How Heraclitus would Design a Programming Language 577
CowboyRobot writes "Developer of Smalltalk Alan Kay has an interview on ACM Queue where he describes the history of computing and his approach to designing languages. Kay has an impressive resume (PARC, ARPAnet, Atari, Apple, Alan Turing Award winner) and has an endless supply of memorable quotes: 'Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term,' 'Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you're always going to get a pop culture,' 'most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training,' 'All creativity is an extended form of a joke,' and 'nobody really knows how to design a good language.'"
Which fanboy are you? (Score:5, Funny)
You wear wraparound sunglasses, even indoors. You wish your mother would let you ride a motorbike. You tell your friends you're pulling in $50,000 a year and $2,000 a month "playing the stock market" but in reality you're only bringing in half that and your dividends from MSFT havn't been good in years. Your non computing friends all turn to you for help; you only charge $30 an hour. Your collegues talk about you behind your back. Your workplace nickname is likely to be "The Asshole". Unlike the Linux fanboys, you actually try to pick up dates in bars but women laugh at you.
ou think you're so cool you hurt. You have mirrors on every wall in your "loft apartment", which is really a grimy little apartment next to a guy who plays Guns 'n Roses at 3am. All of your furniture is from Ikea. You sometimes think that changing your name to "Steve" would be "pretty cool". When you go to bars you only drink Miller Lite. No body ever asks you for help with their computers because they know you don't know anything but OS X, even if you do tell them you "run Unix" now. Your friends openly laugh at you.
You regularly give $10 bills to homeless guys because you have too much money. Computers baffle you, but you enjoy looking at pictures of naked women. You don't know what Linux is, but you continually bugged the IT guy at work about your computer he installed Linspire on your machine.
You shop at GAP. You probably used to use a Mac. When you saw the multiracial image used as a desktop picture and heard that this operating system came from the same country as Nelson Mandella, you knew it was for you. You meet with your friends in fair-trade coffee houses and talk about the eventual overthrow of evil corporations such as Microsoft and Starbucks. Like the Linspire user, you have very little real knowlege when it comes to computers but you would never use your computer to look at pictures of women degrading themselves.
You've been "into computers" for ohh, one or two years now and fancy yourself as "a bit of a hacker". Wouldn't know C from C++, or even Perl for that matter. Older Gentoy users may be building their homes from matchsticks. You've explained to all your friends that your matchstick house will have an "optimised floorplan". They've tried to tell you that your house violates every known building code and law in your area, but you've ignored them so far because you can't read those complicated regulatory documents.
Much like the Gentoy user but you'd also be into sadomasochistic sex if you could get it. You're not just building a house from matchsticks, you're planing to grow the trees to make the matchsticks. You've cleared some land but don't know what to do next because you havn't read the books you've got, so you've posted to alt.arborists.newbie asking for help. It's been three days so far and no one has replied. You remain hopeful.
None of the above. (Score:5, Funny)
Whoever modded the PP a Troll needs to learn how to laugh at themselves.
Viva-la-difference
Disclaimer: I know jack-shit about VMS or French spelling.
Minor quibble (Score:2)
Re:Which fanboy are you? (Score:2, Funny)
You are a bitter person, twisted by how unfair the world is to have ignored your choice of system and operating system. You still think it is the late 80s, and don't realise that everybody else has caught up, gone past and then lapped you. Oddly enough you hate your neighbour, also an Amiga fanboy, because they have a blue front door. You have a collection of Amiga t-shirts, including a XXXL Amiga Inc t-shirt sent out 3 years after you paid $50 to try and keep your platform alive. You current hard
Re:Which fanboy are you? (Score:4, Funny)
You don't really exist in the conventional sense. You are more an abstraction. So too is your operating system. Your imaginery friends call you all the time to arrange getting together to add on more features to your imaginery OS. You will always buy the fair trade bar of chocolate for $5 before the bag of smarties @ $0.50 but thats ok, because although the cost to your productivity by using HERD now runs into the tens of thousands, that is more than made up for by the imaginery dent you are doing to the Microsoft corrporation. You could be from anywhere but you might well be German and as you know very well, its dangerous to purchase proprietary software but it's ok to stone someone else to death for using it!
: )
Apple (Score:2)
What? Are you spyin' on me from over the street?
When you go to bars you only drink Miller Lite.
Urgh ... assuming a Mac user drinks beer it should be at least Beck's.
Not C++ I hope (Score:4, Funny)
I'm a first year programming student at an Ivy League school and I've
just finished my Visual Basic classes. This term I'll be moving onto
C++. However I've noticed some issues with C++ that I'd like to
discuss with the rest of the programming community. Please do not
think of me as being technically ignorant. In addition to VB, I am
very skilled at HTML programming, one of the most challenging
languages out there!
C++ is based on a concept known as Object Oriented Programming. In
this style of programming (also known as OOPS in the coding community)
a programmer builds "objects" or "glasses" out of his code, and then
manipulates these "glasses". Since I'm assuming that you, dear reader,
are as skilled at programming as I am, I'll skip further explanation
of these "glasses".
