4 ms·

Didn't read as disrespectful at all to me, just a firm rebuttal.

GuiA 8y ago
It’s a tad condescending. It asserts authoritatively that is a misreading of computer science history - in history, there is rarely a single “correct reading”, but rather many interpretations that at time reinforce and at times weaken each other. Using the imperative “read”, “learn”, etc is also heavy handed and unnecessary. It’s the kind of language bad teachers - the teachers who have to use their authority rather than mentorship skills - tend to use (“Check out those books for more” flows much better, for instance). As a result, the comment comes a little too much across as “no, you don’t have the knowledge, I have the knowledge!” which is sadly can be a little too common in hacker circles and doesn’t really encourage open, fruitful conversations the way “You know stuff, I know other stuff, let’s put it together and see what we come up with” does.
- westoncb 8y ago
  > ... in history, there is rarely a single “correct reading”, but rather many interpretations that at time reinforce and at times weaken each other. As I was reading the GP's interpretation of these historical events, it occurred to me how difficult it really is to get at a reliable interpretation of something like this: I've already read a couple books on the subject—but I can see room the cracks so to speak, where the GP's view may be more accurate. That said, difficulty isn't the same as impossibility—and yes, it is technically impossible (or at least meaningless) for certain definitions of 'correct' interpretation, but if you're okay with correct up to "for all intents and purposes"—then it's a non-issue. For instance, in this case there is a pretty definite question we'd like answered: which innovation was the limiting factor on our original development of general purpose computation: increased memory capacity, or theoretical knowledge of general purpose computation—or was their role more alike than different? Depending on how things actually played out, there are definite things you can say about that. For instance, perhaps we need at least 500 bits of memory for general purpose computation—did we have access to that while no one had yet thought to build the general purpose computer because we were still waiting for Zuse, Turing/Church? If so, we answer one way; if not, we answer the other way. The only case where it gets endlessly complicated, perhaps giving apparent grounds for claiming impossibility of correct interpretation, actually fits neatly into the last option I mentioned in the original question statement: that there wasn't a significant difference in the two innovations' roles as limiting factors. It seems valuable to understand the difficult and limits of interpretation, but I think more harm is being done than good speaking so generally of "correct readings" being impossible. > Using the imperative “read”, “learn”, etc is also heavy handed and unnecessary. It’s the kind of language bad teachers - the teachers who have to use their authority rather than mentorship skills - tend to use (“Check out those books for more” flows much better, for instance). I really wish this was better known. It's a pretty consistent pattern and useful to be able to recognize. My read on it is that it's typically used as a defensive strategy—a way to prevent an interlocutor from questioning the speaker any further on the subject.
Animats 8y ago
OK, that was a bit harsh. My point is that machine arithmetic preceded machine data storage. Early computing was a struggle to get something done with very, very little memory. Like 5 to 20 numbers. Babbage wanted to build something the size of a locomotive for storage - a huge drum of counter wheels, able to store 1000 numbers. Atanasoff had a rotating wheel of capacitors, refreshed on each turn, like DRAM, which was good thinking for 1939. The code-breaking machines of WWII were all very limited memory, more like a Bitcoin ASIC than a general purpose computer. IBM was plugging away with punched cards, which were their form of permanent data storage. Shannon wrote a paper on the minimum memory requirements for a telephone switch. In the IBM punched card world, "sorting" meant ordering, and distributing into groups was "selecting". Sorting was usually required before selecting, but if you only needed two or three output groups, you could select cards using a collator, which was capable of moderately complex logic operations. You might do that for "customers who are past due", for example. Building a stored program computer wasn't a conceptual problem. It was that, despite massive efforts, there was nothing to store the program in. The concept of algorithms dates back to at least the 9th century, and probably back to Euclid. (Although there's a long history of programmable cam-driven machinery. I've seen the Jaquet-Droz automata. built in the 1770s, demonstrated at the museum in Neuchâtel, where they are operated once a month. That was the high point of cam driven machinery for a long time.)
- westoncb 8y ago
  First off, thanks for the comment—pretty interesting stuff. One thing continues to bother me though. > My point is that machine arithmetic preceded machine data storage. > The concept of algorithms dates back to at least the 9th century, and probably back to Euclid. I don't think that's the issue at hand. Special-purpose computers implement algorithms and may use arithmetic—those are not the key differentiators from general purpose computation. Perhaps they were important first steps, but clearly what e.g. Turing/Church did was something else entirely. And I'm aware Leibniz was very much concerned with the problem earlier on, but where I get a bit fuzzy is whether general purpose computers really needed the more fleshed out results of e.g. Turing (or perhaps a predecessor) in order to really build a general purpose computer—and whether that was a major limiting factor even after we had access to the necessary memory, or if we knew conceptually that what we were shooting for all along was fully general purpose computation and we were really just waiting for the hardware to be possible.

