191–200 of 231 posts
What a terrible month for computing...
Death always comes in threes.
What a terrible month for computing...
I have a feeling this will start being a lot more common in the computer world. The founders of everything are starting to hit their later ages. :(
But now, the pioneers have gotten old. And the excitement is slowly ebbing away.
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Between Gates, Zuckerberg, Larry and Sergey, Torvalds, RMS, Knuth, and a few others, there're still plenty of icons left and so I don't forsee your scenario happening anytime soon. I am generally an optimist, and think the number of icons to come is far greater than those who have come and gone.
Is it really fair to compare Zuckerberg to Knuth? Zuckerberg made a PHP site for people to stalk their classmates. Knuth wrote TeX, hundreds of papers, and a series of books considered among the 100 most important scientific works of the 20th century. http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/100-or-so-boo... Zuckerberg is definitely a successful dude that one can look up to. But in terms of advancing the field…
What a pity. I sense a black bar coming. The last few weeks have been terrible, one icon after another has fallen. What is different from other fields is that computing is still a young enough field that almost all of its luminaries except for the earliest ones are still alive. I fear the avalanche has only barely begun, and at some point the frequency of these will become high enough that either we will stop to noti…
What you're seeing is actually the death of the second generation of great comp sci minds, IMO. The first modern generation included von Neumann (b. 1903), Hopper (b. 1906), Turing (b. 1912), and others. McCarthy (1927), Knuth (1932), Hoare (1934) etc. are of the next generation. Obviously, you can cut generations on any arbitraty line and YMMV, but the 15-20 year gap seems a reasonable grouping, IMO.
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Right, but if there is actually any selection for aging and death in organisms (maybe there is, I'm not sure), it's not useful anymore. There's a lot of evidence that there's no longer genetic selection acting on the human population, and it's therefore no longer true that our children should be genetically superior.
Maybe not genetically superior, but certainly culturally stronger. Old people have old ways of thinking.
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> Death is necessary for human ecology Ugh, not now. References or stop talking. I have my fingers crossed he was signed up for cryonics. This is tragic.
Even if you can live for a million years from advanced technologies, you still inevitably will die. We all do.
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Maybe not genetically superior, but certainly culturally stronger. Old people have old ways of thinking.
And the way of thinking isn't constant. It changes over time. A 15 year old you, a 25 year old you and a 50 year old you are all different people. A 500 year old you will most probably be a different person. There are people who resist change and disapprove of all viewpoints other their own, but I doubt it's an age thing. I see a lot of young people opposing gay marriages for instance.
Ideas tend to propagate in generations - it's often necessary for the old guard to die off before a new idea will be accepted, whether this is in art, or science, or politics or whatever.
As new people crop up that aren't reputationally invested in a certain idea it allows more ideas to be considered seriously, etc.