8 ms·

Where are the modern-day Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay? It seems like all the great minds are building gimmicky apps and starting IC

Where are the modern-day Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay? It seems like all the great minds are building gimmicky apps and starting ICOs.

jaaames 9y ago
Follow the money.
ocschwar 9y ago
I'm reading what Nelson wrote in the 60's right now, and I'm dumbfounded by the guy's genius. But if I were reading his stuff in the 60's, I'd probably consider it frivolous nonsense and get on with my day. Today's Ted Nelsons are probably working in obscurity for the same reasons.
- criddell 9y ago
  I really want to get a copy of his book Computer Lib/Dream Machines but I just can't justify the $100 or so for a beat up copy.
  - hyperpape 9y ago
    Many university libraries will offer access to non-affiliated individuals for a non-crazy amount. Even if you don't want to pay, if the library is open to the public, you can walk in, find the book on the shelf and read it at a desk.
    - criddell 9y ago
      I don't know if you will be able to find it in a library anymore. I think most library copies have been stolen and sold on eBay.
  - thenoblebuffalo 9y ago
    Here's a download link for a pdf copy if that helps: https://libgen.pw/item/detail/id/736641?id=736641 https://libgen.pw/item/detail/id/736641?id=736641 Found using this site: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/
    - criddell 9y ago
      All of the online versions I've seen look like photocopies of a fax. Do you know if that's what the original looked like?
      - thenoblebuffalo 9y ago
        Wow, that is not the best quality. I haven't read this one yet (def plan on at least glancing through it now). I found this http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-21-nelson.pdf http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-21-nelson.pdf it's just a sample showing chapter 21, but it is much nicer looking.
  - zethraeus 9y ago
    He'll sell you a reprint directly. http://hyperland.com/LibPage http://hyperland.com/LibPage
    - criddell 9y ago
      Thanks! I wish it were $40 though. A $100 is a bit outside of my impulse purchase zone.
      - tudorw 9y ago
        It sounds a lot, consider it a fine piece of art in it's own right and I don't think you'll lose your investment over time... The reprint by M$ does not do this original large format version which is crisp and sharp.
        zethraeus 9y ago
        It's a beautiful book. He also signed it for me, in case that's a thing you value. I'd love to know how different his reprints are the the originals. I've seen one from the original run, and they looked the same to me. (But it had been a while.)
  - todd8 9y ago
    I've got a copy that I bought new while in grad school (back in the '70s). I read and reread it; it's a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I kept in in my grad student office in the CS building, so to protect it and my other CS books from wandering off I stamped my name with bright ink on a number of the pages. The name stamps probably ruined its value as a collector's item :( ... One thing I remember from it was his fascination with APL and with the even more off-beat language TRAC. TRAC is a Turing complete macro language first implemented as an interactive programming environment[1]. [1] http://hopl.info/showlanguage2.prx?exp=276 http://hopl.info/showlanguage2.prx?exp=276
- miguelrochefort 9y ago
  Can you give an example of something he wrote that would be considered "frivolous nonsense" in the 60's?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ocschwar 9y ago
    Read page 12 here: https://ia801502.us.archive.org/17/items/SelectedPapers1977/SelectedPapers1977_text.pdf https://ia801502.us.archive.org/17/items/SelectedPapers1977/...
    - contingencies 9y ago
      OMG. I thought this guy's mannerisms were some kind of acquisition of fame. He was talking like that in the 60s. No wonder nobody listened! Perversely, I now have far more respect for him.
kabes 9y ago
I wouldn't put Ted Nelson on the same page like the other ones. The other three actually build stuff that is now everywhere. Ted never got anywhere is now bitching all the time on how much better his ideas were than what we actually got.
- funkymike 9y ago
  Perhaps then the best lesson he has to teach is that execution (with a bit of luck) is more important than the idea.
