101–110 of 202 posts
I'm partial to Bryan Cantrill's Dtrace talk since it tackles a fundamental problem in software engineering and shows how to solve it using a new technology. The talk is more than 5 years old now, but sadly still as relevant as ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That exact quote is from a more recent talk of his, but he does mention the web and his current distaste for the design principles it embodies. I would encourage you to still watch the talk as it his criticism of the web is an incredibly small portion of the overall talk. I wish that you had included more substance in your criticisms so I could have either agreed with you, disagreed, or explained my interpretation of…
And yet no desktop toolkit has ever approached the ubiquity and deployability of the web. However much of a hodgepodge the web is, it can and will continue to improve incrementally, whereas the a GUI toolkit no matter how technically superior can never cross the chasm to ubiquity, wring your hands though you might.
There's no concept of "line 4 of chapter 3 of book X" in the web, at least not down at its core. You have to shim it in with anchor tags or something similar, and as a result we don't have ubiquitous browser apps that let me highlight a snippet of text in a book, write some notes in the margin (example: "this is a reference to Hamlet's soliloquy"), and then on a whim search for all of Noam Chomsky's (or whoever's) notes on Hamlet, or perhaps search for all public notes on this book in the context of Hamlet. The lack of structure means that everything's this haphazard soup of markup, with the focus being so much on how it looks that structure of the text and the relationship between parts gets lost. I'm not sure the "semantic web" will make up for that lack, but it's probably a good example of how the "next web will be built on the bones of this one" (to paraphrase someone else's comment in this thread).
Simple Made Easy changed how I think about constructing software systems of any kind. It provided me with a strong vocabulary and mental model to identify coupling and design with a more clear separation of concerns and focus on the output rather than the ease of development. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
Simple Made Easy changed how I think about constructing software systems of any kind. It provided me with a strong vocabulary and mental model to identify coupling and design with a more clear separation of concerns and focus on the output rather than the ease of development. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
Meredith Patterson's astonishing CCC talk on computing and linguistics. It's a tour de force, presenting a systematic and practical proposal for how we can build an open and secure future for computing. I can't imagine a better example of the joys of inter-disciplinary thinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEfedtQVOY
I found the message in the talk persuasive, but the presentation of it sorely lacking. Her delivery was stilted, probably because she was either very nervous and/or hadn't practiced her presentation nearly often enough to sound natural. On top of that, the talk was way too long. It could have been easily cut in half, at the very least. In a Boing Boing article[1] (which also, incidentally, calls her presentation a "t…
They also redefine what an OS and the Web (Hypercard style) means by removing as much accidental complexity as possible.
"Alan Kay: How Simply and Understandably Could The "Personal Computing Experience" Be Programmed?" http://vimeo.com/10260548
"Alan Kay: Extracting Energy from the Turing Tarpit" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt8jyPqsmxE
"Alan Kay: Programming and Scaling" http://www.tele-task.de/archive/lecture/overview/5819/
"Ian Piumarta - To trap a better mouse" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGeN2IC7N0Q
Papers here http://vpri.org/html/writings.php
Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII
Of course, the best technical talk is WAT by Gary Bernhardt! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXEgk1Hdze0