Please allow me to make a brief aside here and discuss the origins C++
for a moment. My research shows that this language is one of the
oldest languages in existence, pre-dating even assembly! It was
created in the early 70s when AT&T began looking for a new language to
write BSD, its Unix Operation System (later on, other companies would
"borrow" the BSD source code to build both Solaris and Linux!)
Interestingly, the name C++ is a pun by the creator of the language.
When the first beta was released, it was remarked that the language
would be graded as a C+, because of how hideously complex and unwieldy
it was. The extra plus was tacked on during a later release when some
of these issues were fixed. The language would still be graded a C,
but it was the highest C possible! Truly a clever name for this
language.
Back to the topic on hand, I feel that C++ - despite its flaws - has
been a very valuable tool to the world of computers. Unfortunately
its starting to show its age, and I feel that it should be
retired, as COBOL, ADA and Smalltalk seem to have been. Recently I've
become acquainted with another language that's quite recently been
developed. Its one that promises to greatly simplify programming. This
new language is called C.
Although syntactically borrowing a great deal from its predecessor
C++, C greatly simplifies things (thus its name, which hints at its
simpler nature by striping off the clunky double-pluses.) Its biggest
strength is that it abandons an OOPS-style of programming. No more
awkward "objects" or "glasses". Instead C uses what are called
structs. Vaguely similar to a C++ "glass", a struct does away with
anachronisms like inheritance, namespaces and the whole
private/public/protected/friend access issues of its variables and
routines. By freeing the programmer from the requirement to juggle all
these issues, the coder can focus on implementing his algorithm and
rapidly developing his application.
While C lacks the speed and robustness of C++, I think these are petty
issues. Given the speed of modern computers, the relative sluggishness
of C shouldn't be an issue. Robustness and stability will occur as C
becomes more pervasive amongst the programming community and it
becomes more fine-tuned. Eventually C should have stability rivaling
that of C++.
I'm hoping to see C adopted as the de facto standard of programming.
Based on what I've learned of this language, the future seems very
bright indeed for C! Eventually, many years from now, perhaps we'll
even see an operating system coded in this language.
Thank you for your time. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
You IDIOT! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, and BTW - an *operating system* in C? Jesus, where have you *BEEN*! Don't you know that almost all the OS's existing today - Windows, SCO/Linux, even MacOS - have been written in C?? And that's why there's so many bugs in all of them - because C is practically *impossible* to write good code in. That's why Apple is now switching over to Objective C, which is kinda like Apple C++. I've heard that Windows XP was written in Visual C++. And SCO/Linux was going to be ported to Java, until Microsoft paid Sun off to kill the deal and IBM sued SCO for violating their big-company-with-major-trademarks-shoots-itself-i
Thankfully, the field is being revolutionised by people like Richard Stallman, who wrote gcc (the GNU C compiler), gvim and gnome, among many other open source programs. Finally, an advanced programming language like Perl can be used FOR FREE. Without a shadow of a doubt, Perl is the language of the future, even though it's still pretty young and all.
(And no, HTML is NOT a language. Go a learn a REAL programming language like Javascript, n00b).
Re:You IDIOT! (Score:2)
The HORROR! Perl may be good for some things, but they do not include anything that may ever need to be revised by anyone except the author. Maybe I should learn perl anyway... any book recommendations?
What a shame. (Score:2)
Either that or, best. troll. ever?
I think I've just pissed my pants (Score:2)
Are you aware of the fact, that you are the straight-man for the talented comic in the GP post?
Clarification (Score:4, Interesting)
Misleading headline (Score:5, Interesting)
astounding hubris (Score:5, Insightful)
In light of more than half a century of dynamic language history, that's just astounding hubris. By comparison with systems like Lisp and Dylan, for example, the Parrot system is still enormously complex, limited, and cumbersome from the programmer's point of view. And compared to Smalltalk, Perl/Parrot isn't even in the same league when it comes to programming environments, browsers, and other tools (in fact, very little really is).
Kay's example of Perl as a language that reinvents the wheel poorly is as appropriate today with Parrot as it was for earlier versions of Perl. The fact that Perl is useful in practice (I use it all the time) because it has lots of libraries and ports doesn't change the fact that its foundations are poorly thought out.
Re:astounding hubris (Score:2)
Re:Misleading headline (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure that if you suggested to him that designing a language by following Perl's example was a good idea, he'd laugh at you, though.
No decent langauges... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd disagree that there aren't people who can design decent languages. The problem is that they can't market them, and that developers continue to go back to the brain-dead syntax of C as if looking like C was an aspiration for a language.
Languages like Ada, Eiffel etc (which yes I have used commercially) are brilliant from a language perspective, especially for large projects. The trouble is developers would prefer to write something in 5 characters than 30 characters in a mistaken belief that they are being more productive and that typing is the longest task they undertake.
