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Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

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Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#71

Post by analog31 »

Rochus wrote: post #29
analog31 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in research you have to "do" something with an idea, at least hang your hat on a specific prediction, or carry out the experiment.

There is quite a difference between fundamental and applied research.

I've done both. Even in fundamental research, you have to "do" something in order to make an idea worth considering. Halley didn't just jot down that a comet might appear in 1758 [0]. He didn't just suggest that a comet could be used to test Newtonian mechanics. He had to work his computation from start to finish, find and fix the bugs, show convincingly how his result actually followed from the theory, etc. And computation was hard back then. Maybe 1758 wasn't the first answer he got.

Likewise other theoretical and fundamental work. Note that this is aside from the question of who gets "credit." Fortune tellers take credit for predictions. This is about what it takes to do good work under most circumstances.

[0] Wikipedia

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#72

Post by labrador »

cxr wrote: post #57
labrador wrote: post #47

If this interests you I recommend "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" by John Markoff and "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" by the BBC and Adam Curtis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o...

Howard Rheingold's book "Tools For Thought" profiles Ted (along with Engelbart, Licklider, and other familiar names). And you can read it for free nowadays from the author's own site. http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/index.html#index >

Thanks, this is fantastic. I see this and raise you "Seattle Mystic Alfred M. Hubbard: Inventor, Bootlegger and Psychedelic Pioneer" by Brad Holden

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57536256-seattle-myst...

Alfred M. Hubbard had an influence on Silicon Valley that is not well known.

From my copy of the book, page 73: "Meanwhile, as Hubbard crisscrossed the globe, he began hearing murmurs about a group of engineers and scientists in San Francisco who were expressing a strong interest in experiencing one of his guided trips [LSD]. They were located in a stretch of land that would eventually become known as Silicon Valley, and being a fellow inventor himself, the good Captain had every intention of paying them a visit"

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#73

Post by analog31 »

runevault wrote: post #42
analog31 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in research you have to "do" something with an idea, at least hang your hat on a specific prediction, or carry out the experiment.

Yes and no. You won't reap any benefits if you fail to create something useful with an idea, but if you were the first person to get the idea out in the world and other people made it useful, you still created value by helping inspire the other person to pursue what you did. Just probably won't get any monetary gain FROM that.

At least in the business world, I think the value of getting ideas out is vastly overrated. Someone else has to choose among a flood of ideas, which one is worth pursuing. And they may have had the same idea themselves but kept it to themselves.

I'm a bit adamant about this (and willing to eat the downvotes -- fair is fair). Every individual contributor (IC) has experienced credit for something they've worked on being given to a colleague or manager who comes in at the last minute and claims to have blurted out an idea at a meeting.

I've gotten plenty of credit for ideas -- 20+ patents. What I'm proud of is the part of a patent called "reduction to practice," where you figure out the details that prove an idea to be workable, and typically result in additional claims. I've informally adopted a standard that an "idea" has the same requirements as a patent, specifically a study of background information and an explanation of how something can be reduced to practice. I'm super generous with credit, especially towards my junior colleagues.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. And as a musician, I got over the difference between "doing" something, and making money, long ago.

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#74

Post by saghm »

xenomachina wrote: post #58
saghm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being very much a kid (at heart at least), I'll wager the question: what's the case against declaring variables as you need them? There's not really one, it's just a joke about how some languages used to work. > Also, at the top of which scope are you supposed to declare variables, function scope, class scope, ... somewhere else? In C, you used to have to declare all local variables at the top of the function rathe…

> In C, you used to have to declare all local variables at the top of the function rather than throughout the body. This is true, but support for block-scoped (as opposed to function-scoped) variable declarations was added to C a long time ago. Every version of ANSI C supports them, and this stack exchange answer, https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/300274/19196 , suggests that support was added to K&R C…

Hmm, interesting! I might be remembering wrong, but I remember within the last decade being told by a coworker that it was required for proper Windows support, but maybe that was just an old version of Visual Studio from XP or something that no longer needs to be supported.

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#75

Post by AlbertCory »

labrador wrote: post #69
AlbertCory wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry .. and how it didn't. Confessing I haven't actually read the book, but I've certainly read reviews & other articles about it. Hippies did not build the Internet. Or the personal computer industry. They were around and some jumped on it early, but it's clickbait to say they built it. The TV series "Halt and Catch Fire" is actually a better picture…

There's a difference between the words 'shaped' and 'built'. I'm sure Markoff chose his words carefully. 'shaped': determine the nature of; have a great influence on "his childhood was shaped by a loving relationship with his elder brother" 'built': past and past participle of build. 'build': construct (something) by putting parts or material together "the ironworks were built in 1736" Or in the context of the topic,…

So you haven't read it either? Let's argue about a book neither of us have read.

Hippies didn't "shape" the Internet, either. Rather, there was a general idea of openness which almost everyone shared, to some degree -- even the faculty and grad students and researchers who actually did build it. The telephone company people and the IBM'ers did not share it, and that's why their vision did not win out.