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  I think his biggest problem is that he refuses to collaborate with other people, or build on top of current technology. He's had a lot of great important inspirational ideas, but his implementation of those ideas didn't go anywhere, he's angry and bitter, and he hasn't bothered re-implementing them with any of the "inferior technologies" that he rejects. Back in 1999, project Xanadu released their source code as open source. It was a classic example of "open sourcing" something that was never going to ship otherwise, and that nobody could actually use or improve, just to get some attention ("open source" was a huge fad at the time). http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/08/27/web_precursor_xanadu_project_goes/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/08/27/web_precursor_xanadu... >Register believe it or not factoid: Nelson's book Computer Lib was at one point published by Microsoft Press. Oh yes. ® They originally wrote Xanadu in Smalltalk, then implemented a Smalltalk to C++ compiler, and finally they released the machine generated output of that compiler, which was unreadable and practically useless. It completely missed the point and purpose of "open source software". I looked at the code when it was released in 1999 and wrote up some initial reactions that Dave Winer asked me to post to his UserLand Frontier discussion group: http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010163.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010163.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010164.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010164.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010165.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010165.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010166.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010166.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010167.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010167.... A few excerpts (remember I wrote this in 1999 so some of the examples are dated): >Sheez. You don't actually believe anybody will be able to do anything useful with all that source code, do you? Take a look at the code. It's mostly uncommented glue gluing glue to glue. Nothing reusable there. >Have you gotten it running? The documentation included was not very helpful. Is there a web page that tells me how to run Xanadu? Did you have to install Python, and run it in a tty window? >What would be much more useful, would be some well written design documents and port-mortems, comparisons with current technologies like DHTML, XML, XLink, XPath, HyTime, XSL, etc, and proposals for extending current technologies and using them to capture the good ideas of Xanadu. >Has Xanadu been used to document its own source code? How does it compare to, say, the browseable cross-referenced mozilla source code? Or Knuth's classic Literate Programming work with TeX? >Last time I saw Ted Nelson talk (a few years ago at Ted Selker's NPUC workshop at IBM Almaden), he was quite bitter, but he didn't have anything positive to contribute. He talked about how he invented everything before anyone else, but everyone thought he was crazy, and how the world wide web totally sucks, but it's not his fault, if only they would have listened to him. And he verbally attacked a nice guy from Netscape (Martin Haeberli -- Paul's brother) for lame reasons, when there were plenty of other perfectly valid things to rag the poor guy about. >Don't get me wrong -- I've got my own old worn-out copy of the double sided Dream Machines / Computer Lib, as well as Literary Machines, which I enjoyed and found very inspiring. I first met the Xanadu guys some time ago in the 80's, when they were showing off Xanadu at the MIT AI lab. >I was a "random turist" high school kid visiting the AI lab on a pilgrimage. That was when I first met Hugh Daniel: this energetic excited big hairy hippie guy in a Xanadu baseball cap with wings, who I worked with later, hacking NeWS. Hugh and I worked together for two different companies porting NeWS to the Mac. >I "got" the hypertext demo they were showing (presumably the same code they've finally released -- that they were running on an Ann Arbor Ambassador, of course). I thought Xanadu was neat and important, but an obvious idea that had been around in many forms, that a lot of people were working on. It reminded me of the "info" documentation browser in emacs (but it wasn't programmable). >The fact that Xanadu didn't have a built-in extension language was a disappointment, since extensibility was an essential ingredient to the success of Emacs, HyperCard, Director, and the World Wide Web. >I would be much more interested in reading about why Xanadu failed, and how it was found to be inadequate, than how great it would have been if only it had taken over the world. >Anyway, my take on all this hyper-crap is that it's useless without a good scripting language. I think that's why Emacs was so successful, why HyperCard was so important, what made NeWS so interesting, why HyperLook was so powerful, why Director has been so successful, how it's possible for you to read this discussion board served by Frontier, and what made the World Wide Web what it is today: they all had extension languages built into them. >So what's Xanadu's scripting language story? Later on, in the second version, they obviously recognized the need for an interactive programming language like Smalltalk, for development. >But a real-world system like the World Wide Web is CONSTANTLY in development (witness all the stupid "under construction" icons), so the Xanadu back and front end developers aren't the only people who need the flexibility that only an extension language can provide. As JavaScript and the World Wide Web have proven, authors (the many people writing web pages) need