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Why Did Symbolics Fail? (2009)
11–20 of 64 posts
Re: Why Did Symbolics Fail? (2009)
#12Exactly why Java succeed - the world is dominated by mediocrity while idiots are mostly on management positions. This is why all we got nowadays are Windows PCs with Java. It "worth us" or "suits us well". Designers were too smart (consider David Moon) while management was "as usual".
No - the world is dominated by stuff that works and solves real problems. It doesn't care for how much smarter than all those mediocre idiots you think you are. It offers lots of opportunities for very smart people who mistake their mental masturbation for unstoppable genius to be very, very stupid.
Re: Why Did Symbolics Fail? (2009)
#13Re: Why Did Symbolics Fail? (2009)
#14Exactly why Java succeed - the world is dominated by mediocrity while idiots are mostly on management positions. This is why all we got nowadays are Windows PCs with Java. It "worth us" or "suits us well". Designers were too smart (consider David Moon) while management was "as usual".
The world is dominated by:
1. mediocre people
2. smart people with very little knowledge of their own limits and a very strong tendency towards intellectual masturbation and asocial behavior
...this is why languages that offer a few obvious way to to do each thing and are boring enough to make people concentrate on "getting their jobs done" instead of doing limitless intellectual exploration win. (For example, this is why a enjoy coding in Python so much: the language is so limited and boring that it actually forces me to concentrate on the interesting aspects of the problem itself instead of the interesting aspects of the details of solving it :) )
(...now, why didn't Lisp win at least in the academic environment, where it was obviously one of the right tools for limitless exploration (together with the ML languages) is beyond me. Things like Mathematica and Matlab should have been Lisp based (and then Lisp itself evolved to suit their needs, maybe even a few syntaxes added on top), open-source and massively publicly funded from the get go. But putting public academic money in the right places is even harder than convincing CS academics that tools, infrastructure, platforms and languages are not boring and unworthy of attention but crucial, and that the wrong choices made by academics on these topics doomed us all. And no, just refusing to make a choice and choosing "what works best in the industry" (the "we'll teach our OOP introductory course using C++ because this is what they use in the industry nowadays" thinking) is not a solution. You must make a choice for yourself and only for yourself and make it right! And CS researchers should realize that languages and tools are not just "technical details", they are the vehicles for their ideas and "the vessel shapes the content", so just choosing the strongest vessel (language/platform) to implement your idea disregarding how much it deforms it (like a researcher choosing C# instead of a Lisp language to first implement a new programming idea) in not ok!)
Re: Why Did Symbolics Fail? (2009)
#15Exactly why Java succeed - the world is dominated by mediocrity while idiots are mostly on management positions. This is why all we got nowadays are Windows PCs with Java. It "worth us" or "suits us well". Designers were too smart (consider David Moon) while management was "as usual".
No - the world is dominated by stuff that works and solves real problems . It doesn't care for how much smarter than all those mediocre idiots you think you are. It offers lots of opportunities for very smart people who mistake their mental masturbation for unstoppable genius to be very, very stupid.
Symbolics stuff not just worked, it worked remarkably well on the very modest hardware and solved real word problems.
For an example of unimaginable by "modern standards" quality, go ahead and take a look at the Common Lisp documentation produced by Symbolics (the art of writing, "motorcycle maintenance" kind of clarity and conscience) which is buried somewhere inside bitsavers and take a look at the sources of Open Genera 2.0, the whole OS, which was available of dynamic modification and extension by the programmer, which could be found in a torrent search, and then go to the rosettacode website and look at every single page too see what a fucking crap is the language you are using to get shit done in exchange for a paycheck. It is worst in any possible way - verbosity, clumsiness, clutter, cryptic syntax, you name it.
This is actually not interesting notion. Everyone with a bit of brains could visit rosettacode. The interesting questions are why it is so that the world is dominated by Java.
Pages and pages were written about what's wrong with Java and why it is so popular. One sentence summary could go like this "a sandbox for crowds of packers to get shit done, agressively marketed to them via "you don't have to understand" memes by corporations to make big money". It spread like a virus due to bandwagon and peer effects and catchy memes like "write once" or "millions of man hours".
Ok, use it, enjoy yourself, but, please, do not touch so rare and really wonderful things which you unable to comprehend.
Re: Why Did Symbolics Fail? (2009)
#16The dates on Dan Weinreb's blog are all wrong for some reason. This post likely dates back to 2011 or before. (EDIT: Ah, corrected by the moderators, thanks.) I had the pleasure of meeting Dan at ECLM 2008, four years before his death. He was hacking away on his XO-1 and showing around fancy things. A very memorable man. He's missed.
His blog seems to have JUST been rehosted by somebody. I got pingbacks on DBMS2 from it, with the new post dates, yesterday. It also looks quite different than it did before.
I miss Dan. One of the nicest guys in the industry.
Re: Why Did Symbolics Fail? (2009)
#17Dan was the guy at Symbolics most commonly tasked with making me believe Symbolics would succeed. He succeeded at the task. I forgave him.
Re: Why Did Symbolics Fail? (2009)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
No - the world is dominated by stuff that works and solves real problems . It doesn't care for how much smarter than all those mediocre idiots you think you are. It offers lots of opportunities for very smart people who mistake their mental masturbation for unstoppable genius to be very, very stupid.
Symbolics stuff not just worked, it worked remarkably well on the very modest hardware and solved real word problems. For an example of unimaginable by "modern standards" quality , go ahead and take a look at the Common Lisp documentation produced by Symbolics (the art of writing, "motorcycle maintenance" kind of clarity and conscience) which is buried somewhere inside bitsavers and take a look at the sources of Open…
Yeah, I guess you'll keep telling yourself that because it makes you happy and remain unable to comprehend just how wrong you are...
Re: Why Did Symbolics Fail? (2009)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Symbolics stuff not just worked, it worked remarkably well on the very modest hardware and solved real word problems. For an example of unimaginable by "modern standards" quality , go ahead and take a look at the Common Lisp documentation produced by Symbolics (the art of writing, "motorcycle maintenance" kind of clarity and conscience) which is buried somewhere inside bitsavers and take a look at the sources of Open…
Yeah, I guess you'll keep telling yourself that because it makes you happy and remain unable to comprehend just how wrong you are...
Why, yes, reading Symbolics CL docs or David Moon's "language for oldtimers" makes me happy, like any other decent reading.
Re: Why Did Symbolics Fail? (2009)
#20The dates on Dan Weinreb's blog are all wrong for some reason. This post likely dates back to 2011 or before. (EDIT: Ah, corrected by the moderators, thanks.) I had the pleasure of meeting Dan at ECLM 2008, four years before his death. He was hacking away on his XO-1 and showing around fancy things. A very memorable man. He's missed.
I met Dan only once, despite working in some similar areas and living in the same town. I wish I'd had the chance to spend more time with him. He was very bright, very energetic, and very friendly. Mutual friends have said he was like that most of the time. He just wanted to understand stuff, and thought I could help (I'm the author of a blog post he says inspired this one), so he simply reached out and made a new friend. What a great hacker.