When you get into more "esoteric" areas like goal driven programming or agents then the languages become better, because the people using them are more aware of the purpose of the language and aren't constrained by a belief that it has to look like C.
C# and Java are great example of languages that took on that syntax and many of the constructs as its easier to get a language accepted when it looks like C than when a developer has to learn a new syntax that will in the long run be better.
The problem isn't language designers its us developers, we don't want to spend a week learning a new syntax for a loop, we want to use what we used before. In other words we are luddites.
Smalltalk was okay, but I prefered Eiffel, Java and C# are both by comparison rubbish, but they have better GUI libraries and marketing departments.
Re:No decent langauges... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've always felt that learning new syntax is relatively easy. By that, I mean, once you "learn how to program", as in figure out how to be in that zen position where you understand the flow of information and lines of code start leaking out of your fingers, applying a new syntax isn't too hard. It may take you a few days or weeks, and you may need to keep google / quick reference guide handy, but mostly, learning the first one correctly propels you into a scenario where you can learn other languages quickly.
~Wx
language developers disconnected from reality (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the problem is that the people who know a lot about languages know little about application domains, and the people who know a lot about application domains know little about how to design languages (or at least don't spend much time on it).
That's why languages like MATLAB dominate scientific computing and languages like Perl, PHP, and Java dominate web computing, and why languages like CAML, Haskell, Lisp, and Smalltalk have never ended up being good general purpose languages.
The problem isn't language designers its us developers, we don't want to spend a week learning a new syntax for a loop, we want to use what we used before. In other words we are luddites.
Programmers contribute to the problem. But while many people have syntactic hangups, even more of them just "don't get" a different approach to programming at all.
Re:language developers disconnected from reality (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to disagree here, the team that designed Ada for instance REALLY understood about application domains and the challenges of developing languages, and the people judging the competition to design Ada DEFINATELY understood the challenges of languages. The problem was that it wasn't "cool" like C, and they didn't focus on providing elements like DB connectivity or GUI frameworks as standard (understandable in the 1980s).
I've worked on projects with Ada, and as a language it was superb. Same with Eiffel. The biggest problem that I had managing those teams were the malcontents who complained that writing
"foreach n in X loop"
with an "end loop;" at the end. This was FAR too much work apparently and coding would be much quicker writing
"for(x = 0; x y; x++)"
In the end around 20% of the code was written in C, and 80% in Ada. 95% of our bugs were in the C code.
Keeps us in jobs though I guess, if we used better languages we wouldn't have to spend so much time fixing things.
Why Ada is good (Score:3, Insightful)
A proper type system is worth a heck of a lot more than a few characters saved typing!
Re:language developers disconnected from reality (Score:3, Insightful)
1. I'm sure you meant to write "for (i = 10; i <= 100; i++)"
2. C's for loop construct is one of its good points, as it lets one put loop control in one place for a far broader range of loops than just iteration over an arithmetic sequence, e.g.
for (ptr = head; ptr != NULL; ptr = ptr->next)
becomes immediately recognizable as an idiom for iterating over a linked list.
Re:language developers disconnected from reality (Score:4, Informative)
It is perfectly fine, though, to stick with C and MATLAB as long as they work for you; programming languages are a means to an end, and everybody's needs are different. I was using MATLAB for many years even though I thought the language sucked, and I stopped using it only when the language actually started getting in the way too much.
Now that's just plain wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, Ada leaves C in the dust for bit-
Yes, you can do that, RTFM (Score:3, Funny)
Complexity has a constant minimum (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is, in its way, the reason C "failed", too. It seems to be a law of programming that the complexity required to implement a real-world useful language has a constant minimum. If you leave it out of the s
Re: Now that's just plain wrong (Score:3, Informative)
> > You can specify layout of data down to the byte-order and bit-width,
> Replace "can" with "must", because what some view as a priviledge, others will find an obligation.
Except that it's not an obligation in Ada. It's an option available for when you need it. I almost never use it.
> > Ada didn't catch on much more are down to an early lack of good compilers
> Which was a direct consequence of language overcomplexity.
Yes, Ada overchallenged the compiler technology of the time. Th
Re:language developers disconnected from reality (Score:3, Insightful)
> When Ada was released it's documentation was something like 10 times as much as C++ had. C++ is larger Ada's NOW, and Ada hasn't changed. (Partially this is because C++ originally had poor documentation, and partially it's because the C++ specs repeatedly needed to be expanded.
Ironically (in the popular sense of the word), one of the reasons often cited as a reason to use C++ over Ada now ("Ada doesn't have standard class libraries") is the same reason often cited for not using Ada when it first cam
I must protest (Score:2, Insightful)
I strongly disagree. Not all of us are a bunch lazy idiots as you imply. If I didn't want to spend a week learning a new syntax for a loop I wouldn't have finished reading a second Perl 6 book [oreilly.com] yesterday, now would I? I have already spent man-months learning the language that is not even fully designed yet, so I woul
Re:I must protest (Score:3, Funny)
I must protest.
