4 ms·

I always felt that Tim Berners-Lee was not respected enough in both the computer science and programming communities. I felt it especially after working for ov

by chubot 10y ago

I always felt that Tim Berners-Lee was not respected enough in both the computer science and programming communities. I felt it especially after working for over a decade at Google, which literally built its entire business on TBL's architectural concepts. For example, Google and other search engines would not work without the principle of least power [1], which a lot of people, including Alan Kay [2], somehow don't understand. That is, if the web language was a VM rather than HTML, there would be no Google. It would also not have been possible for the web to make the jump from desktops to cell phones as the #1 client now. You know the handler in iOS and Android that makes <select> boxes usable? That's an example of the principle of least power. I recommend reading his book "Weaving the Web" [2] if you want to learn more about the story behind the web. I'm very glad that TBL is getting this recognition. He is a genius and also has a very generous personality. People in the programming community seem to talk about Torvalds or Stallman a lot, perhaps because of their loud styles, but I don't see that much about TBL. Ditto in the CS community. "HyperText" used to be a big research area but I guess TBL solved it and people don't talk about it anymore. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power [2] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442 http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny/dp/006251587X https://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny...

madiathomas 10y ago
Looks like if you want to be famous, you have to be loud. Maybe that explains why he has been vocal against walled gardens lately. Thanks for the recommendation. Let me check it out. Let me search for it. WWW is very important to my life.
noblethrasher 10y ago
I don't want to detract from TBL's accomplishments, especially on this occasion but, he didn't solve the hypertext problem insomuch as he decided that the really hard things like provenance and bidirectional linkages weren't important. Google and Facebook did solve those problems, but only for commercial benefit. Moreover, it's clear that TBL regrets that early decision to the degree that he rails against the walled gardens.
- syshum 10y ago
  >Moreover, it's clear that TBL regrets that early decision to the degree that he rails against the walled gardens. he rails against the walled gardens while at the same time putting things into the standard, like EME, they powers them.
  - noblethrasher 10y ago
    The goal of advocacy is to rouse a sympathetic collective that you can leverage at the bargaining table. But, when the time comes, you play whatever hand you have. The W3C has to negotiate with industry. But, unfortunately for us that care about the open web, its position is weak.
  - aanm1988 10y ago
    I think the EME thing is a symptom of a worse problem, which is that the internet is very much controlled by a handful of commercial interests. Whoever controls browsers can become a bad actor and you either go along with it or end up with a broken system (this site only works in IE).
- chubot 10y ago
  But that's exactly what I disagree with. Design is as much about what to leave out as what to include. Leaving out those things wasn't an accident or ignorance as Alan Kay claims. There were a lot of very conscious design decisions involved in the web -- again see "Weaving the Web". He may regret that the web has evolved into walled gardens, but what could he have possibly have done about it? There's to prevent that decades in advance, at least not without strangling it from birth.
  - noblethrasher 10y ago
    I don't think that you and I are in disagreement about the TBL’s design competence: I stated that his decision to set aside the problem of provenance that preoccupied other hypertext research was intentional. But, your argument is perilously close to begging the question that the success of web is a good thing. Now, I happen to think that the web is a net good (no pun intended), because (among other things) it helped break Microsoft’s hegemony and continues to force OS vendors to provide and support a standard universal computing platform (albeit a crippled one). But, it’s also arguable that the success of the web may have set personal computing back by a few decades, while also exacerbating a bunch of other problems like wealth inequality and reduced privacy/sovereignty, because it turned the Internet into a big modem. I’ll take a look at Weaving the Web; thank you for the recommendation. To you, I commend Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future.
kolme 10y ago
"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." -- Alan Kay That quote is pretty unfortunate. I guess nobody's perfect.
- jarmitage 10y ago
  Kay is bang on. 1. http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/ http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot 3. Comment elsewhere in this thread about how we have been forced into turning a document system into a VM.
  - leoc 10y ago
    He's absolutely right, and also completely wrong. It's like listening to the blind men argue about the elephant. "It's a particle!" "No, it's a wave!" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119057
cuspycode 10y ago