extension languages at least as much as developers (the few people writing browsers and servers). >Ideally, an extension language should be designed into the system from day one. JavaScript kind of fits the bill, but was really just nailed onto the side of HTML as an afterthought, and is pretty kludgey compared to how it could have been. >That's Xanadu's problem too -- it tries to explain the entire universe from creation to collapse in terms of one grand unified theory, when all we need now are some practical techniques for rubbing sticks together to make fire, building shelters over our heads to keep the rain out, and convincing people to be nice and stop killing each other. The grandiose theories of Xanadu were certainly ahead of their time. >It's the same old story of gross practicality winning out over pure idealism. >Anyway, my point, as it relates to Xanadu, and is illustrated by COM (which has its own, more down-to-earth set of ideals), is that it's the interfaces, and the ideas and protocols behind them, that are important. Not the implementation. Code is (and should be) throw-away. >There's nothing wrong with publishing old code for educational purposes, to learn from its successes and mistakes, but don't waste your time trying to make it into something it's not.
justin66 9y ago
What about the people building gimmicky apps and starting ICOs leads you to believe that they are "great minds?"
- nrhk 9y ago
  I would consider someone like Vitalik to be a potential "great mind". I think its facetious to discount ALL the people in Crypto, there's defiantly a lot of talent there.
  - justin66 9y ago
    > I think its facetious to discount ALL the people in Crypto That's clearly what I was doing.
kristopolous 9y ago
Don't fool yourself into thinking society writ large is wise enough to value them. So look at the people getting steamrolled and dismissed and somewhere in that pile you'll find them.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Agreed. Kay, Nelson, et al are well-known more as an accident of timeline convergence than due to their revolutionary insights. That's not to say they don't have or didn't have revolutionary insights, it's just to say that such insights are rarely widely recognized. :) This is painfully obvious when we see that these people themselves have been making comments critical of the industry for decades, and have generally been ignored.
taeric 9y ago
My favorite part of reading Knuth and Martin Gardner has been how much they cite others. That is the field has always had a lot of people with ideas. Selecting for the best communicators is limiting. Especially if they do self promotion. So, where are the big names? Out doing work, most likely. Most of it work that won't go anywhere. The barrier to entry impact has risen, after all. Even as participation barriers have dropped. I say this as someone that probably would not be participating years ago.
leoc 9y ago
Well, Hans Reiser is currently in Soledad State Prison apparently. Of course he has no-one but himself to blame for that particular setback. His old Future Vision document https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Future_Vision https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Future_Vision is still well worth your time. Some more stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14542595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14542595
dude01 9y ago
I think one problem we have is that to those people, the future of computers was a blank slate -- sure they had computers back then, but the industry was tiny compared to what it is now. Now, we already have tons of paradigms -- databases, browsers with their own HTML / JavaScript / CSS ecosystem, mobile apps, cloud computing, neural networks, etc. I think it's harder now for someone to say, let's do things completely differently. Everybody nowadays is all about incremental changes.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > "I think it's harder now for someone to say, let's do things completely differently. Everybody nowadays is all about incremental changes." There is room for radical change, but you have to know how to make your own space for it. To give an example, I think the opportunities for reconfigurable computing are huge, and that we've barely scratched the surface. However, building a whole new platform based on that idea doesn't make practical sense (at least, not yet). What would be best is to sneak it in the back door. For example, design a new open-source FPGA-based sound card. That way, you can get reconfigurable chips into people's computers. After you've got a decent install base, you can expand into new uses for those chips, similar to how GPGPU expanded the utility of GPUs.
ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
Judea Perl won the Turing prize in 2011 for contributions in artificial intelligence. I think we will see a number of people joining your "great minds" group from the AI field in the next 20 years.
- miguelrochefort 9y ago
  In 20 years, AI itself will dominate the "great minds" group.
- leoc 9y ago