KFG
Re:I must protest (Score:2)
Err yes, because you'd have picked a script derivative language. You agree that Java and C# are rubbish, but I assume from a position where Perl is good.
That is like agreeing that a Dodge Cavalier is rubbish, while driving an Edsel.
Re:I must protest (Score:2)
I must protest, too (Score:2, Insightful)
Pan Tarhei Hosé? Panty Hose? And how do you become a Ph.D. and not learn how to avoid run on sentences. Now maybe I'm just a little more critical of my sources than your average Slashdot reader, but when someone with the MeatWorld name of Panty Hose makes a statement, I tend to be a little bit skeptical. And Dr
Re:I must protest, too (Score:3, Funny)
It's "egregious." I should know. I have a Ph.D. ;-)
Re:No decent langauges... (Score:3, Interesting)
I used Eiffel in college, and didn't it find it to be all that great. To make your compiled program run at a decent speed, you had to 'freeze' it (melting IIRC was the quick & dirty no opimization compile) which would take hours. Hours if find if you are compling a huge project (say a kernel) but for a simple graphical poker game..ugh.
I know terminology is probably something that held it back...freeze,
Re:No decent langauges... (Score:2)
In terms of the raw totals of important and useful software written in a language, and how widely society in general uses and relies on code written in a language, C has been the most widespread, useful, and productive language in the history of computer science. From telephone switches to operating systems to video encoders and a million other places. There are far worse things to look to for inspiration.
Re:No decent langauges... (Score:4, Insightful)
Your examples don't make any sense because Ada and Eiffel have a very C-like syntax. As does Pascal, Visual Basic, and a ton of other languages.
C is just a very concise version of the same syntax. This is why it's better than the others. It has power without extra fluff. It's a perfect starting point for making a more powerful language.
Smalltalk does not use a C-like syntax though and that is one reason why no one uses Smalltalk. Its syntax sucks.
The perfect language would have an extended C-like (or C++-like) syntax. The extensions to the syntax would make functional programming easier. They would allow things like heavy use of recursion without performance loss. Being able to choose between mutable and nonmutable variables would be good too (especially if the language made this very efficient).
Brain Dead? (Score:2)
The revolution is over. Evolution is now firmly entrenched.
"esoteric" - Sending modem strings to Mars.
Re:No decent langauges... (Score:2)
One of my favorite languages was Amiga E. In the way it worked it was fundamentally similar to K&R-style C, with a few esoteric features added. The striking difference was how much more readable Amiga E was, mostly because it used more keywords than C.
It also underscores that point about marketing, since Amiga E was never a commercial project, and was never ported from Amiga to any other sys
Re:No decent langauges... (Score:3, Interesting)
I used a fair bit of Eiffel last semester, and love the language. I do have a theory as to why it hasn't gotten a more mainstream acceptance than a lot of other languages though: ESTUDIO. That is one of the most painful IDEs I have ever used. I can't even think of what else to say... EStudio was one of the largest barriers for me doing my assignments, because there was numerous times I felt it was actually working against me.
Re:No decent langauges... (Score:3, Insightful)
Saving lines is useful because you can fit only so many lines on screen at once, and the eye can only scan so many at a time.
The more code I can understand at a time, the easier it is for me to understand the program and fix the bugs. If you know the language well, and the style is good, you don't need real words (which are just representations of something anyway) where a symbol will do.
Note that I said understand. Sometimes adding lines makes code easier to understand, othertimes subtracting lines mak
Hey, I like Perl! (Score:5, Interesting)
Frankly, without Perl my work would be far harder.
I also like Eiffel. Guess I am one of those scary people that actually use different tools for different tasks and do not spam the world with simplistic, general and irrelevant statements. about
Re:Hey, I like Perl! (Score:3, Interesting)
Would you spend ages writing a text parser in Java to get some text formatted data into a database, or would you do it in an hour in Perl? Especially if you are working on a remote system, any unix system is pretty much guaranteed to have Perl installed.
It is all about choosing the best language for the task. If I was writing mobile phone games, I'd use Java
Re:Hey, I like Perl! (Score:2)
Re:Hey, I like Perl! (Score:2)
Re:Hey, I like Perl! (Score:2, Insightful)
Which API?
J2ME is constant across all mobile envs (symbian UIQ/Nokia, M$, Linux). What C-based phone multimedia API is?
Re:Hey, I like Perl! (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're using it as a much more powerful replacement to sed, it's a great tool. If you're using it to replace C to develop complex application, you're proving Mr. Kay's point.
Re:Hey, I like Perl! (Score:2)
Exactly my point. However it is not the languages fault if it is misused. It is the fault of those misuing it. And there is a reason interfacing between Perl and C is possible in both directions and via the OS. I actually do this all the time: Longer pipe-chains with some components Perl and some components C. Interface between on
Re:Hey, I like Perl! (Score:2)
It's not much good requiring an ee-fscking-normous interpreter to interpret your small tool, though. On my system
There's nothing you can do with perl that you can't do with awk and sed. perl is, let's face it, a collection of cheap hacks in a bag hung off the si
Re:Hey, I like Perl! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hey, I like Perl! (Score:3, Insightful)
Good news. The vast majority of them have moved on to PHP
The advantage of Perl is not the Syntax. Hell,
Re:Hey, I like Perl! (Score:2, Insightful)
IHBT, right?