With all respect to Tim Berners-Lee, I think the principle of least power is overrated. For example, even binary Horn clauses are Turing complete[0]. Whatever configuration language you can come up with (HTML, CSS, or whatever), it's either Turing-complete or not, and if it's Turing-complete there is no danger of executing infinite loops as long as you have some cutoff for resource requirements. The only thing that matters is whether the code is properly sandboxed before it tries to do any I/O. [0] https://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/Publications/documents/devienne_94.pdf https://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/Publications/documents/devien...
- chubot 10y ago
  Not sure I agree with you overall, but I do agree with the distinction between computational power and I/O (or capabilities). That's a very important design criteria for languages for distributed systems. I think the problem would be that the computation would get cut off at different points on every machine, leading to an unstable ecosystem. Remember the browser has to run on devices with at least an order of magnitude difference in resources, probably 2 orders now. Generally, you want to guarantee that your style computations terminate. Now it appears that CSS doesn't actually provide that guarantee, since it's Turing complete :) But I guess it's close enough in practice.
gambler 10y ago
>For example, Google and other search engines would not work without the principle of least power [1], which a lot of people, including Alan Kay [2], somehow don't understand. That is, if the web language was a VM rather than HTML, there would be no Google. Kay's criticism of the Web is very well justified and (like most of his high-level criticisms) typically misunderstood. He doesn't criticize it as a repository of hyperlinked documents. He criticizes it as platform for application delivery, which it became. Modern web with all its scripts is a VM -- and badly designed one at that.
- chubot 10y ago
  If that's true, then it's not the fault of the web's designers. Suppose you are an architect and you a build a house for a family of five. Then someone buys the house and it into an auditorium. And then they say, "Wow this is really shitty place to hold concerts -- the acoustics are terrible. What a bunch of amateurs." Is that your fault? If the web is a genius for hypertext, but not for app delivery, then he should have just said so. That is not a very hard sentiment to express. "The Web was done by Amateurs" doesn't capture it. But I don't even think that's true. If the web were really bad as an application delivery platform, someone should have supplanted it by now. Alan Kay or someone else should go design their own awesome VM for application delivery. I guarantee you it will fail, for reasons of fundamental to its design, while TBL's platform succeeded for reasons fundamental to its design.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- sanderjd 10y ago
  I think people understand the argument, they just don't fully agree with it. Personally, while I agree that we have ended up with a fairly poor universal VM, I find it to be a fascinating example of path dependency. Maybe we would be better off with one repository of hypertext and one well designed universal VM, but what path would we have taken to get there? The hypertext repository was so compelling that everyone installed software to access it. Then that universally available software was so compelling that people found ways to run increasingly complex applications on it. And that's how we naturally found ourselves where we are today. I don't see any reason to think that engineering a more perfect solution all at once would have worked better than this natural progression.
gkya 10y ago
Torvalds didn't add anything to CS. He just wrote a Unix-like kernel. The kernel took off and the project grew to include thousands of devs and became the biggest OSS project ever, but still, it's a kernel, not much different in essence from any old Unix kernel. Git? Again, popular project, nothing new. It was even started contemporaneously with Mercurial, which is essentially equal to it, and both are no new inventions at all, DVCS was here since the 90's. Stallman did Emacs in whose invention AFAIK he did take part, and then he took part in implementing some other innovative projects, though I don't really know his CS career (I mostly know him as the face of GNU and FSF). IDK but having created a popular project should not be equal to a big innovation in the field.
- hutzlibu 10y ago
  "IDK but having created a popular project should not be equal to a big innovation in the field." So you seriously think that "new" is better, then "well done"? I don't think it makes sense to compare those 2 things and value one higher than the other. Of what use are innovations, if you can't use them in a "popular project"?
  - gkya 10y ago
    > So you seriously think that "new" is better, then "well done"? No. But Linux is not more well-made than, say, the kernel of any modern BSD, or that of illumos, etc. Git is not technically superior to Mercurial et al. Torvalds' success is certainly a big, admirable one, but it's a different kind of success than that of Berners-Lee. Also, while it's the most popular kernel, it's not like we'd not have anything we do have today if it didn't exist, it's in essence an ordinary kernel that came out in the right time. It's those who made the distros and reverse-engineered the drivers and ported/packaged thousands of programs who made Linux a big thing. WWW, on the other hand, is an invention. It's something that did not exist, and it transformed the world like nothing else.
    - hutzlibu 10y ago
      "but it's a different kind of success" That was my point ;) Otherwise we agree ...