  AI seems to be doing ok, though you hear complaints about short-termism from there too. It's AHI (Augmenting Human Intelligence) that's largely been in a rut for decades.
iamwil 9y ago
I hear this notion bandied about once in a while. I don't think it's strictly true. It's just something you say to express frustration about things you don't like broadly like about tech, by comparing it to an idealized version of the past. There were plenty of frivolous things back in the 60's. We just don't remember them as no one wrote about it that survived so we can read it. As for some modern-day people doing progressive work in computing that should change how we compute in the future--a couple come to mind: Bret Victor and others (along with Alan Kay) in the YCR HARC lab are carrying on in the same tradition with Dynamiclang.org. Chris Granger at Eve is also exploring some of these new old ideas and trying to push programming forward. In Neural Networks, there's George Hinton that helped push Deep Learning into the forefront of Machine Learning. (And others whose names I can't remember) Personally, I'd also put Juan Benet of Protocol Labs and Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum in this group. The former built IPFS and FileCoin, and the latter built Ethereum. Out of everyone I've read and watched talks and listened to interviews about cryptocurrenies, they seem the most concerned about its potential for computing in the future.
- miguelrochefort 9y ago
  This is a great list. The two I already had in mind were Bret Victor and Vitalik Buterin.
romaniv 9y ago
Generally, I'm wondering the same thing. It's not all bad, though. Alan Kay has his VPRI, which has a lot of talented people. Bret Victor has some good conceptual stuff. But as he said himself: https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/947177766885081088 https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/947177766885081088 "As Kay himself has said so many times, this question is entirely about funding. With ARPA/IPTO-style funding, you get Kays (and Engelbarts, Minskys, McCarthys, Corbatós, etc) With VC and NSF, you don't. Even Kay hasn't been able to "be Kay" since the 80s: http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/ http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/ " Another problem, I think, is that many people are no longer interested in this kind of research. Two popular lines of thought are: - Our infrastructural computing is already awesome or at least good enough, so we do not need anything simpler or different, just more tooling and automation. - Machine learning will fix everything in computing.
- tachyonbeam 9y ago
  I'm very interested in doing this kind of research, but I can tell you it's incredibly difficult in academia, for instance, to publish research about programming languages, or wild new designs. It seems to me the academic world has moved to a model where everything has to be incremental, and you have to immediately have positive results that beat prior work on a number of metrics. Anything else is unpublishable. As far as machine learning fixing everything. I work in machine learning now, and I'm incredibly skeptical. Especially with the way companies always rush things to market and seek to eliminate competition. There are going to be a lot of bugs, hacks, and malicious uses of machine learning. I will also mention that the quality of the code I'm seeing in ML right now is absolutely terrible. Everything is so fast-moving. People don't take time to polish anything, they've already moved on to another project, nothing is maintained. The code is largely written by academics who are rushing to write papers and look down on programming as some kind of unfortunate necessity, and the quality of the code they produce reflects that. Oh and, the machine learning world thinks Python is the best programming language ever... Sigh.
  - mattgreenrocks 9y ago
    I'm in industry, but have similar leanings of wanting to work on this stuff. For a few years I was convinced academia was the way to do this; now I'm not certain. It's as if the collective capacity of dreaming about the possibilities of computing was lost when we realized we could make lots of money. Instead of building bicycles for the mind, we're obsessed with building TV 2.0, and getting lots of money doing it. Nowadays I see my meager, fledgling research as art pretty much. I don't know where I'll end up long-term, but I doubt I'm the only person that feels this way. I've occasionally thought of starting a Slack for this sort of thing.
carapace 9y ago
Three of those four are still alive. If we expand the time-frame a little they are the modern-day themselves.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Yep, I was gonna make this comment too. Alan Kay in particular is an active commenter on Quora and he shows up on HN occasionally (often to chastise someone for speculating about "how it was" when they could've just asked, or at least just referenced existing documentation). There's no need for us to box them out. Alan Kay particularly seems to lament the way the field has developed and the average programmer's ignorance of and disrespect for historical context. He is validated in this more every day.

