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A few words on Doug Engelbart

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Re: A few words on Doug Engelbart

#51

Post by gruseom »

GuiA wrote: post #50
gruseom wrote: post #49

The closest present-day analog to Engelbart's collaborative editing demo (edit: I mean specifically the document-editing portion, not the video etc.) is not screen-sharing, but modern collaborative editors (Google Docs, Etherpad), which do provide multiple cursors. Thus the screen-sharing analogy is a straw man, and the author hasn't really made his case against "drawing correspondences to our present-day systems" fr…

In Engelbart's original demo, the users can see each other, talk, collaboratively work on a document, and do together pretty much anything that the computer offers. The full OS, including the GUI, is intended to be multi-user. Google Docs et al. only offer one aspect of that; all they aspire to do is solve the problem of "collaborative editing of a document". But say we need to work on something that involves listeni…

Google Docs et al. only offer one aspect of that; all they aspire to do is solve the problem of "collaborative editing of a document"

Yes, but it's just the aspect the OP criticizes screen-sharing (as a proxy for present-day technology) for missing. I take your point that these things could be better integrated, though.

Re: A few words on Doug Engelbart

#52

Post by nhamann »

nhamann wrote: post #2

> Engelbart hated our present-day systems. I'm not trying to say "[citation needed]" here, but I would be interested in seeing a source for this. Does anyone know of one?

I was able to find some sources. The first is this article: http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/high-performance-....

> Easy-to-use computer systems, as we conventionally understand them, are not what Engelbart had in mind. You might be surprised to learn that he regards today’s one-size-fits-all GUI as a tragic outcome. That paradigm, he said in a talk at Accelerating Change 2004, has crippled our effort to augment human capability. High-performance tasks require high-performance user interfaces specially designed for those tasks. Instead of making every task lie on the Procrustean bed of the standard GUI, we should be inventing new, task-appropriate interfaces. No, they won’t work for everyone. Yes, they’ll require effort to learn. But in every domain there are some experts who will invest that effort in order to achieve greater mastery. We need to do more to empower those people.

The above cites Engelbart's 2004 talk "Large-Scale Collective IQ", so that is probably a good place to look as well.

There's also this page, which presents some interesting related comments by Alan Kay: http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/traction/permalink/Blog...

> Alan Kay: ... If you have ever seen anybody use NLS [Engelbart's 1968 hypertext system for which he invented the mouse and chord key set] it is really marvelous cause you're kindof flying along through the stuff several commands a second and there's a complete different sense of what it means to interact than you have today. I characterize what we have today as a wonderful bike with training wheels on that nobody knows they are on so nobody is trying to take them off. I just feel like we're way way behind where we could have been if it weren't for the way commercialization turned out.

Re: A few words on Doug Engelbart

#53

Post by tel »

As I began to read his thesis I was reminded powerfully of Conor McBride's Epigram system [1]. It's a very different kind of system, but the parity between a user's intent and the computer's ability to interact seamlessly with that intent is a powerful feature of Epigram.

[1] I can't seem to find the source anymore, but there are many papers like cs.ru.nl/~freek/courses/tt-2010/tvftl/epigram-notes.pdf‎

Re: A few words on Doug Engelbart

#54

Post by contingencies »

nnq wrote: post #45
akanet wrote: post #4

I found that the quip about how the document that they are sharing while having a conversation is not screensharing as we commonly understand it in modern parlance to be pretty illuminating. That modern screensharing is in several ways worse than a demo that came out decades ago is frankly amazing. I've tried to recapture a bit of that early magic with https://coderpad.io/ (multiple cursors, realtime editing/executio…

We're reinventing things over and over again because we haven't yet learned to design platforms that can evolve . Because the platforms can't evolve, every time we have a new platform we have to reinvent the applications of the old platforms. The closest thing we ever got to "platforms that can evolve" were first Unix-like systems , that were too low level, limited and specific-machine-bound to be able to support the…

Right. However, the platform is irrelevant if the programming is abstract enough, since you can essentially regenerate all previous programs for a new platform. Lisp can do this. Actually, any language can probably do this, but Lisp is said to be better suited for its IIRC introspective/reflective/code-data-indistinct (ie. ~typeless) purity.

The main shift for programmers is looking at code not as instructions (procedural) but as a combined cognitive/computational model, from which to assemble useful lines of thought (codepaths) on an ad-hoc/JIT basis.

