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The Story of Mel (1983)

cs.utah.edu

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Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#91

Post by toss1 »

Suzuran wrote: post #85
toss1 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: OP made a response indicating that his objection to Mel was that he left zero documentation. To this, I agree 100% !! Leaving no documentation is doing your future self a huge disservice (even a few weeks from now it'll be helpful if you've left yourself some good breadcrumbs to follow), and is pretty much a hostile act towards the team. ----- initial comment ----- Sure, if he's doing that kind of highly idiosy…

Please read his response of about 30 minutes ago, it's a few replies up. It's not what you think.

Oh, thanks for the alert!

Indeed not at all what it first seemed.

edited (original had sat in writing for a while then submitted later w/o reacing new context comments)

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#92

Post by mlyle »

oaiey wrote: post #90
mlyle wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat! I'm curious if you remember anything about this or the materials. I have developed something very similar that I teach to middle schoolers: https://github.com/mlyle/armtrainer

That looks very identical ;) just so much more modern. A lot smaller and the screen is so much more fancy. Think that with old style boards, old-style chips, old-style number screen.

Yah! I was familiar with old "microprocessor trainers" and I tried to recreate that. There's nice on-chip debug that makes writing a monitor to do this pretty easy.

I was more thinking-- curriculum? How old were you? Anything particular stick with you that I should be sure to include?

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#93

Post by acuozzo »

mlyle wrote: post #86
markus_zhang wrote: post #11

I think I found Melvin Kaye's obituary a few years ago but I couldn't find it anymore. A pity that both him and Ed Nather passed away :(

There's this comment long ago about getting in contact with him that has always made me curious, but no information was proffered: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7871260 And, of course, there's this picture that was found of him: https://zappa.brainiac.com/MelKaye.png

> but no information was proffered

What more would you like to know? I'm bad at telling stories, but I can do Q&A.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#94

Post by mlyle »

acuozzo wrote: post #93
mlyle wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's this comment long ago about getting in contact with him that has always made me curious, but no information was proffered: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7871260 And, of course, there's this picture that was found of him: https://zappa.brainiac.com/MelKaye.png

> but no information was proffered What more would you like to know? I'm bad at telling stories, but I can do Q&A.

:D I'm just guessing at questions, since I don't have much context.

You found him-- did you get to really talk to him? Find out how he looks back on that era? Did he keep programming?

What scared him away?

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#95

Post by MatthiasPortzel »

billpg wrote: post #28

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

Obviously, not documenting things and writing the most clever code possible makes it difficult for other people to read your code, there’s no doubt about that. And the story acknowledges that. It’s clear that Mel is a very clever programmer but probably a pain to work with.

But your comment is just so dismissive of the point of the story, Mel’s cleverness. It comes across like you saying “This person sounds awful because they’re smarter than me.” I can assume that’s not what you’re trying to say, but that’s what it sounds like.

If you wrote a more nuanced comment acknowledging that, e.g. ‘while I would love the opportunity to learn from someone like that, I’m glad I don’t have to work with them or maintain their code.’ I would be more inclined to see your comment as contributing to the discussion.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#96

Post by jhbadger »

jart wrote: post #84
eob wrote: post #60

I bought the Hackers Dictionary by Eric S. Raymond as a 90s kid and it had this story, as well as a few others. Das Blinkenlights and some AI Koans like the Broken Lisp Machine come to mind. I used to read them over and over, and it really left an imprint on me. The early hacker ethos was such a strong flavor. Sort of a "one part gnostic, one part mechanic, one part counterculture" vibe. Sometimes I wonder if that fl…

A lot of that ethos I think is just Generation X plus computers. A rebellious generation that came of age during a time when digital technology had just granted kids the power to wardial norad. I think tinkerers have always been timeless, but that kind of cyberpunk culture is something we're unlikely to see again.