Where are the modern-day Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay? It seems like all the great minds are building gimmicky apps and starting ICOs.

jaaames 9y ago

Follow the money.

ocschwar 9y ago

I'm reading what Nelson wrote in the 60's right now, and I'm dumbfounded by the guy's genius. But if I were reading his stuff in the 60's, I'd probably consider it frivolous nonsense and get on with my day. Today's Ted Nelsons are probably working in obscurity for the same reasons.

criddell 9y ago
I really want to get a copy of his book Computer Lib/Dream Machines but I just can't justify the $100 or so for a beat up copy.
- hyperpape 9y ago
  Many university libraries will offer access to non-affiliated individuals for a non-crazy amount. Even if you don't want to pay, if the library is open to the public, you can walk in, find the book on the shelf and read it at a desk.
  - criddell 9y ago
    I don't know if you will be able to find it in a library anymore. I think most library copies have been stolen and sold on eBay.
- thenoblebuffalo 9y ago
  Here's a download link for a pdf copy if that helps: https://libgen.pw/item/detail/id/736641?id=736641 https://libgen.pw/item/detail/id/736641?id=736641 Found using this site: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/
  - criddell 9y ago
    All of the online versions I've seen look like photocopies of a fax. Do you know if that's what the original looked like?
    - thenoblebuffalo 9y ago
      Wow, that is not the best quality. I haven't read this one yet (def plan on at least glancing through it now). I found this http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-21-nelson.pdf http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-21-nelson.pdf it's just a sample showing chapter 21, but it is much nicer looking.
- zethraeus 9y ago
  He'll sell you a reprint directly. http://hyperland.com/LibPage http://hyperland.com/LibPage
  - criddell 9y ago
    Thanks! I wish it were $40 though. A $100 is a bit outside of my impulse purchase zone.
    - tudorw 9y ago
      It sounds a lot, consider it a fine piece of art in it's own right and I don't think you'll lose your investment over time... The reprint by M$ does not do this original large format version which is crisp and sharp.
      - zethraeus 9y ago
        It's a beautiful book. He also signed it for me, in case that's a thing you value. I'd love to know how different his reprints are the the originals. I've seen one from the original run, and they looked the same to me. (But it had been a while.)
- todd8 9y ago
  I've got a copy that I bought new while in grad school (back in the '70s). I read and reread it; it's a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I kept in in my grad student office in the CS building, so to protect it and my other CS books from wandering off I stamped my name with bright ink on a number of the pages. The name stamps probably ruined its value as a collector's item :( ... One thing I remember from it was his fascination with APL and with the even more off-beat language TRAC. TRAC is a Turing complete macro language first implemented as an interactive programming environment[1]. [1] http://hopl.info/showlanguage2.prx?exp=276 http://hopl.info/showlanguage2.prx?exp=276
miguelrochefort 9y ago
Can you give an example of something he wrote that would be considered "frivolous nonsense" in the 60's?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ocschwar 9y ago
  Read page 12 here: https://ia801502.us.archive.org/17/items/SelectedPapers1977/SelectedPapers1977_text.pdf https://ia801502.us.archive.org/17/items/SelectedPapers1977/...
  - contingencies 9y ago
    OMG. I thought this guy's mannerisms were some kind of acquisition of fame. He was talking like that in the 60s. No wonder nobody listened! Perversely, I now have far more respect for him.

kabes 9y ago

I wouldn't put Ted Nelson on the same page like the other ones. The other three actually build stuff that is now everywhere. Ted never got anywhere is now bitching all the time on how much better his ideas were than what we actually got.