I got your perl right here. (Score:5, Funny)
Waka waka bang star tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang star equal at dollar under-score,
Percent star waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Pipes curly-bracket bang comma comma CRASH.
Also: Isn't it odd that perl is the one language that hardly ever makes it past the slashdot lameness filter?
~Wx
Re:I got your perl right here. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I got your perl right here. (Score:2, Funny)
String found where operator expected at
(Missing semicolon on previous line?)
syntax error at
Can't find string terminator "'" anywhere before EOF at
Re:I got your perl right here. (Score:3, Insightful)
For reference, that's a pipe, not an 'L' or a '1', and that line turns off output buffering. OBVIOUSLY.
Perl is useful for a lot of different things, but so are a lot of other languages, and they aren't nearly so obtuse.
Re:I got your perl right here. (Score:3, Interesting)
and while not a poem in the strict sense, you do get a good rythm going when reading this next one. It's inspired by watching someone fail miserably at parallel parking.
Illuminatus! (Score:4, Interesting)
It was in Dobbs' Lightning that I first read Tux Sneezed, which I still think is a rip-roaring good yarn. The scene where Atlanta Hope sees Niklaus Wirth and it's her old *ahem* "boyfriend" with the gaunt cheeks, and he said "I am Bob Dobbs", man, that's writing. The 103-page long speech afterwards, explaining the importance of strong typing and showing why all the anti-Heracletians are destroying civilization by destroying strong typing, certainly is persuasive, especially to me who's got three (going on four) contracts, each of which share the same include files. "Without strong typing there can be no civilization."
Her nonfiction book, "Antitrust: The Unknown Ideal for the New Heracletian" is, I think, a distinct letdown, but the Dobbs' Lightning bumper stickers sure give people the creeps.
I met Atlanta Hope at the time of the IEEE Committee Riots. I was in the thick of it (you have no idea how bizarre civil war gets when one side uses nerf weapons as a large part of its arsenal), and met Atlanta herself where the last stand was being made. She grabbed my right arm and howled something like "War is the Health of the State! Conflict is the creator of all things!"
Seeing as how she was on a heavy Heraclitus wavelength, I quoted with great passion, "Men should fight for the Laws as they would for the walls of the city!" That won her, and I was Atlanta's personal lieutenant for the rest of the battle.
(Epilogue: Heraclitus -- He was apt to say odd things. Once he even wrote that "Religious ceremonies are unholy." A strange duck.)
Perl (Score:5, Insightful)
But Perl! Ah, Perl! Such a bundle of contradictions! It violated every rule I held dear about language theory, and was a better language for it. Perl doesn't try to be a theoretically perfect language for any particular theory of linguistic perfection. It has principles, but it is not a slave to those principles. It has a degree of consistency, but never a foolish consistency.
No language on Earth has made me rethink my concepts of "what makes a good language" more than Perl.
Re:Perl (Score:2)
This argument gets paraded out so often, people have just accepted it and don't realize how ridiculous it is. There are officers to enforce the rules, and they are called Standards. Programming style is a social problem, not a technical one. If it's getting out of hand, your company (or department, or team) needs to develop a set of standards and make people use them. Instead, you would rather make the language itself so limited and inflexible that bad
Re:Perl (Score:2)
I have some other people's code from this past summer that I am going through to find a few bugs. It is hard to read, not very well commented and spaghetti like. It is written in C.
This is more about blaming the language for the shortcomings of an individuals ability to communicate than it is anything to do with a language. It
Lisp (Score:4, Insightful)
So I don't particularly like his pigoenholing of lisp - he says there were three working extensible languages, and smalltalk was one of them, kindof not mentioning however, that lisp _wrote the book_ on extensible languages. Every good lisp program extends the vocabulary of the lisp language into the problem domain (a characteristic shared with good Forth).
I confidently predict something vaguely recognisable as "Lisp" will outlast pretty much every other computer language on the planet. You see, new dynamic languages have a choice when they get to a certain point (a choice e.g. python is now facing) - do they add the remaining features of lisp and thereby "risk" being classed as a reinvented dialect of lisp, or refuse those features, maintain their independent identity, but forever cripple their language compared to lisp?
Re:Lisp (Score:5, Informative)
I wouldn't be that hard on him.
If you search him further you'll see he has probably done more to promote Lisp than most others whose speciality isn't _already_ Lisp.
In his Turing award lecture this past October at OOSPLA 2004, he told the audience (paraphrased): "you owe it to yourself and your profession to seriously learn Lisp".
The Java vocational training quote rings true (Score:5, Insightful)
To quote Isaac Newton, "If I have been able to see farther, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."