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#76

Post by stew-j »

verisimilitudes wrote: post #68
stew-j wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't believe we should store text as characters Could you briefly elaborate? [edit] I read the article on your HN link. I didn't quite "get it". Program text gets in the way, let's replace it with [?]. Dr. Strandh at U. of Bordeaux, et al., have argued that we shouldn't store programs as text files in an operating system--is that what you are advocating? An image based system, for example? > none of my work ever…

Yes, I can elaborate: http://verisimilitudes.net/2018-06-06 This is my current progress: http://verisimilitudes.net/2022-06-13 However, that was somewhat a waste of time, so I also wrote this reflection on it: http://verisimilitudes.net/2022-06-17 > Sorry for my part in that, most people don't find me interesting. I didn't intend the remark as an insult. It's interesting to mention Shakespeare so much. I'm reading Th…

The Internet is an easy target for blame, but in fact in the past month I found a number of people whose thinking (at least on some specific topic) was near to mine through Reddit discussions (and now you, it seems):

https://www.github.com/kaveh808

https://gitlab.com/flatwhatson/guile-prescheme

If you are interested in the nature of machine code and assembly language I would recommend at least looking at Scheme86:

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6042

It's like a Scheme interpreter running on hardware, and the latest successor to Steele/Sussman's Scheme-on-a-chip--I'm working on microcoding it with my inferior S-assembly. :) I didn't think you were being insulting--my last refuge in an increasingly humorless world appears to be self-deprecating humor.

Have you reached out to John Cowan, who is working on the R7RS Large Scheme standard, and is interested in topics like auxiliary human language as well as computer language and their representation? I'm not serious enough, I'm afraid, for the Scheme community (see above)--but they might take you more seriously:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Cowan

Another Scheme person, Jonathan Rees, was (or still may be) at a forward-thinking institute called "Ronin Institute"--I'm not sure what their process is for onboarding scholars but they might be interested in your work:

https://ronininstitute.org

Elmer Hanks wrote a forward thinking book many years ago called "Enterprises of Great Pith and Moment: A Proposal for a Universal Human Language" (my Shakespeare quote), about his machine readable, sign-language friendly, auxiliary language, and is worth a look in your domain of study.

I have been meaning to re-install Whitaker's Words which I used frequently in my own study of Latin, but lost when I upgraded my OS. You might have heard of Ido, an auxiliary language designed by Louis Couturat, a French logician, and the successor to Esperanto. It's almost completely regular, and I thought it might be a start for a more human-language neutral Scheme implementation (it is a Eurocentric language, so not completely neutral, unfortunately). My middle-school English teacher in 1981 pointed at the Esperanto booth in the language arts faire we took a field trip to and said, "I don't know why that booth is always so disappointingly unattended." I guess "ain't much changed", right?

I recommend "Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare" if you haven't read it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov%27s_Guide_to_Shakespear...

and maybe we should both just continue to choose "to be" rather than "not to be".

[edit]

I was talking this over with my wife, and after reading your links, I still don't completely understand the overall advantage of coding word stems rather than characters. It did remind me of the first computer I owned, a Sinclair ZX-81 I built from a kit. Its Basic keywords, FOR, GOSUB, RETURN were each represented as a bytecode--and I think you could enter with a special key modifier with one key-chord. Is this like what you are saying?

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#77

Post by andsoitis »

gardenfelder wrote: post #43
andsoitis wrote: post #10

The subtitle says Ted was the inventor of hypertext, but in the interview he credits Doug Engelbart. You can hear him say it if you listen from 4:30 to 4:45. "We thought computing would be artisanal. We did not imagine great monopolies." Even though hindsight is 20/20, I'm still surprised that the power of network effects didn't occur to him (or whoever the "we" refers to). "... artistic expression ..." Reminds me a…

Ted coined the term "hypertext"; he built a prototype Xanadu platform [1] which incorporated it. Engelbart created an editing system which used something like hypertext internally. Ted coined the term in 1963, along with "hypermedia" [2]; Engelbart published a paper in 1962 [3]; you can read it and decide for yourself whether he "invented" hypertext (by any name) in that paper. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proje…

From:

> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

Wired magazine published an article called "The Curse of Xanadu", calling Project Xanadu "the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry".[3] The first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it was not until 1998 that an incomplete implementation was released.

Ouch!

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#78

Post by spc476 »

saghm wrote: post #74
xenomachina wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In C, you used to have to declare all local variables at the top of the function rather than throughout the body. This is true, but support for block-scoped (as opposed to function-scoped) variable declarations was added to C a long time ago. Every version of ANSI C supports them, and this stack exchange answer, https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/300274/19196 , suggests that support was added to K&R C…

Hmm, interesting! I might be remembering wrong, but I remember within the last decade being told by a coworker that it was required for proper Windows support, but maybe that was just an old version of Visual Studio from XP or something that no longer needs to be supported.

And C99 allows you to declare variables anywhere in the function (much like C++).

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#79

Post by verisimilitudes »

stew-j wrote: post #76
verisimilitudes wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I can elaborate: http://verisimilitudes.net/2018-06-06 This is my current progress: http://verisimilitudes.net/2022-06-13 However, that was somewhat a waste of time, so I also wrote this reflection on it: http://verisimilitudes.net/2022-06-17 > Sorry for my part in that, most people don't find me interesting. I didn't intend the remark as an insult. It's interesting to mention Shakespeare so much. I'm reading Th…

The Internet is an easy target for blame, but in fact in the past month I found a number of people whose thinking (at least on some specific topic) was near to mine through Reddit discussions (and now you, it seems): https://www.github.com/kaveh808 https://gitlab.com/flatwhatson/guile-prescheme If you are interested in the nature of machine code and assembly language I would recommend at least looking at Scheme86: ht…

I'm aware of the Scheme chips. I chose machine language because it doesn't need many names for code, and thus was suitable as a starting point for my work on textless programming.

I've not reached out to John Cowan but think I might, despite my dislike of Unicode. I'll also look into this Ronin Institute. I'll keep the book in mind. I appreciate the help.

As I explain in the last linked article, a lot of these artificial languages retard language work, rather than help it. I expect to target real languages with most of my time now.

Think of Elision like MIDI, but for human language. Text is stored uniformly as indices into a dictionary, rather than as a sequence of characters with interspersed control codes.

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