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Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

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Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#41

Post by UncleEntity »

I like learning from the past, when they were letting people download papers for free due to covid I got enough to keep me busy for a long time — just need to find the time to do something with them because working outside tech means I have very little time for such things. Read some here and there, bother industry experts here, fun times.

There’s a lot of good ideas buried in the past out there that never took off because people adopted some other way due to that being what the textbooks teach or whatever. Most of what I look at isn’t applicable to anything I do, unless I were to find a pile of money so I could write a compiler, but I find it interesting and like messing with language grammars and compiler theory. Someday I might even get past the AST stage with my playing around.

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#42

Post by runevault »

analog31 wrote: post #27
Rochus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ideas are worth nothing unless executed. Maybe if you only have a business focus. He was apparently not interested in fundamental research.

Even in research you have to "do" something with an idea, at least hang your hat on a specific prediction, or carry out the experiment.

Yes and no. You won't reap any benefits if you fail to create something useful with an idea, but if you were the first person to get the idea out in the world and other people made it useful, you still created value by helping inspire the other person to pursue what you did. Just probably won't get any monetary gain FROM that.

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#43

Post by gardenfelder »

andsoitis wrote: post #10

The subtitle says Ted was the inventor of hypertext, but in the interview he credits Doug Engelbart. You can hear him say it if you listen from 4:30 to 4:45. "We thought computing would be artisanal. We did not imagine great monopolies." Even though hindsight is 20/20, I'm still surprised that the power of network effects didn't occur to him (or whoever the "we" refers to). "... artistic expression ..." Reminds me a…

Ted coined the term "hypertext"; he built a prototype Xanadu platform [1] which incorporated it. Engelbart created an editing system which used something like hypertext internally. Ted coined the term in 1963, along with "hypermedia" [2]; Engelbart published a paper in 1962 [3]; you can read it and decide for yourself whether he "invented" hypertext (by any name) in that paper.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext

[3] https://dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906-Framework.html

Note that [1] says 1960 for Xanadu and [2] says 1963 for the term hypertext. Go figure.

Edit: fixed typo

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#44

Post by tpoacher »

I was listening to a podcast a few years back, I think it was fortran related, and in any case, the guys talking were having fun putting their "old farts complaining about kids and their scateboards" hat on.

At some point the conversation went a bit like this:

- Do you know what else kids these days don't do?

- What?

- They don't declare all their variables at the top.

- What?

- Yep

- They don't?

- Nope

- W ... where do they declare them then?

- Right before they use them.

- No!

- I shit you not.

- Wtf

I remember laughing hard, and realising I'm also becoming an old fart who complains about kids and their scateboards and shudders at the thought of variable declarations sprinkled thoughout code. :p

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#45

Post by teddyh »

moffkalast wrote: post #21

TIL about Douglas Engelbart, such a visionary that even Occam's razor says he ought to be a time traveller.

After watching The Mother of All Demos at https://www.dougengelbart.org/firsts/dougs-1968-demo.html>, I suggest you also read this:

https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC&pg=PA97

It’s an anonymized account (from 1982) of what happened to Douglas Engelbart (anonymized as “Vision” Stanley).

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#46

Post by stew-j »

bitwize wrote: post #33
AlbertCory wrote: post #3

Little known fact: Ted Nelson worked at DataPoint in the early 1980s, for a couple years. How many people have even heard of DataPoint anymore? They were hugely successful in the 1970s with their fancy terminals, arguably had the first personal computer, and viewed Ted as a prestige hire. It didn't work out well as they faded into obscurity. He's mentioned in the third person in my book https://www.albertcory.io/the-…

Fun fact: The Intel 8008 was intended to be a single-chip CPU for the Datapoint 2200 terminal. It was delayed so ultimately wasn't used in the Datapoint 2200, but Intel had an agreement in place to sell the chip to other buyers. So that means every x86-64 PC sold has an ISA with a compatibility lineage that goes straight back to Datapoint.

More fun facts from "Programming the 80386", Crawford and Gelsinger (chief architect and designer of the 386 respectively), 1987, pp. 1-2

"The 4004 was quickly enhanced to the 8008. These devices, very trivial by today's standards, were novel but hardly taken seriously as computers of any worth...In 1978 the third generation was introduced--the 8086. This marked the beginning of microprocessors as 'real' computers...The 8088, the little brother of the 8086, was used in the IBM personal Computer...and this launched the personal computer revolution."

I wish someone else would have read that for me.

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#47

Post by labrador »

If this interests you I recommend "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" by John Markoff and "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" by the BBC and Adam Curtis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o...

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#48

Post by Pepe1vo »

tpoacher wrote: post #44

I was listening to a podcast a few years back, I think it was fortran related, and in any case, the guys talking were having fun putting their "old farts complaining about kids and their scateboards" hat on. At some point the conversation went a bit like this: - Do you know what else kids these days don't do? - What? - They don't declare all their variables at the top. - What? - Yep - They don't? - Nope - W ... where…

Being very much a kid (at heart at least), I'll wager the question: what's the case against declaring variables as you need them? Also, at the top of which scope are you supposed to declare variables, function scope, class scope, ... somewhere else?

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#49

Post by saghm »

Pepe1vo wrote: post #48
tpoacher wrote: post #44

I was listening to a podcast a few years back, I think it was fortran related, and in any case, the guys talking were having fun putting their "old farts complaining about kids and their scateboards" hat on. At some point the conversation went a bit like this: - Do you know what else kids these days don't do? - What? - They don't declare all their variables at the top. - What? - Yep - They don't? - Nope - W ... where…

Being very much a kid (at heart at least), I'll wager the question: what's the case against declaring variables as you need them? Also, at the top of which scope are you supposed to declare variables, function scope, class scope, ... somewhere else?

> Being very much a kid (at heart at least), I'll wager the question: what's the case against declaring variables as you need them?

There's not really one, it's just a joke about how some languages used to work.

> Also, at the top of which scope are you supposed to declare variables, function scope, class scope, ... somewhere else?

In C, you used to have to declare all local variables at the top of the function rather than throughout the body.

Re: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

#50

Post by samsquire »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #12
cryo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one side the Xanadu implementations over the decades are a complete failure. On the other side, imho some of the ideas will survive and one day make it into successful software projects. Good ideas aren't destroyed by poor excecution.

Then again as Steve Jobs said: “ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.”

Mathematics, philosophy, theology and science began as ideas. Even if you aren't the person to develop your ideas, they still have value to civilization.
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