Frankly, we've hit a point where there's a lot less "science" in Computer Science, or rather, the need for such training in many programming jobs.
There's nothing wrong with a well rounded education but for some people they don't have the time or inclination to take on full engineering curriculums (as I did).
While I don't mind have gotten a rounded education in light of where tech careers have gone, it's too bad I didn't follow my father... construction. Given his real estate holdings, I doubt I will reach his station in life (economically) if I stay on a pure tech track... highly unlikely.
So if CS degrees are nowadays more about vocational training, so what. A tech degree of any kind, no matter how full of yourself you are, is not going to take you where it once might. That's reality. For all the noise we hear about a focus on math & science, it seems to me to be rendered somewhat moot since some Big Wig Biz guy is going to offshore such work anyway. So I ask, what's the point?
Don't get me wrong, a good foundation in math is good, we just don't all need to become math majors...
If you manage to learn and apply algebra, you can at least solve some practical math problems. But considering some of the stories of people who can't deal with fractions, well, obviously we're failing somewhere in the math department.
Anyway, just rambling now...
-M
Re:The Java vocational training quote rings true (Score:2)
And that's partly because no one did anything about it as degrees (of all sorts) were devalued in order to allow governments to crow about the fact that 60,70,80% of the population were getting degrees, and never mind the fact that the degrees were so easy as to be meaningless.
When I was employing people a couple of years ago I quickly found that there was no point in filtering
Re:The Java vocational training quote rings true (Score:2, Insightful)
People who know what their doing, and why, instead of, as I said in my post, shoving everything in their Java Box.
Java isn't always the best solution, or even possible, on every platform.
Actually you can say that about every language... But there is one thing that is always true, on every platform, and that's the theories of Computer Science.
Re:The Java vocational training quote rings true (Score:2, Insightful)
However, to be quite honest, they relate very little to the needs of most mundane business IT requirements. Or, rather, the ones that do are pretty much handled by the first two years of a decent undergrad CS program. Everything beyond that is really only applied in software businesses (like Google, iD, MSFT, etc) rather than the majority of corps that are software consumers (Home Depot, DaimlerChr
Re:The Java vocational training quote rings true (Score:4, Interesting)
But that's not a "good" program, that's a bad one. A good program would teach algorithms, design, and team working and at least three languages, one of which should be Lisp, just because it lets them know there are other paradigms out there. That will teach flexibility and allow students to cope with legacy and oddball systems. Learning Java is simply not good enough. Indeed, I would say that learning C and Smalltalk would give anyone the tools to walk into a Java post with a week's notice, and many other posts too.
Get them all doing assembler, that what I say. Assemble some sense into 'em!
TWW
Re:The Java vocational training quote rings true (Score:2)
My point was that the current system assumes that there is no need for the scientist at all. That's not true, even though it is a smaller need than programmers (in whatever languages).
Undergraduate courses are not the place for vocational training no matter how good the stats look for the government.
TWW
On the contrary (Score:2)
Of course, I graduated way back in 2001, so I'm sure the landscape has changed-- or maybe just in crappy cs schools.
Re:On the contrary (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, we wanted courses in VAX Assembler and C. When I got out into the real world, it turned out that the theory that I had learned was of much more practical use than the so-called "practical" classes I took -- with the exception of C, which I learned on my own.
Perl (Score:4, Informative)
Perl fills a 'tiny short-term need'? Is that why Morgan Stanley, RyanAir [ryanair.com], Amazon [amazon.com], Ticketmaster [ticketmaster.com] and even increasingly Google [google.com] to name but a few are using it for real, business-critical applications?
I'm so sick of all this anti-Perl talk. I write powerful applications in Perl and they are definetly not 'write only'. If anyone writes a 'write only' program in any language then it is the programmer who is at fault. Perl assumes a bit of intelligence on the programmer's side, rather than adopting Java's policy of bondage. And contrary to what a previous comment said, Perl is a general purpose language (with excellent built-in data structures and regular expressions, and a convenient and expressive syntax).
This guy might have an impressive [sic] resume, but he is badly showing his ignorance about Perl.
Re:Perl (Score:4, Insightful)
Your perl apps may be amazingly legible and easy to understand , but most I've seen are written by paid up members of the The Shorter The Better club. Usually resulting in a rats nest of complex regular expressions and obscure syntax making it impossible to get a clear understanding of whats going on without intensive study of the code. Other languages can allow obtuse code but only Perl makes it so easy it becomes 2nd nature.
Re:Perl (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, businesses use perl for business-critical applications. Why do you think that proves anything about the theory of designing languages? Businesses used Windows 3.1, too. Does that prove that it's the perfect operating system, so no one should have bothered to develop any new ones?
Businesses need to use some tool that exists now. Alan Kay, who is hardly ignorant about the subject, doesn't think there isany existing language that doesn't have some sort of problems, so saying that perl has problems isn't "anti-Perl" talk. He has the same sort of concerns about Smalltalk, which he invented himself. Getting upset about some quote about where your favorite language went wrong is just moronic. All languages have gone wrong, and that's the problem he's talking about.