It seems like the upshot is this: basically, code in Lisp. Use the code as a concrete, formalized model of abstract thought, don't enslave your cognitive capacities to attempting to model the computer's finite procedural logic.

Wish I had time to embark :) Maybe I'm getting there. Over 15 years I've noticed my procedural code has shrunk to tinier and tinier, more and more reusable and rigidly independent snippets. Perhaps the diving board for the great pool of Lisp draws closer faster than anticipated? :)

Re: A few words on Doug Engelbart

#56

Post by nnq »

contingencies wrote: post #54
nnq wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're reinventing things over and over again because we haven't yet learned to design platforms that can evolve . Because the platforms can't evolve, every time we have a new platform we have to reinvent the applications of the old platforms. The closest thing we ever got to "platforms that can evolve" were first Unix-like systems , that were too low level, limited and specific-machine-bound to be able to support the…

Right. However, the platform is irrelevant if the programming is abstract enough, since you can essentially regenerate all previous programs for a new platform. Lisp can do this. Actually, any language can probably do this, but Lisp is said to be better suited for its IIRC introspective/reflective/code-data-indistinct (ie. ~typeless) purity. The main shift for programmers is looking at code not as instructions (proce…

Well, you say that a flexible and high level enough language ca span all platforms and be itself a platform. The JVM is close to such a platform and Clojure is good lisp for it, so you "only" have to figure the abstractions right... the thing is that "use the code as a concrete, formalized model of abstract thought" is kinda hard-to-impossible, even in the most cross-platform language with the best meta-programming facilities, you'll end up with knowledge that (a) is not in the code (like everything about how Engelbart's prototypes interacted with humans to really augment their capabilities), which is not a problem in and of itself, but you also have (b) platform dependent knowledge and code that cannot be abstracted away, and (a) and (b) inevitably overlap making a total mess, because the interaction/usage related knowledge that's no in the code actually relates most to the platform specific code that's can't be abstracted well.

Anyway, my point is the platforms and programming languages are orthogonal: having the best cross-platform language in the world won't get you any closer to a "platform that can evolve well", and all programs will have platform specific code that won't benefit from the language at all.

And a "platform that can evolve well" can manage to do so even with crappy languages as defaults. Our best such platform, the Web, has Javascript, a language that I imagine will keep evolving because it has the weird characteristic of "you can always ducktape more stuff to it" (I imagine future versions of Javascript with optional advanced static typing, concurrency features ala Clojure, macros ala Lisp or Scala etc.). A better language will not necessarily be "a better language for the platform" ie "something that will help the platform evolve better" (the "platform" I'm referring to here is HTML/Javascript/JSON/REST/HTTP/etc.), it will solve a different set of problems and maybe it will or maybe it won't be adopted as the "platform's first class language".

If you like Lisp, work to make Parenscript or Clojure-script better (I hope you pick the 2nd and let CL die and rot... it taught us a lot, but it's time to let it rest... there's no chance in hell it will ever gain any traction again), as this is the only way we'll have a decent Lisp for the Web.

Re: A few words on Doug Engelbart

#57

Post by contingencies »

nnq wrote: post #56
contingencies wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. However, the platform is irrelevant if the programming is abstract enough, since you can essentially regenerate all previous programs for a new platform. Lisp can do this. Actually, any language can probably do this, but Lisp is said to be better suited for its IIRC introspective/reflective/code-data-indistinct (ie. ~typeless) purity. The main shift for programmers is looking at code not as instructions (proce…

Well, you say that a flexible and high level enough language ca span all platforms and be itself a platform. The JVM is close to such a platform and Clojure is good lisp for it, so you "only" have to figure the abstractions right... the thing is that "use the code as a concrete, formalized model of abstract thought" is kinda hard-to-impossible, even in the most cross-platform language with the best meta-programming f…

knowledge that (a) is not in the code

That sounds like what documentation's for.

(b) platform dependent knowledge and code that cannot be abstracted away

Can you give an example of this platform specific code that's can't be abstracted well? I am less than convinced.

a "platform that can evolve well" can manage to do so even with crappy languages as defaults. Our best such platform, the Web

Sorry, I don't think that the web is a well evolving platform. I think it's a butt ugly duct-tape driven just-still-hobbling-along type of platform that is rife with security holes, trust issues, unneeded complexity, cross platform issues, unexpected but effective centralization of power, and many other issues. I am not sure how you can hold it up as a great example of a technical offering, really.

