I was looking how to efficiently generate power sets and eventually the only good answer was in TAoCP!!!

So the answer is: history, the kind of history full of technical details that Knuth argues for, is extremely useful for our profession.

It is the empty, pop history, made without algorithm descriptions and full of only anecdotes what you are thinking about? Knuth argues against that!

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#118

Post by pjmlp »

mikewarot wrote: post #27

Unlike Medicine, many of the ideas that we had in the past were better than the commonly accepted way things are done now. Capability based security, for example was something that allowed you to run any program, with no danger to your system. It's not part of any common OS. They had it at Xerox PARC, but Steve Jobs chose not to take that part. On the other hand, the PARC focus on replicating paper was a step backwar…

> They had it at Xerox PARC, but Steve Jobs chose not to take that part.

At least they created Object Pascal and did two OSes with it, and contributed later on to the C++ industry adoption, instead of being yet another C powerhouse cloning UNIX.

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#119

Post by jerf »

brandmeyer wrote: post #108
Animats wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capability based security, for example was something that allowed you to run any program, with no danger to your system. It's not part of any common OS. I know, I know. Norm Hardy was really good, his system, KeyCos, worked, and few could understand him. I used to know his "explainer", Susan Rajunas. We don't even have proper "rings of protection", like Multics, any more. Although the real problem today is that we ne…

> Although the real problem today is that we need to run programs with less authority than the user running them, All true; But. What really stopped capability systems is that most users cannot be bothered to grant minimum privilege. Even most developers cannot - we invented containers in part as a way to mitigate the consequences of failing to grant minimum privilege.

As the old saying goes, you go to war with the army you have. I have a bunch of fantastic solutions to all our problems, if only programmers would work 10 times harder for every line of code, and the project managers would be OK with that, and the business funding it would be OK with that, and society would be OK with getting 1/10th the software.

Capabilities-based stuff is really neat, but it's also really complicated to put into practice, and I live in a world where it's often a struggle to get developers to label their brand new REST interface for whether or not it's "admin only". Personally, I think a lot of that "really complicated to put into practice" is essential complexity, not incidental; anytime you sit down and really think about what the optimal permissions scheme around any even slightly non-trivial system ought to be, you generally end up with something pretty complicated. But even if the perfect system existed and you handed it to the real developers we have today, you'd still be working with people who would do whatever the simplest thing they could do to fully bypass the capabilities system is and get on with life without a moment's twinge of conscience.

I don't want to be too hard on the average programmer; contra fashionable cynicism, things are actually getting better on the decade time scale. But at the current pace, "capabilities" are probably still a decade or two away from even being "niche".

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#120

Post by Shorel »

wernercd wrote: post #49
fooker wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History is not just about time — what happened when. An equally important part is the ordering and the reasons something happened. You can know how to write simple programs in all paradigms, but fail to understand what to use when. You might have memorized a long list of algorithms but not understand the trade-offs involved in choosing one. Of course history is not the only way to understand this, but it is definitel…

Well like I said... I enjoy history. but. I've never used history to solve business problems. They are related and good to know... but I don't need to know history to flip burgers, run a business or plan my next sprint. I'm not arguing history is unimportant or good to know or even possibly useful just to have ideas of what to do - or what not to do... I'm just arguing it's importance is over-emphasized.

> Well like I said... I enjoy history.

It totally looks like you don't. Are you sure about this sentence? Every other sentence seems to contradict this one.

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