Lots of good quotes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lots of good quotes. (Score:3, Insightful)
I use XML purely to store data files for my applications. Most of the time there is no DTD or schema or anything fancy like that. However, what makes it useful for me is that I can add new parts to my data storage and my old code will s
Favourite quote (Score:4, Funny)
memorable quotes ? (Score:2, Funny)
Which is why for years people have been writing CGI, QA and Admin scripts in Smalltalk.
Re: memorable quotes ? (Score:2)
Re: memorable quotes ? (Score:5, Interesting)
(Non-ANSI, but original) Lisp is a language that is implemented in itself in about half a letter page.
Even Smalltalk can be implemented in Smalltalk in a quite compact manner.
Perl needs a quite large compiler to turn Perl code into the runtime code. And every new feature in Perl is done in a way, that the compiler has to be changed and a formerly syntactically wrong line gets a semantic put on.
Perl is fine for what it was thought out for: To crunch large amounts of similarily structured data into human readable reports. That's what most CGIs or admin scripts are about: filtering database entries or long logfiles and converting the results into webpages or other human accessible documents.
(Or getting huge amounts of data and turning them into log file entries and data base lines.)
It is still a Practical Extraction and Report Language. Alan Kay didn't dispute it. But it gets most of it's power as a language from what Alan Kay has called "an egyptian pyramid", a huge number of bricks and buildingblocks put together by brute force and thousands of slaves, but not from its inherent design qualities.
Re: memorable quotes ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Two Grumpy Old Guys (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, Mr. Kay puts forward some great ideas but the whole tone strikes me as whining. Smalltalk was great and as he says there are many new and interesting ideas out there now, why doesn't he implement them in an accessible way and drop the attitude that intellectual lighweights have ruined programming.
Re:Two Grumpy Old Guys (Score:2, Informative)
My professor on Perl (Score:4, Funny)
Egotism in its purest form... (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason Perl is so popular is because it is SOOO easy to throw something together in no time at all that can access databases, websites, and so forth, without all of the messy class coding of the other languages. Would I want to write something huge in perl? Heck no. Because Perl is made for scripting and not for large projects. Same thing for PHP and and all of those languages he likens to Egyptian pyramids made from brute force.
Also, I don't know about him, but I know that at Purdue the CS degree requires the authoring of a compiler, some study of programming language theory, some classes about Database Theory (I can't remember the last time a vocational class taught tuple calculus and normalization), as well as some high level algorithm knowledge. I would consider at least that degree program a step above just some Java vocational classes, and his comment only highlights how egotistical he really is.
Just because he's really smart doesn't give him the excuse to be a real jackass.
Re:Egotism in its purest form... (Score:3, Insightful)
I would agree with Alan's comment about a modern CS degree being a Java vocational program. I've been trying to hire software developers lately, and every resume I see has nothing but Java and web apps on it, and no b
Re:Egotism in its purest form... (Score:4, Informative)
When someone like Alan Kay, with a very inventive and academic background, criticizes the workhorse stuff out in the "real world", he's pointing out where the ideas don't work, rather than the thing itself. Basically, he's thinking on another level than the one most of us are.
He's not really saying Java just sucks. He's Java sucks insofar as it was founded on some bad ideas. That doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't do real work in it. It just means that there are limits to what you can do with it. Someone like Alan Kay can't really get over this, which is part of what makes him a genius.
Paul Graham (who, of course, is a big fan of Lisp), has written quite a bit on language design. I think I would have reacted to this interview the same way you have had I not read The Hundred-Year Language [paulgraham.com], and others. I highly recommend them.
What have you done since 1980? (Score:2)
I know a vast amount about computer science (Score:5, Funny)
LISP had it first, LISP did it better, and LISP is all you need. Let's look at why LISP is so good that it has to be mentioned ad nauseam whenever a language discussion comes up.
1 -- LISP is simple and elegant. LISP has a pure functional design, without any of that procedural/imperative/OO junk that people use to actually write software that does stuff. LISPs purity and simplicity keep it in the lab, where languages belong.
2 -- LISP is old. You name it, LISP implemented it way back when. Things like visual form designers, refactoring IDEs, regular expressions and the like don't count -- those aren't real language features, just modern rubbish that helps people do boring jobs.
3 -- LISP is highly intuitive. I've used LISP for 70 years, man and boy, and that's why I realise just how intuitive LISP is. Starting off, some people find LISP a bit daunting, and they keep wanting to write 'a + b' instead of '(add a b)' just because it's "shorter" and "clearer". In fact, though, it only takes a few short years of practise with purely functional languages to find LISP completely intuitive.
4 -- LISP is used by real professionals -- computer scientists, AI researchers from the 1980s, and Douglas Hofstatder. The post-LISP languages are used by hired help -- engineers and whatnot. I'm sorry to have to say it, but it's true. If you want to get _paid_ for programming, sure, use C# or PHP or something like that; _gentlemen_ will continue to use LISP.