I'm solidly GenX, but the hacking culture described by "The Hacker's Dictionary" is a generation older than that -- the era of the MIT AI Lab or Stanford's SAIL in the mid 1970s. Lisp Machines and custom in-house operating systems. The GenX hacking culture was the 1980s and was more about getting the most out of our own microcomputers.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#97

Post by kps »

Suzuran wrote: post #79
billpg wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the story, The storyteller is tasked with maintaining Mel's code. He can't do it. Mel hadn't left any documentation. All sort of tricks. No explanation of what's going on.

Upvoted for the effort of responding in verse, very nice. That rubbed me the wrong way too. Even the hackers at MIT documented their hacks, they even wrote up a memo explaining a bunch of them so others could understand and build on them - see HAKMEM. Documentation was much more extensive and available back then. Systems frequently came with full schematics, and you could call the design team on the phone if you want…

The story is known to be inaccurate in technical detail¹, so it's not impossible that it's inaccurate in social detail as well. There's some LGP-30 code on Bitsavers including scanned coding forms, and the ones initialled ‘MK’ are not notably different in level of commentary from the others.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20489273

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#98

Post by acuozzo »

mlyle wrote: post #94
acuozzo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but no information was proffered What more would you like to know? I'm bad at telling stories, but I can do Q&A.

:D I'm just guessing at questions, since I don't have much context. You found him-- did you get to really talk to him? Find out how he looks back on that era? Did he keep programming? What scared him away?

> You found him-- did you get to really talk to him?

Yes. Here's the e-mail exchange: http://acuozzo.sdf.org/Mel.pdf

(I moved all of my e-mails to Gmail via Thunderbird years ago which is why the sender address is different.)

I found him after Bill Bryner mentioned in an e-mail that Mel "was trying to become an expert (Master?) at Bridge and also played flute with the UCLA pep band for basketball games".

I figured he hadn't moved far from where he was working in LA at the time and I was right! His e-mail address was listed among the members of the Thousand Oaks, CA ACBL Unit 532 Bridge club/league.

> Find out how he looks back on that era? Did he keep programming?

I couldn't find any of this out because I scared him away. My guess is that he just wasn't the nostalgic type.

> What scared him away?

My guess is that he was spooked because I contacted his son a few days prior.

… and the webmaster responsible for running his son's business' website.

… and several other people. I must have seemed like a genuine creeper.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#99

Post by mlyle »

acuozzo wrote: post #98
mlyle wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:D I'm just guessing at questions, since I don't have much context. You found him-- did you get to really talk to him? Find out how he looks back on that era? Did he keep programming? What scared him away?

> You found him-- did you get to really talk to him? Yes. Here's the e-mail exchange: http://acuozzo.sdf.org/Mel.pdf (I moved all of my e-mails to Gmail via Thunderbird years ago which is why the sender address is different.) I found him after Bill Bryner mentioned in an e-mail that Mel "was trying to become an expert (Master?) at Bridge and also played flute with the UCLA pep band for basketball games". I figured he…

Oh. Thank you for sharing the e-mail exchange.

That's too bad he wasn't interested in talking about it all. I can imagine if he was aware of it, having random people pop-up wanting to discuss could become annoying.

Thank you for the info!

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#100

Post by cestith »

egypturnash wrote: post #70
cestith wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Story of Mel was likely in direct response to "Real programmers don't use PASCAL", or potentially another very similar "Real Programmers" writing.

A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement: Real Programmers write in FORTRAN. - the first lines of The Story Of Mel

That line was included in more than one post. There are also multiple posts from that time period which said exactly the opposite. It was an ongoing joke, raised to somewhat of an art form.

https://www.multicians.org/thvv/realprogs.html

http://www.bernstein-plus-sons.com/RPDEQ.html

https://www.ecb.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20080419225755/http://www.suslik...

Old magazines, BBSes, Usenet, and mailing lists are full of this sort of humor.

https://www.mipmip.org/tidbits/project.html

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