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Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?

#133

Post by endgame »

kenjackson wrote: post #33
chollida1 wrote: post #20

Guy Steele's "Growing a Language". A very cool idea for a talk! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0

Great talk. One of the best. His talk with Gabriel, 50 in 50, is not as good, but still quite fun. Well worth watching, but it is much better in person than on video (saw it at HOPL): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nii1n8PYLrc

Seconded. I saw it at YOW a few years back. If you get a chance to see it live, it is well worth it.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?

#134

Post by coldtea »

chubot wrote: post #122
coldtea wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If so I'll commit blasphemy and say he's wronger than wrong. I was especially offended that a curious person would display such ignorance in understanding the work of others. I don't see how he can be wrong. The point he made wasn't that the things they did in the 70s were better than today's web or UIs. Just that people (and companies) should have invested in THAT line of work, and building on THOSE principles, in…

Read my response above; you're not addressing the point he makes that the web should have been based on a VM. That's what I'm saying is wronger than wrong. If their line of research is based on distributing content over VMs, then that's completely different than the web's design philosophy, and it's probably THE reason his ideas never were adopted while the web was. Those design ideas are diametrically opposed. The d…

Your whole premise is that his ideas "weren't successful", whereas I see it more as a case of "Greenspun's tenth rule".

That is: tt's not that the VMs lost and the web won.

It's the web started from something that wasn't adequate for what we wanted, and after all these years it has been adding all kinds of kludgy, warty and half-baked implementations of VM features.

In essence, instead of designing a proper web-as-VM from the start (and slowly evolve it as capabilities of networks and CPUs increase) we started with Lee's document based thing, that we soon found out is barely enough, and we have to have video, sound, app capabilities, process isolation, maybe a common bytecode, networking, real-time, etc.

I.e we started from dumb documents we links, when what we wanted was a VM. And now we have twisted the dump document model to sorta kinda look like a VM.

How many times have you heard that "the browser is the new OS" and such?

So, it's a Greenspun's tenth rule, only instead of Lisp we build an ad-hoc, bug-ridden, clumsy version of Alan Kay's, Doug Engelbart, etc, ideas.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?

#135

Post by coldtea »

dasil003 wrote: post #92
jgon wrote: post #87

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.

>And yet no desktop toolkit has ever approached the ubiquity and deployability of the web.

Actually there are more Windows installations than are internet users.

(If you count mobile phones the numbers might skew a little, but the vast majority of those on third world countries are not used for the web anyway).

Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?

#137

Post by chubot »

coldtea wrote: post #134
chubot wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read my response above; you're not addressing the point he makes that the web should have been based on a VM. That's what I'm saying is wronger than wrong. If their line of research is based on distributing content over VMs, then that's completely different than the web's design philosophy, and it's probably THE reason his ideas never were adopted while the web was. Those design ideas are diametrically opposed. The d…

Your whole premise is that his ideas "weren't successful", whereas I see it more as a case of "Greenspun's tenth rule". That is: tt's not that the VMs lost and the web won. It's the web started from something that wasn't adequate for what we wanted, and after all these years it has been adding all kinds of kludgy, warty and half-baked implementations of VM features. In essence, instead of designing a proper web-as-VM…

Right, so you are arguing exactly what Kay argued, and what the Adobe guys argued. I am saying that is wrong for the reasons above (i.e., exactly what Tim Berner's Lee argued).

Anyway, Kay basically attributed it to ignorance and stupidity on the part of the TBL and the web's designers, which I think is incredibly arrogant, especially since he is wrong.

You didn't really address the arguments above -- you're basically saying "it would have been nicer and cleaner if we started with a VM".

I can sort of see how it would have been nicer in some theoretical world, just like using PDF/PS instead of CSS would have been nicer (in a way).

But I am arguing that it would have never happened. If you started with a VM-based system, there would be technical problems that prevented it from being widely adopted.

Actually, Java was pretty much exactly that. It was supposed to be a VM that ran anything, and disenfranchised Microsoft's OS. And we know JS is more popular than Java, despite way more marketing muscle behind Java in the early years.

It's already been tried. I'd argue that it wasn't just beyond the abilities of Java's designers, but actually impossible (this is as much social problem as a technical one).

You make the vague statement as Kay does that "we should have started with a VM", but it would be impossible to come up with a specific VM design (actual running code) that actually worked as well and as widely as the Web does.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?

#139

Post by kingkilr »

viscanti wrote: post #42

Guido did a talk at Uber, about the reasons behind the decisions/trade-offs in how cPython is implemented. The pypy guys were there, and it was interesting to hear how different groups could implemented such different interpreters for the same language. It was much deeper than most of the technical talks I've heard in the bay area.

Glad you enjoyed it!
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