Well, I hope that's finished the 'debate' (if indeed there can be debate about what is self-evident). LISP is better, and that's that. Remember, it's not what you can _do_ with a language that matters; its how much you can _say_ about it.
Incidentally, this post is a JOKE. LISP has exactly the strengths and weaknesses you would expect from a pure functional language. I just think it's weird that people always jump up and go 'LISP IS BETTER OH YES IT IS' when a language discussion comes round.
Re:I know a vast amount about computer science (Score:2)
(defvar a 2)
(setq a (+ a 5))
(princ a)
=> 7
If you add CLOS or Goops into the mix there there is even less functional programming. There is of course still a lot of functional programming in Lisp, due to it bei
Alan Turing Award winner? (Score:2, Funny)
Does that mean he passed the Turing test?
Fascinating (Score:2, Interesting)
Ah, like English. Or, for that matter, everything else ever invented or discovered, accidentally or otherwise. Fire burns down houses. Wheels are attached to cars that run people over and pollute the environment. Light bulbs enable light pollution.
The quote is another example of stating something obvious in a way that seems profound.
Lessions to be learned? (Score:3, Insightful)
- API/Libraries are important, more important than the language itself, no matter how good your language is, if you don't have a bunch of libaries ready to use the common man will solve his problems faster and better in another language. (Perl/CPAN)
- good syntax is important, do/end are no fun, {}'s are easier to read to the common man (C)
- interoperability with other languages is important (C-libraries exported to scripting languages)
At least for me that seems to be the points that make a language successfull, while not necesarrily beatifull. Most of the powerfull, but mostly failed languages, of the past (Smalltalk, Lisp) seem to either ignore most or all of these points, worse they come with their own VM, their own development environment and such, so unless you do it their way you are mostly (hard to write or ship a few ten-line long script, hard/impossible into a native-binary, etc.).
Too bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that the interior of Perl is (at least used to, I don't know about now or Parrot) ugly, scary stuff, I would have liked to hear Kay's take on what Larry Wall and some other pretty bright people are trying to do with perl and parrot now, and whether he thinks their philosophies are great or slumbering. Might be a flame war to end all flame wars, but relatively untutored (well Niklaus Wirth's book was my beginning at a young age and according to Kay I've probably been damaged by it) I was excited to see all the ideas that were being stolen and discussed from other languages for Perl 6. Late typing, rebuilding the language from inside at a "meta" level, these all sound great. I'm also interested time and again with Haskell and perhaps it is because I subconsciously have an urge for cleanliness like the 1/2 page of Lisp.
Would parrot written in Lisp be better? I've liked Perl and the libraries of course, but if I could do without them I wonder if Kay would recommend Squeak, something like Erlang (?), or what. The talk of the ancient computer that had 1000 times better "lost" technology than today was intriguing but there was too little about it, and it seemed to talk almost about the Cell processor there.
I feel a great amount of warmth and wisdom from Kay and it is probably too much to ask him to light the way, but if he is going to go shooting down most of the world, even people who are seriously wanting something better and trying to build it, I think he has some responsibility to address it, or at least to mention how Squeak can solve all our problems. Well I guess I have a week of surfing to find my own answers. When I looked at Squeak the last couple of times a while ago I had to turn away from it (down the dark path?) but at the very least I'd like to be intelligent about my choices.
To me perl and the people at perlmonks.org are interested in a language that assists creativity and the wild Larry juggernaught and the wizards involved in Perl 6 deserve more than Kay handed out. I hope this is not his last parting shot but the first of many challenging, wonderful discussions by Kay about how we can get to the next level.
Re: I had Heraclitus once (Score:3, Funny)
> The itching wasn't so bad, but the burning drove me nuts.
Sounds like Hera shared more than her clitus.
Re:sed'ing (Score:2, Insightful)
System Automation - For a quick and easy automation task on a server I administer I choose a light-weight and dynamic langua
Re: sed'ing (Score:5, Insightful)
> ADA is good for secure stuff
Actually, Ada [sic] is for big, complicated software systems that you want to be able to maintain.
Of course, maintainability is a key component of security, and Ada does offer built-in resistance to buffer overflows, but I don't think security is the primary reason for choosing Ada [sic].
> C++ is good for GUI
That claim isn't so much wrong as... baffling.
Re: sed'ing (Score:2)
You don't have any idea what you are talking about. Please, others reading this, ignore the parent. They clearly have no experience and are attempting to sound intelligent. They are not describing C++ but instead QT. Stop posting comments before you convince someone with even less knowledge than you that you are right.
Re:There is hope yet (Score:2, Informative)
a. The Architecture of the Burroughs B5000 - 20 Years Later and Still Ahead of the Times? [lsu.edu]
b. Early Descriptor Architectures [washington.edu] in Capability-Based Computer Systems (nice book -- great to see it available again)
Re:What 60s GUIs is he talking about? (Score:3, Interesting)
check wikipedia [wikipedia.org] (and update it if you find anything else)