by chubot 10y ago

madiathomas 10y ago

Looks like if you want to be famous, you have to be loud. Maybe that explains why he has been vocal against walled gardens lately. Thanks for the recommendation. Let me check it out. Let me search for it. WWW is very important to my life.

noblethrasher 10y ago

I don't want to detract from TBL's accomplishments, especially on this occasion but, he didn't solve the hypertext problem insomuch as he decided that the really hard things like provenance and bidirectional linkages weren't important. Google and Facebook did solve those problems, but only for commercial benefit. Moreover, it's clear that TBL regrets that early decision to the degree that he rails against the walled gardens.

syshum 10y ago
>Moreover, it's clear that TBL regrets that early decision to the degree that he rails against the walled gardens. he rails against the walled gardens while at the same time putting things into the standard, like EME, they powers them.
- noblethrasher 10y ago
  The goal of advocacy is to rouse a sympathetic collective that you can leverage at the bargaining table. But, when the time comes, you play whatever hand you have. The W3C has to negotiate with industry. But, unfortunately for us that care about the open web, its position is weak.
- aanm1988 10y ago
  I think the EME thing is a symptom of a worse problem, which is that the internet is very much controlled by a handful of commercial interests. Whoever controls browsers can become a bad actor and you either go along with it or end up with a broken system (this site only works in IE).
chubot 10y ago
But that's exactly what I disagree with. Design is as much about what to leave out as what to include. Leaving out those things wasn't an accident or ignorance as Alan Kay claims. There were a lot of very conscious design decisions involved in the web -- again see "Weaving the Web". He may regret that the web has evolved into walled gardens, but what could he have possibly have done about it? There's to prevent that decades in advance, at least not without strangling it from birth.
- noblethrasher 10y ago
  I don't think that you and I are in disagreement about the TBL’s design competence: I stated that his decision to set aside the problem of provenance that preoccupied other hypertext research was intentional. But, your argument is perilously close to begging the question that the success of web is a good thing. Now, I happen to think that the web is a net good (no pun intended), because (among other things) it helped break Microsoft’s hegemony and continues to force OS vendors to provide and support a standard universal computing platform (albeit a crippled one). But, it’s also arguable that the success of the web may have set personal computing back by a few decades, while also exacerbating a bunch of other problems like wealth inequality and reduced privacy/sovereignty, because it turned the Internet into a big modem. I’ll take a look at Weaving the Web; thank you for the recommendation. To you, I commend Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future.

kolme 10y ago

"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." -- Alan Kay That quote is pretty unfortunate. I guess nobody's perfect.

jarmitage 10y ago
Kay is bang on. 1. http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/ http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot 3. Comment elsewhere in this thread about how we have been forced into turning a document system into a VM.
- leoc 10y ago
  He's absolutely right, and also completely wrong. It's like listening to the blind men argue about the elephant. "It's a particle!" "No, it's a wave!" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119057

cuspycode 10y ago

With all respect to Tim Berners-Lee, I think the principle of least power is overrated. For example, even binary Horn clauses are Turing complete[0]. Whatever configuration language you can come up with (HTML, CSS, or whatever), it's either Turing-complete or not, and if it's Turing-complete there is no danger of executing infinite loops as long as you have some cutoff for resource requirements. The only thing that matters is whether the code is properly sandboxed before it tries to do any I/O. [0] https://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/Publications/documents/devienne_94.pdf https://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/Publications/documents/devien...

