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The Story of Mel (1983)

cs.utah.edu

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Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#161

Post by kfajdsl »

nemo1618 wrote: post #76
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…

I've wondered this too. When my dad was learning to program, this was the culture. When I was learning to program, the culture was no longer fresh and alive, but its spirit was still strongly felt; the torch was being passed to us. Have we preserved that light? If my son learns to program, what will "hacker culture" mean to him?

It's still alive, but it's not the culture IMO. Which is sad.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#162

Post by dale_glass »

lbriner wrote: post #18

Sadly we have strayed to the other extreme. From "every instruction is precious" right over to, "who cares how many instructions I use?" Nowadays, desktop apps which started in an instant 20 years ago, seem to take several seconds even before they are even doing anything useful like loading a project or whatever. Even things like Visual Studio looking through the MRU project list can take 10 seconds (probably a threa…

Who cares about instruction counts? Computers are there to get stuff done, they're a means to an end.

Good algorithms are far more important than instruction level optimization, which is to a large degree pointless anyway, since new CPUs come out all the time, and change the tradeoffs involved.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#163

Post by cestith »

Arcorann wrote: post #153
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.

The original version of the post [1] cited the article "Real programmers Don't Use PASCAL" by name. For some reason it disappeared in the later versions. [1] https://cboh.org/mel.txt

Thank you. I thought I remembered that from elsewhere, and was a little surprised to see the oblique reference to one of the many similar writings from the time.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#164

Post by philwelch »

zasdffaa wrote: post #155
agentwiggles wrote: post #43

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 hack…

Thanks, I'll read your link but I must dispute your enthusiasm: "It took me two weeks to figure it out" Leaving a no-documentation time bomb for your successor is not to be celebrated, nor IMO is it a hackerish thing to do.

It’s not to be celebrated, but it’s an extremely hackerish thing to do.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#165

Post by nmeofthestate »

the_af wrote: post #78
nmeofthestate wrote: post #59

I had to strip out the pretend poetry formatting before reading. https://pastebin.com/raw/TyqZXPVe

I agree with the sibling comment, the verse formatting makes it even better!

I have to disagree - it was a nice read without the grafted on pseudo poetic pretentiousness.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#166

Post by cxr »

lproven wrote: post #83
lbriner wrote: post #18

Sadly we have strayed to the other extreme. From "every instruction is precious" right over to, "who cares how many instructions I use?" Nowadays, desktop apps which started in an instant 20 years ago, seem to take several seconds even before they are even doing anything useful like loading a project or whatever. Even things like Visual Studio looking through the MRU project list can take 10 seconds (probably a threa…

Agreed. My #1 annoyance these days, because it is so egregious, is Electron apps. I guess because the only language some programmers know is Javascript, of which I know little but what little I know places it marginally above PHP in intrinsic horror. So people write standalone apps in a language intended for tweaking web pages, meaning that to deploy those apps requires embedding an entire web browser into every app.…

> meaning that to deploy those apps requires embedding an entire web browser into every app

It doesn't require it, that's just what they choose, and it has little to do with the language. (Besides, if you actually observe them—and ignore what they tell you about liking JS—then it's clear that most of them hate their preferred language.) Languages and the bindings that a particular runtime exposes are orthogonal. You can have GTK apps written in JS, for example, or you can write a program in JS that compiles into a binary that runs on a microcontroller[2].

This is much more of a problem with the culture of Electron and the adjacent NPM ecosystem than it is anything else. Conflating the source of these problems is a great way to tank any would-be activism meant to solve them.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Shell>

2. https://github.com/Moddable-OpenSource/moddable/blob/public/...>

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#167

Post by adrianmonk »

foobarbecue wrote: post #144
adrianmonk wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just a spelling variation. "Ae" or "æ" does show up in English words sometimes, but a lot of times it gets simplified to "e" (probably closer to the pronunciation). Examples: "aeon"/"eon", "caesium"/"cesium", "paediatrician"/"pediatrician", "anaesthesia"/"anesthesia", "haemoglobin"/"hemoglobin", and "chimaera"/"chimera". And more debatably, "daemon"/"demon" and "aeroplane"/"airplane". Generally, British…

Hm. Aesthetics really doesn't make sense in the context. Ethics does.

To me, aesthetics does fit. It has two different meanings. One refers to the overall subject area of beauty, like, "This warehouse isn't pretty, but the people who made it weren't thinking of aesthetics." The other meaning refers to a particular artistic style or concept of beauty. For example, minimalism is an aesthetic, because to some people a clean look is beautiful. You might say the main page at google.com has a minimalist aesthetic.

If a programmer has a certain sense of what they feel is beautiful, they can incorporate that into their code and the way they go about creating it. So you could say Mel's sense of what makes code beautiful is deep knowledge of the computer and clever code that ties in with that.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#168

Post by jandrusk »

agentwiggles wrote: post #43

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 hack…

I wrote a Twitter bot in Python that tweets one of the Hacker Dictionary Words of Day once a day.

https://twitter.com/hashtag/hackdict?src=hashtag_click

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#169

Post by ddingus »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #154
ddingus wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing! And it parallels the early learning my peer group and I experienced in the 80's. We had Apple 2 type computers to work with and a small group of us were split off to do a deeper dive education. And really it was a sort of student guided education. Basically, the teacher asked is to declare what we were going to try and do and that was more about making sure we did something besides play games than it was any…

Your teacher is great. People may not appreciate now but just getting info is hard.

Yes it is. I took too many words to convey that in my comment above.

Two very high value things:

Getting us kids relevant, useful info

, and

Time / Focus management.

When done with basic human consideration in mind, those two amplify the good thinking and knowledge building.

Great teachers get that and apply it to the course, project at hand and the students benefit greatly.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#170

Post by nocoiner »

pfarrell wrote: post #16

This page [0] includes an analysis of the manual for the possible machine Mel programmed in the story along with a probable photograph of him. [1] is an instruction manual for the blackjack program itself, written by Mel. Classic story solidly in the “should be reposted every six months or so” cohort. 0: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/macho-programmers-drum-mem... 1: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/royalPre…

It’s interesting to me that caption to the 1956 newspaper picture in the first linked article identifies someone from the NSA. I thought the mere existence of that agency was basically classified information well into the ‘70s.
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