2 ms·

What's even more a shame is that many people in the computer industry don't respect TBL's invention and accomplishments either! I'll borrow a phrase from Paul

by chubot 11y ago

What's even more a shame is that many people in the computer industry don't respect TBL's invention and accomplishments either! I'll borrow a phrase from Paul Graham and call it the "middlebrow critique" of the web. Typically people think the design is naive and inefficient -- they think it should involve a stateful protocol, a turing-complete VM, or be more "statically typed". They also tend to believe in "global truth" and neglect backward compatibility / graceful upgrades. I've heard a variety of accomplished engineers -- including my coworkers at Google, whose riches were built on the web -- express these kinds of sentiments. I think the real disconnect is that TBL thinks about people just as much as he thinks about computers. He thinks about the ecosystem -- the whole rather than the parts. The inventions and design principles were not an accident; you can read about them in his book "Weaving the Web".

berntb 11y ago
The whole stateful/stateless choice isn't intuitive unless you've at least read discussions about a few protocol designs/implementations which made these choices. It isn't about intelligence. No wait, I might be wrong here -- this ought to be obvious for people so young that they grew up doing web programming? Do educated developers really say that? (I haven't followed the rfcs for quite a long time, so I probably do lots Dunning–Krugers myself now. :-) ) Edit: I remember when WWW took over from Gopher. I thought "Damn, a superior alternative that won't win because a first-come implementation already filled the niche." Then came Mosaic which could show pictures -- and WWW took over. I was happy and disgusted at the shallowness. :-)
- drumdance 11y ago
  One of my favorite Internet artifacts is Marc Andreessen's proposal for the IMG tag -- note he used all caps. http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...

by chubot 11y ago

berntb 11y ago

The whole stateful/stateless choice isn't intuitive unless you've at least read discussions about a few protocol designs/implementations which made these choices. It isn't about intelligence. No wait, I might be wrong here -- this ought to be obvious for people so young that they grew up doing web programming? Do educated developers really say that? (I haven't followed the rfcs for quite a long time, so I probably do lots Dunning–Krugers myself now. :-) ) Edit: I remember when WWW took over from Gopher. I thought "Damn, a superior alternative that won't win because a first-come implementation already filled the niche." Then came Mosaic which could show pictures -- and WWW took over. I was happy and disgusted at the shallowness. :-)

drumdance 11y ago
One of my favorite Internet artifacts is Marc Andreessen's proposal for the IMG tag -- note he used all caps. http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...