Thanks for the email, I probably wouldn’t have checked back here for a while.

I’d say something apropos about the computer helpfully “hiding” your email, but I can’t seem to think of anything really clever

I tried starting a wiki a while back, but no one came. Maybe a Google group would work, but the big problem is trying to get people involved. Open public forums degenerate, but closed ones don’t really accomplish much.

Wave might be interesting (particularly if it combines technologies like discussion groups and tweets), but I’m not nearly important enough to get added into the first 100,000. Or the first million, or perhaps even the first billion or so. It could be quite a while before Google gives me access (I’m thinking years

It’s a great idea to get back into mathematics, if for no other reason than to be able to appreciate the elegance of some of the proofs. The secrets to simplicity are rooted in our mathematical abstractions.

Paul.

Sorry about your comment getting hung up. I see you posted it on Sept. 14. I’ve been neglecting my blog since last month, and I just now found your comment in my spam queue (1 month later!). I have no idea why it ended up in there. Every once in a while legitimate comments end up in spam, so I force myself to check it from time to time.

I like the idea of a group for trying to come up with something better. I see that we can’t visit physically, since we’re in different places. I’m in Colorado. So I assume you’re talking about something virtual. I’m no expert on what’s available for group collaboration. Got any ideas?

As you saw in the comments above, Google Wave is coming along sometime, probably next year. It’s still in a rough state, last I heard.

My main interest is in knowledge modeling and representation. This not only encompasses data, but code as well.

This year I’ve been trying to upgrade my perceptive skills, when I can, such as really learning mathematics, the way mathematicians understand it. Like I was saying in my post, I feel that’s really necessary for me to move ahead with what I’m trying to accomplish. So that’s been my focus. I’m a work in progress…

Great post!

I share the same disappointment with the current state of our technologies as you and Alan. I can see so much potential, but so little progress.

Maybe those of us that aren’t convince that .NET and a million mindless coders isn’t a greatest way belch new stuff into existence, can come together somewhere in a group?

Somewhere dedicated to trying to explore other ways to make this stuff work better.

Paul.

I would like very much so to encourage you to write a book. You have the talent for it. If you decide to go this route, I’d be glad to help you in any way I can (editing, getting you in touch with my contacts, etc.).

J.Ja

“It is a pity that they were called Programming Languages, but apart from that unfortunate name, FORTRAN and LISP have been the great contribution of the 50s.

That name was unfortunate because very soon the analogy with natural languages became more misleading than illuminating. It strengthened the school of thought that tried to view programming primarily as a communication problem, it invited the psychologists in, who had nothing to contribute, and it seriously delayed the recognition of the benefits of viewing programs as formulae to be derived. It was the time of Edmund C. Berkeley’s “Giant Brains or Machines that Think”, it was the time of rampant anthropomorphism that would lead to the false hope of solving the programming problem by the verbosity of COBOL and would seduce Grace M. Hopper to write a paper titled “The Education of a Computer”. Regrettably and amazingly, the habit lingers on: it is quite easy to infuriate computing scientists by pointing out that anthropomorphizing inanimate objects is in science a symptom of professional immaturity.

As said, FORTRAN and LISP were the two great achievements of the 50s. Compared with FORTRAN, LISP embodied a much greater leap of imagination. Conceptually FORTRAN remained on familiar grounds in the sense that its purpose was to aid the mechanization of computational processes we used to do with pen and paper (and mechanical desk calculators if you could afford them). This was in strong contrast to LISP whose purpose was to enable the execution of processes that no one would dream of performing with pen and paper.

At the time LISP’s radical novelties were for instance recognized by its characterization as “the most intelligent way of misusing a computer”, in retrospect we see its radical novelty because it was what is now known as a language for “functional programming”, while now, 40 years later, functional programming is still considered in many CS departments as something much too fancy, too sophisticated to be taught to undergraduates. LISP had its serious shortcomings: what became known as “shallow binding” (and created a hacker’s paradise) was an ordinary design mistake; also its promotion of the idea that a programming language should be able to formulate its own interpreter (which then could be used as the language’s definition) has caused a lot of confusion because the incestuous idea of self-definition was fundamentally flawed.”

I have come across what I think is a very good example of this “no centers” aspect: please take a look at Lecture 4b at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/ around 1:12:00 into the lecture.

I finally looked at this lecture, and I’d say the first part is not about “no centers” design. Abelson talks about abstraction there. But later on I’d say yes, Abelson is talking about a “no centers” design. As Abelson says, it “takes out the manager”. Kay said that conventional programming was like a “single chef” going around assembling “ingredients”. Whereas “no centers” was:

how to get things done without having to concentrate the knowledge in one or a few places (because this would require these places to have to control “ingredients”).

The sense I got was that Abelson was describing the building blocks of the rationale for real OOP, as they understood it at Xerox PARC. You can kind of see the thought process that people like Alan Kay went through to arrive at it, particularly in the Q&A part. You heard Abelson talk about the idea of “message passing” a couple times in the lecture; that instead of needing to have types to map information to operations, the operations are already packaged inside the objects. In effect the table that Abelson described gets internalized in each object, and the appropriate method is dispatched via. a table lookup when a message is received by the object.

So in Smalltalk, for example, we could do what Abelson did by defining a Complex class, a Rectangular class, a Polar class, an Ordinary class, a Rational class, and a Polynomial class. In the case of Complex, it could contain a Rectangular object or a Polar object. Both would respond to the messages realPart and imaginaryPart, and Complex would not need to bother knowing whether it was dealing with Rectangular or Polar objects. For example, with addition in Complex we could just say:

+ other

“Create new complex number as result of addition”
^Complex realPart: self realPart + other realPart
imaginaryPart: self imaginaryPart + other imaginaryPart

I liked the lecture a lot. Thanks for referring me to it. I’ve sworn that I’m going to get into SICP someday. I’m more focused on learning about mathematics at this point.