funkymike 9y ago
Perhaps then the best lesson he has to teach is that execution (with a bit of luck) is more important than the idea.
DonHopkins 9y ago
I think his biggest problem is that he refuses to collaborate with other people, or build on top of current technology. He's had a lot of great important inspirational ideas, but his implementation of those ideas didn't go anywhere, he's angry and bitter, and he hasn't bothered re-implementing them with any of the "inferior technologies" that he rejects. Back in 1999, project Xanadu released their source code as open source. It was a classic example of "open sourcing" something that was never going to ship otherwise, and that nobody could actually use or improve, just to get some attention ("open source" was a huge fad at the time). http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/08/27/web_precursor_xanadu_project_goes/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/08/27/web_precursor_xanadu... >Register believe it or not factoid: Nelson's book Computer Lib was at one point published by Microsoft Press. Oh yes. ® They originally wrote Xanadu in Smalltalk, then implemented a Smalltalk to C++ compiler, and finally they released the machine generated output of that compiler, which was unreadable and practically useless. It completely missed the point and purpose of "open source software". I looked at the code when it was released in 1999 and wrote up some initial reactions that Dave Winer asked me to post to his UserLand Frontier discussion group: http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010163.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010163.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010164.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010164.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010165.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010165.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010166.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010166.... http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010167.html http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010167.... A few excerpts (remember I wrote this in 1999 so some of the examples are dated): >Sheez. You don't actually believe anybody will be able to do anything useful with all that source code, do you? Take a look at the code. It's mostly uncommented glue gluing glue to glue. Nothing reusable there. >Have you gotten it running? The documentation included was not very helpful. Is there a web page that tells me how to run Xanadu? Did you have to install Python, and run it in a tty window? >What would be much more useful, would be some well written design documents and port-mortems, comparisons with current technologies like DHTML, XML, XLink, XPath, HyTime, XSL, etc, and proposals for extending current technologies and using them to capture the good ideas of Xanadu. >Has Xanadu been used to document its own source code? How does it compare to, say, the browseable cross-referenced mozilla source code? Or Knuth's classic Literate Programming work with TeX? >Last time I saw Ted Nelson talk (a few years ago at Ted Selker's NPUC workshop at IBM Almaden), he was quite bitter, but he didn't have anything positive to contribute. He talked about how he invented everything before anyone else, but everyone thought he was crazy, and how the world wide web totally sucks, but it's not his fault, if only they would have listened to him. And he verbally attacked a nice guy from Netscape (Martin Haeberli -- Paul's brother) for lame reasons, when there were plenty of other perfectly valid things to rag the poor guy about. >Don't get me wrong -- I've got my own old worn-out copy of the double sided Dream Machines / Computer Lib, as well as Literary Machines, which I enjoyed and found very inspiring. I first met the Xanadu guys some time ago in the 80's, when they were showing off Xanadu at the MIT AI lab. >I was a "random turist" high school kid visiting the AI lab on a pilgrimage. That was when I first met Hugh Daniel: this energetic excited big hairy hippie guy in a Xanadu baseball cap with wings, who I worked with later, hacking NeWS. Hugh and I worked together for two different companies porting NeWS to the Mac. >I "got" the hypertext demo they were showing (presumably the same code they've finally released -- that they were running on an Ann Arbor Ambassador, of course). I thought Xanadu was neat and important, but an obvious idea that had been around in many forms, that a lot of people were working on. It reminded me of the "info" documentation browser in emacs (but it wasn't programmable). >The fact that Xanadu didn't have a built-in extension language was a disappointment, since extensibility was an essential ingredient to the success of Emacs, HyperCard, Director, and the World Wide Web. >I would be much more interested in reading about why Xanadu failed, and how it was found to be inadequate, than how great it would have been if only it had taken over the world. >Anyway, my take on all this hyper-crap is that it's useless without a good scripting language. I think that's why Emacs was so successful, why HyperCard was so important, what made NeWS so interesting, why HyperLook was so powerful, why Director has been so successful, how it's possible for you to read this discussion board served by Frontier, and what made the World Wide Web what it is today: they all had extension languages built into them. >So what's Xanadu's scripting language story? Later on, in the second version, they obviously recognized the need for an interactive programming language like Smalltalk, for development. >But a real-world system like the World Wide Web is CONSTANTLY in development (witness all the stupid "under construction" icons), so the Xanadu back and front end developers aren't the only people who need the flexibility that only an extension language can provide. As JavaScript and the World Wide Web have proven, authors (the many people writing web pages) need extension languages at least as much as developers (the few people writing browsers and servers). >Ideally, an extension language should be designed into the system from day one. JavaScript kind of fits the bill, but was really just nailed onto the side of HTML as an afterthought, and is pretty kludgey compared to how it could have been. >That's Xanadu's problem too -- it tries to explain the entire universe from creation to collapse in terms of one grand unified theory, when all we need now are some practical techniques for rubbing sticks together to make fire, building shelters over our heads to keep the rain out, and convincing people to be nice and stop killing each other. The grandiose theories of Xanadu were certainly ahead of their time. >It's the same old story of gross practicality winning out over pure idealism. >Anyway, my point, as it relates to Xanadu, and is illustrated by COM (which has its own, more down-to-earth set of ideals), is that it's the interfaces, and the ideas and protocols behind them, that are important. Not the implementation. Code is (and should be) throw-away. >There's nothing wrong with publishing old code for educational purposes, to learn from its successes and mistakes, but don't waste your time trying to make it into something it's not.

