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The Story of Mel (1983)

cs.utah.edu

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Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#41

Post by dcminter »

billpg wrote: post #28

I hope I never have to work with someone like him. He sounds awful.

There is a saying "autres temps, autres moeurs"

In a way I agree - someone programming like this right now without very good cause would be a bit of a nightmare if you ever had to tangle with their code. But it really was another world back then.

They were so resource constrained [1]. That "drum" wasn't the hard disk, it was the memory! Think about waiting for the rotation of a drum for each instruction read. Then the actual capacity of it was only 4K. The laptop I am typing this on has about 32 million times more memory and I don't like to think how much faster it is.

You either used clever tricks, or you wrote very limited programs. There was no room for any overhead. The author of that story wasn't astonished by clever tricks, just the degree of cleverness.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGP-30#Specifications

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#42

Post by zozbot234 »

ratww wrote: post #35
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really feels like being an end user of modern tech is like being in an abusive relationship. I've come to realize that a lot of modern developers consider users of their tech to be little more than cattle. The tech is cattle feed, meant to fatten and ensnare the user, so they can be sold off and slaughtered. There's really only one party in that kind of relationship that benefits.

+1000. But in my experience the trend started not with developers, but with the other people around them: Product Managers, Designers, Engineering Managers, Steve Jobs wannabes. There was an obvious disdain for users, and they were seen as complete dunces that should be shepherded to whatever new functionality happened to pop up their heads. There was also a complete disdain for the medium: designers used to print de…

> There was an obvious disdain for users

The disdain for "lusers" came from BOFH sysadmin types, well before it was adopted by the non-"tech", business-focused folks.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#43

Post by agentwiggles »

I've always loved this story as a tribute to the early hacker ethos. So easy to forget how high up the stack we live these days.

There are a few other gems at this site, in the "hacker folklore" appendix. http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/index.html

I like "How to Become a Hacker", and the AI Koans too. Lots of good stuff there. These old pages have a certain biblical magic to them.

I love our field! Long live the hacker.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#44

Post by int0x2e »

OmarAssadi wrote: post #39

I’m surprised I haven’t seen this linked yet, but Bryan Cantrill of dtrace, Sun, lawnmower, Joyent, etc, fame gave an amazing talk for Monktoberfest 2016, titled “Oral Tradition in Software Engineering”, which features The Story of Mel [1]. Highly recommend checking it out — there are loads of little gems and stories like this throughout. All of his other presentations are great too and definitely worth a listen if y…

Bryan Cantrill's talks are some the best I've ever seen. I've always tried sharing them around with colleagues (with limited success, but still worth it in my view...)

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#47

Post by [deleted] »

drfuchs wrote: post #37
naniwaduni wrote: post #7

Bonus trivia: those "Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers"? Those would not have been the 0-9a-f we're familiar with today, but 0-9fgjkqw[1]! [1]: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/lgp-30-man.html#R4.13

The reason for FGJKQW is simple: Look at the list of single-letter mnemonics for the 16 opcodes (called “orders” in the manual you cite). Sort them alphabetically, and look for the first six letters that are unused. Viola! (Of course, the problematic letter O is skipped, and for some reason, V as well.) That’s how it was explained to me in 1973 by Mr. Willoughby, a math teacher who also taught Computer Programming in…

[deleted]

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#48

Post by phkahler »

wawjgreen wrote: post #46

seems like yet another trip down the past-huggery and a penchant for doing-things-the-hardway. Real programmers don't write write-only code.

>> Real programmers don't write write-only code.

He did figure out how the program exited the loop, it just took him 2 weeks.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#49

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

zozbot234 wrote: post #42
ratww wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1000. But in my experience the trend started not with developers, but with the other people around them: Product Managers, Designers, Engineering Managers, Steve Jobs wannabes. There was an obvious disdain for users, and they were seen as complete dunces that should be shepherded to whatever new functionality happened to pop up their heads. There was also a complete disdain for the medium: designers used to print de…

> There was an obvious disdain for users The disdain for "lusers" came from BOFH sysadmin types, well before it was adopted by the non-"tech", business-focused folks.

But it became industrialized by business-types. The BOFH thing was personal. They considered (still do, sometimes), users of their systems to be "the great unwashed."

Basically, pests.

Business types look at users as a resource to be exploited to make money.

Basically, livestock.

Different outlook. We try to discourage pests, but we breed and incubate livestock. In neither case, are we particularly interested in the long-term benefit to our users. If anything, the BOFH types are actually working towards the benefit of their "lusers," because that's their job.

I write software that is targeted at a demographic that I actually respect, and sincerely want to benefit with my work (so, naturally, I don't get paid for it).

I'm constantly fighting with "modern software types" that want to treat users of the software that I write as livestock. They -quite literally- can't understand my PoV.

It's fairly discouraging, really. I'm treated like an idiot, because I actually want to help the users of my software.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#50

Post by Suzuran »

dcminter wrote: post #41
billpg wrote: post #28

I hope I never have to work with someone like him. He sounds awful.

There is a saying "autres temps, autres moeurs" In a way I agree - someone programming like this right now without very good cause would be a bit of a nightmare if you ever had to tangle with their code. But it really was another world back then. They were so resource constrained [1]. That "drum" wasn't the hard disk, it was the memory! Think about waiting for the rotation of a drum for each instruction read. Then th…

When adding 256 kilowords of memory to your PDP-10 cost $230,000 (2022 dollars) you were either clever or unemployed.

If your programs couldn't run on the machine you had, they were no good. Nobody was going to spend a quarter million dollars on equipment for the sake of source code beautification.

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