chubot 10y ago
Not sure I agree with you overall, but I do agree with the distinction between computational power and I/O (or capabilities). That's a very important design criteria for languages for distributed systems. I think the problem would be that the computation would get cut off at different points on every machine, leading to an unstable ecosystem. Remember the browser has to run on devices with at least an order of magnitude difference in resources, probably 2 orders now. Generally, you want to guarantee that your style computations terminate. Now it appears that CSS doesn't actually provide that guarantee, since it's Turing complete :) But I guess it's close enough in practice.

gambler 10y ago

>For example, Google and other search engines would not work without the principle of least power [1], which a lot of people, including Alan Kay [2], somehow don't understand. That is, if the web language was a VM rather than HTML, there would be no Google. Kay's criticism of the Web is very well justified and (like most of his high-level criticisms) typically misunderstood. He doesn't criticize it as a repository of hyperlinked documents. He criticizes it as platform for application delivery, which it became. Modern web with all its scripts is a VM -- and badly designed one at that.

chubot 10y ago
If that's true, then it's not the fault of the web's designers. Suppose you are an architect and you a build a house for a family of five. Then someone buys the house and it into an auditorium. And then they say, "Wow this is really shitty place to hold concerts -- the acoustics are terrible. What a bunch of amateurs." Is that your fault? If the web is a genius for hypertext, but not for app delivery, then he should have just said so. That is not a very hard sentiment to express. "The Web was done by Amateurs" doesn't capture it. But I don't even think that's true. If the web were really bad as an application delivery platform, someone should have supplanted it by now. Alan Kay or someone else should go design their own awesome VM for application delivery. I guarantee you it will fail, for reasons of fundamental to its design, while TBL's platform succeeded for reasons fundamental to its design.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
sanderjd 10y ago
I think people understand the argument, they just don't fully agree with it. Personally, while I agree that we have ended up with a fairly poor universal VM, I find it to be a fascinating example of path dependency. Maybe we would be better off with one repository of hypertext and one well designed universal VM, but what path would we have taken to get there? The hypertext repository was so compelling that everyone installed software to access it. Then that universally available software was so compelling that people found ways to run increasingly complex applications on it. And that's how we naturally found ourselves where we are today. I don't see any reason to think that engineering a more perfect solution all at once would have worked better than this natural progression.

gkya 10y ago

Torvalds didn't add anything to CS. He just wrote a Unix-like kernel. The kernel took off and the project grew to include thousands of devs and became the biggest OSS project ever, but still, it's a kernel, not much different in essence from any old Unix kernel. Git? Again, popular project, nothing new. It was even started contemporaneously with Mercurial, which is essentially equal to it, and both are no new inventions at all, DVCS was here since the 90's. Stallman did Emacs in whose invention AFAIK he did take part, and then he took part in implementing some other innovative projects, though I don't really know his CS career (I mostly know him as the face of GNU and FSF). IDK but having created a popular project should not be equal to a big innovation in the field.

hutzlibu 10y ago
"IDK but having created a popular project should not be equal to a big innovation in the field." So you seriously think that "new" is better, then "well done"? I don't think it makes sense to compare those 2 things and value one higher than the other. Of what use are innovations, if you can't use them in a "popular project"?
- gkya 10y ago
  > So you seriously think that "new" is better, then "well done"? No. But Linux is not more well-made than, say, the kernel of any modern BSD, or that of illumos, etc. Git is not technically superior to Mercurial et al. Torvalds' success is certainly a big, admirable one, but it's a different kind of success than that of Berners-Lee. Also, while it's the most popular kernel, it's not like we'd not have anything we do have today if it didn't exist, it's in essence an ordinary kernel that came out in the right time. It's those who made the distros and reverse-engineered the drivers and ported/packaged thousands of programs who made Linux a big thing. WWW, on the other hand, is an invention. It's something that did not exist, and it transformed the world like nothing else.
  - hutzlibu 10y ago
    "but it's a different kind of success" That was my point ;) Otherwise we agree ...