justin66 9y ago

What about the people building gimmicky apps and starting ICOs leads you to believe that they are "great minds?"

nrhk 9y ago
I would consider someone like Vitalik to be a potential "great mind". I think its facetious to discount ALL the people in Crypto, there's defiantly a lot of talent there.
- justin66 9y ago
  > I think its facetious to discount ALL the people in Crypto That's clearly what I was doing.

kristopolous 9y ago

Don't fool yourself into thinking society writ large is wise enough to value them. So look at the people getting steamrolled and dismissed and somewhere in that pile you'll find them.

cookiecaper 9y ago
Agreed. Kay, Nelson, et al are well-known more as an accident of timeline convergence than due to their revolutionary insights. That's not to say they don't have or didn't have revolutionary insights, it's just to say that such insights are rarely widely recognized. :) This is painfully obvious when we see that these people themselves have been making comments critical of the industry for decades, and have generally been ignored.

taeric 9y ago

My favorite part of reading Knuth and Martin Gardner has been how much they cite others. That is the field has always had a lot of people with ideas. Selecting for the best communicators is limiting. Especially if they do self promotion. So, where are the big names? Out doing work, most likely. Most of it work that won't go anywhere. The barrier to entry impact has risen, after all. Even as participation barriers have dropped. I say this as someone that probably would not be participating years ago.

leoc 9y ago

Well, Hans Reiser is currently in Soledad State Prison apparently. Of course he has no-one but himself to blame for that particular setback. His old Future Vision document https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Future_Vision https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Future_Vision is still well worth your time. Some more stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14542595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14542595

dude01 9y ago

I think one problem we have is that to those people, the future of computers was a blank slate -- sure they had computers back then, but the industry was tiny compared to what it is now. Now, we already have tons of paradigms -- databases, browsers with their own HTML / JavaScript / CSS ecosystem, mobile apps, cloud computing, neural networks, etc. I think it's harder now for someone to say, let's do things completely differently. Everybody nowadays is all about incremental changes.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "I think it's harder now for someone to say, let's do things completely differently. Everybody nowadays is all about incremental changes." There is room for radical change, but you have to know how to make your own space for it. To give an example, I think the opportunities for reconfigurable computing are huge, and that we've barely scratched the surface. However, building a whole new platform based on that idea doesn't make practical sense (at least, not yet). What would be best is to sneak it in the back door. For example, design a new open-source FPGA-based sound card. That way, you can get reconfigurable chips into people's computers. After you've got a decent install base, you can expand into new uses for those chips, similar to how GPGPU expanded the utility of GPUs.

ghostbrainalpha 9y ago

Judea Perl won the Turing prize in 2011 for contributions in artificial intelligence. I think we will see a number of people joining your "great minds" group from the AI field in the next 20 years.

miguelrochefort 9y ago
In 20 years, AI itself will dominate the "great minds" group.
leoc 9y ago
AI seems to be doing ok, though you hear complaints about short-termism from there too. It's AHI (Augmenting Human Intelligence) that's largely been in a rut for decades.

