css is 20(ish)
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It's funny, but I remember reading about CSS when I was about 30, and HTML before that, and I looked at what was going on in the nascent web world and thought how horrid all that markup looked -- arbitrary, confusing, contradictory, and most importantly, always always always lacking completeness, requiring the most arcane workarounds. I made a the semi-conscious decision to not get anywhere near that cesspool, and I've managed to too pretty damn well, finally plunging into Ruby on Rails (to which I now respond with a whole-hearted X| ) three years ago. It's been insightful, if only that the only insight of significance is that, after 20 years, what goes on in the web world is even more arbitrary, confusing, contradictory, and lacking completeness. I sometimes regret that semi-conscious decision, because I am now by now means an expert in all this cruff[^], but in other ways I am delighted to have only taken a glancing blow with regards to web "technologies" (and I use the term loosely.) Marc
Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Higher Order Programming
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It's funny, but I remember reading about CSS when I was about 30, and HTML before that, and I looked at what was going on in the nascent web world and thought how horrid all that markup looked -- arbitrary, confusing, contradictory, and most importantly, always always always lacking completeness, requiring the most arcane workarounds. I made a the semi-conscious decision to not get anywhere near that cesspool, and I've managed to too pretty damn well, finally plunging into Ruby on Rails (to which I now respond with a whole-hearted X| ) three years ago. It's been insightful, if only that the only insight of significance is that, after 20 years, what goes on in the web world is even more arbitrary, confusing, contradictory, and lacking completeness. I sometimes regret that semi-conscious decision, because I am now by now means an expert in all this cruff[^], but in other ways I am delighted to have only taken a glancing blow with regards to web "technologies" (and I use the term loosely.) Marc
Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Higher Order Programming
I agree whole-heartedly. It seems many people celebrate the state-of-the-art today only because they don't realise how much we've lost. This interview with Alan Kay brings a lot of this stuff into focus, including such gems as: "They have no idea where [their culture came from] — and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs." Binstock: Still, you can't argue with the Web's success. Kay: I think you can. Binstock: Well, look at Wikipedia — it's a tremendous collaboration. Kay: It is, but go to the article on Logo, can you write and execute Logo programs? Are there examples? No. The Wikipedia people didn't even imagine that, in spite of the fact that they're on a computer. That's why I never use PowerPoint. PowerPoint is just simulated acetate overhead slides, and to me, that is a kind of a moral crime. That's why I always do, not just dynamic stuff when I give a talk, but I do stuff that I'm interacting with on-the-fly. Because that is what the computer is for. People who don't do that either don't understand that or don't respect it. There's lots more there, but I recommend more people read it to get some true perspective. And when he mentions Englebart, for example, look up what he did.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." Alan Kay.
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I agree whole-heartedly. It seems many people celebrate the state-of-the-art today only because they don't realise how much we've lost. This interview with Alan Kay brings a lot of this stuff into focus, including such gems as: "They have no idea where [their culture came from] — and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs." Binstock: Still, you can't argue with the Web's success. Kay: I think you can. Binstock: Well, look at Wikipedia — it's a tremendous collaboration. Kay: It is, but go to the article on Logo, can you write and execute Logo programs? Are there examples? No. The Wikipedia people didn't even imagine that, in spite of the fact that they're on a computer. That's why I never use PowerPoint. PowerPoint is just simulated acetate overhead slides, and to me, that is a kind of a moral crime. That's why I always do, not just dynamic stuff when I give a talk, but I do stuff that I'm interacting with on-the-fly. Because that is what the computer is for. People who don't do that either don't understand that or don't respect it. There's lots more there, but I recommend more people read it to get some true perspective. And when he mentions Englebart, for example, look up what he did.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." Alan Kay.
Rob Grainger wrote:
This interview with Alan Kay brings a lot of this stuff into focus, including such gems as:
Great interview. Thanks for posting that!
Rob Grainger wrote:
And when he mentions Englebart
Engelbart, BTW :) While I knew about his classic demonstration of a mouse and graphical user interface, I do not know much about the rest of his life, so I still looked him up. :) Marc
Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Higher Order Programming
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Rob Grainger wrote:
This interview with Alan Kay brings a lot of this stuff into focus, including such gems as:
Great interview. Thanks for posting that!
Rob Grainger wrote:
And when he mentions Englebart
Engelbart, BTW :) While I knew about his classic demonstration of a mouse and graphical user interface, I do not know much about the rest of his life, so I still looked him up. :) Marc
Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Higher Order Programming
Thanks for the correction, noted. I'm glad you enjoyed the interview - I seem to post it fairly regularly in various places, it seems to cover a lot of ground. Another one worth checking is the Stroustrup, Ungar and Hewitt interview I posted in the news feed a while ago: Linkety. Really makes you think about concurrency properly. One of the reasons I've been learning functional programming properly recently is to prepare myself for the upcoming many-core world. Incidentally, which language (if any) do you concentrate on in the book you link to?
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." Alan Kay.
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Thanks for the correction, noted. I'm glad you enjoyed the interview - I seem to post it fairly regularly in various places, it seems to cover a lot of ground. Another one worth checking is the Stroustrup, Ungar and Hewitt interview I posted in the news feed a while ago: Linkety. Really makes you think about concurrency properly. One of the reasons I've been learning functional programming properly recently is to prepare myself for the upcoming many-core world. Incidentally, which language (if any) do you concentrate on in the book you link to?
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." Alan Kay.
Rob Grainger wrote:
Incidentally, which language (if any) do you concentrate on in the book you link to?
Since SyncFusion is a Windows 3rd party control provider, the book focuses on F# but to make the transition less painful (and to illustrate F#'ish things) there's a lot of C# in the beginning as well. I actually spend very little time on how stateless languages make threading rather painless -- I probably should have mentioned that more. It's a free download, check it out - I'd appreciate your feedback. And it's on my list to read the other interview! Marc
Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Higher Order Programming
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Rob Grainger wrote:
Incidentally, which language (if any) do you concentrate on in the book you link to?
Since SyncFusion is a Windows 3rd party control provider, the book focuses on F# but to make the transition less painful (and to illustrate F#'ish things) there's a lot of C# in the beginning as well. I actually spend very little time on how stateless languages make threading rather painless -- I probably should have mentioned that more. It's a free download, check it out - I'd appreciate your feedback. And it's on my list to read the other interview! Marc
Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Higher Order Programming
Marc Clifton wrote:
It's a free download,
I hadn't spotted that - my bad. Will do so and let you know how I get on.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." Alan Kay.