If you like Lisp, work to make Parenscript or Clojure-script better

Clojure-script seems pretty full-featured already. To be honest, though, I'm not sure that a Javascript VM is the place to implement complex code. GUI-related code is probably most of JS, and that is probably easier to generate from a model than rewrite with an additional layer of syntax abstraction in an effectively new language... particularly given the rate at which new JS related functionality appears.

orthogonal

I am going to come clean: I hate it when people use this word because I'm never quite sure what they mean. Often, I think, neither are they. To me, what you said seems to be "x and y are not the same". Others use it differently. I hereby wish we could just use familiar, regular-human language instead of latter-day tech hubbub. Ta.

Re: A few words on Doug Engelbart

#58

Post by ehsanu1 »

weland wrote: post #37
ehsanu1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/bu...

I think we both know that's not what I was referring to. It's stuff like this one (PhoneGap, but really, it's like this almost everywhere): Back . Unless I am mistaken and you can build the whole UI out of form elements (perhaps you can, but I'm not sure I've actually seen that done anywhere), that's simply not sufficient.

I took your comment to mean that no button element exists, but I suppose that was not your intention. But I did realize you were referring to links being abused as buttons.

I think the issue is simply that buttons tend to have more default styling you need to override, which is more likely to vary across platforms since the default style is generally chosen to mimic the system's native buttons. Whereas default styling for links is quite simple across all platforms. Besides that, there is no particular problem with using real button elements instead of link elements as far as I'm aware, just a matter of habit and convenience.

Re: A few words on Doug Engelbart

#59

Post by nnq »

contingencies wrote: post #57
nnq wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you say that a flexible and high level enough language ca span all platforms and be itself a platform. The JVM is close to such a platform and Clojure is good lisp for it, so you "only" have to figure the abstractions right... the thing is that "use the code as a concrete, formalized model of abstract thought" is kinda hard-to-impossible, even in the most cross-platform language with the best meta-programming f…

knowledge that (a) is not in the code That sounds like what documentation's for. (b) platform dependent knowledge and code that cannot be abstracted away Can you give an example of this platform specific code that's can't be abstracted well ? I am less than convinced. a "platform that can evolve well" can manage to do so even with crappy languages as defaults. Our best such platform, the Web Sorry, I don't think that…

ok, it got well offtopic but my prev comment was confusing indeed, so:

- you're right, that's what documentation is for, but people rarely document things like use cases and workflows and I've rarely seen comments like "this complex optimization is here because a delay longer than X ms is intolerable for workflows like ... or because otherwise you'll have inconsistent data when connectivity to external service Y breaks at the same time as service Z crashes ... and this actually happens very often because the user tends to do N and P at the same time and almost always ignores warning/error Q"

- "platform dependent knowledge and code that cannot be abstracted away": if you write a tablet app, you will need to take into consideration things like touch ui, impermanent internet connectivity and so on, if you consider the "platform" to be the devices. At other levels, if your "platform" is the browsers you'll have code that reacts to browser differences. If you use Ruby your platform will be the ruby interpreter and you'll also have code that is written somehow because of the platform limitation (gc problems, multithreading problems)

...I'm talking about the kinds of applications where 80% of the code is actually the UI code. If your balance differs, you can probably have good abstractions in your no-UI code. But for interface heavy applications (it doesn't have to be UI, it can be interfaces with lots of external web APIs), porting will always be a nightmare and you'll lose stuff at every porting and have to rediscover/reinvent it.

- "orthogonal" - my bad, I should have just said "they are independent" or "I don't think they really influence each other's evolution", I thought this word has already grown roots in the tech vocabulary and it's a nice engineery metaphor that I really like (I just think of perpendicular vectors and independent dimensions and since I'm more of a picture thinker that only later translates his thought in words it just seems intuitive to me - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonality)

- the Web: I agree, it's "butt ugly duct-tape driven" indeed but that's the thing with things that evolve, you don't get to control the evolution, nobody really gets to do this, we all pull in different direction and some organic emergent behavior appears... hopefully it will crawl out of the current state to a less chaotic state that would enable more sane workflows for developers

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