iamwil 9y ago

I hear this notion bandied about once in a while. I don't think it's strictly true. It's just something you say to express frustration about things you don't like broadly like about tech, by comparing it to an idealized version of the past. There were plenty of frivolous things back in the 60's. We just don't remember them as no one wrote about it that survived so we can read it. As for some modern-day people doing progressive work in computing that should change how we compute in the future--a couple come to mind: Bret Victor and others (along with Alan Kay) in the YCR HARC lab are carrying on in the same tradition with Dynamiclang.org. Chris Granger at Eve is also exploring some of these new old ideas and trying to push programming forward. In Neural Networks, there's George Hinton that helped push Deep Learning into the forefront of Machine Learning. (And others whose names I can't remember) Personally, I'd also put Juan Benet of Protocol Labs and Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum in this group. The former built IPFS and FileCoin, and the latter built Ethereum. Out of everyone I've read and watched talks and listened to interviews about cryptocurrenies, they seem the most concerned about its potential for computing in the future.

miguelrochefort 9y ago
This is a great list. The two I already had in mind were Bret Victor and Vitalik Buterin.

romaniv 9y ago

Generally, I'm wondering the same thing. It's not all bad, though. Alan Kay has his VPRI, which has a lot of talented people. Bret Victor has some good conceptual stuff. But as he said himself: https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/947177766885081088 https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/947177766885081088 "As Kay himself has said so many times, this question is entirely about funding. With ARPA/IPTO-style funding, you get Kays (and Engelbarts, Minskys, McCarthys, Corbatós, etc) With VC and NSF, you don't. Even Kay hasn't been able to "be Kay" since the 80s: http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/ http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/ " Another problem, I think, is that many people are no longer interested in this kind of research. Two popular lines of thought are: - Our infrastructural computing is already awesome or at least good enough, so we do not need anything simpler or different, just more tooling and automation. - Machine learning will fix everything in computing.

tachyonbeam 9y ago
I'm very interested in doing this kind of research, but I can tell you it's incredibly difficult in academia, for instance, to publish research about programming languages, or wild new designs. It seems to me the academic world has moved to a model where everything has to be incremental, and you have to immediately have positive results that beat prior work on a number of metrics. Anything else is unpublishable. As far as machine learning fixing everything. I work in machine learning now, and I'm incredibly skeptical. Especially with the way companies always rush things to market and seek to eliminate competition. There are going to be a lot of bugs, hacks, and malicious uses of machine learning. I will also mention that the quality of the code I'm seeing in ML right now is absolutely terrible. Everything is so fast-moving. People don't take time to polish anything, they've already moved on to another project, nothing is maintained. The code is largely written by academics who are rushing to write papers and look down on programming as some kind of unfortunate necessity, and the quality of the code they produce reflects that. Oh and, the machine learning world thinks Python is the best programming language ever... Sigh.
- mattgreenrocks 9y ago
  I'm in industry, but have similar leanings of wanting to work on this stuff. For a few years I was convinced academia was the way to do this; now I'm not certain. It's as if the collective capacity of dreaming about the possibilities of computing was lost when we realized we could make lots of money. Instead of building bicycles for the mind, we're obsessed with building TV 2.0, and getting lots of money doing it. Nowadays I see my meager, fledgling research as art pretty much. I don't know where I'll end up long-term, but I doubt I'm the only person that feels this way. I've occasionally thought of starting a Slack for this sort of thing.

carapace 9y ago

Three of those four are still alive. If we expand the time-frame a little they are the modern-day themselves.

cookiecaper 9y ago
Yep, I was gonna make this comment too. Alan Kay in particular is an active commenter on Quora and he shows up on HN occasionally (often to chastise someone for speculating about "how it was" when they could've just asked, or at least just referenced existing documentation). There's no need for us to box them out. Alan Kay particularly seems to lament the way the field has developed and the average programmer's ignorance of and disrespect for historical context. He is validated in this more every day.