GuiA 8y ago

It’s a tad condescending. It asserts authoritatively that is a misreading of computer science history - in history, there is rarely a single “correct reading”, but rather many interpretations that at time reinforce and at times weaken each other. Using the imperative “read”, “learn”, etc is also heavy handed and unnecessary. It’s the kind of language bad teachers - the teachers who have to use their authority rather than mentorship skills - tend to use (“Check out those books for more” flows much better, for instance). As a result, the comment comes a little too much across as “no, you don’t have the knowledge, I have the knowledge!” which is sadly can be a little too common in hacker circles and doesn’t really encourage open, fruitful conversations the way “You know stuff, I know other stuff, let’s put it together and see what we come up with” does.

westoncb 8y ago
> ... in history, there is rarely a single “correct reading”, but rather many interpretations that at time reinforce and at times weaken each other. As I was reading the GP's interpretation of these historical events, it occurred to me how difficult it really is to get at a reliable interpretation of something like this: I've already read a couple books on the subject—but I can see room the cracks so to speak, where the GP's view may be more accurate. That said, difficulty isn't the same as impossibility—and yes, it is technically impossible (or at least meaningless) for certain definitions of 'correct' interpretation, but if you're okay with correct up to "for all intents and purposes"—then it's a non-issue. For instance, in this case there is a pretty definite question we'd like answered: which innovation was the limiting factor on our original development of general purpose computation: increased memory capacity, or theoretical knowledge of general purpose computation—or was their role more alike than different? Depending on how things actually played out, there are definite things you can say about that. For instance, perhaps we need at least 500 bits of memory for general purpose computation—did we have access to that while no one had yet thought to build the general purpose computer because we were still waiting for Zuse, Turing/Church? If so, we answer one way; if not, we answer the other way. The only case where it gets endlessly complicated, perhaps giving apparent grounds for claiming impossibility of correct interpretation, actually fits neatly into the last option I mentioned in the original question statement: that there wasn't a significant difference in the two innovations' roles as limiting factors. It seems valuable to understand the difficult and limits of interpretation, but I think more harm is being done than good speaking so generally of "correct readings" being impossible. > Using the imperative “read”, “learn”, etc is also heavy handed and unnecessary. It’s the kind of language bad teachers - the teachers who have to use their authority rather than mentorship skills - tend to use (“Check out those books for more” flows much better, for instance). I really wish this was better known. It's a pretty consistent pattern and useful to be able to recognize. My read on it is that it's typically used as a defensive strategy—a way to prevent an interlocutor from questioning the speaker any further on the subject.

Animats 8y ago

OK, that was a bit harsh. My point is that machine arithmetic preceded machine data storage. Early computing was a struggle to get something done with very, very little memory. Like 5 to 20 numbers. Babbage wanted to build something the size of a locomotive for storage - a huge drum of counter wheels, able to store 1000 numbers. Atanasoff had a rotating wheel of capacitors, refreshed on each turn, like DRAM, which was good thinking for 1939. The code-breaking machines of WWII were all very limited memory, more like a Bitcoin ASIC than a general purpose computer. IBM was plugging away with punched cards, which were their form of permanent data storage. Shannon wrote a paper on the minimum memory requirements for a telephone switch. In the IBM punched card world, "sorting" meant ordering, and distributing into groups was "selecting". Sorting was usually required before selecting, but if you only needed two or three output groups, you could select cards using a collator, which was capable of moderately complex logic operations. You might do that for "customers who are past due", for example. Building a stored program computer wasn't a conceptual problem. It was that, despite massive efforts, there was nothing to store the program in. The concept of algorithms dates back to at least the 9th century, and probably back to Euclid. (Although there's a long history of programmable cam-driven machinery. I've seen the Jaquet-Droz automata. built in the 1770s, demonstrated at the museum in Neuchâtel, where they are operated once a month. That was the high point of cam driven machinery for a long time.)

westoncb 8y ago
First off, thanks for the comment—pretty interesting stuff. One thing continues to bother me though. > My point is that machine arithmetic preceded machine data storage. > The concept of algorithms dates back to at least the 9th century, and probably back to Euclid. I don't think that's the issue at hand. Special-purpose computers implement algorithms and may use arithmetic—those are not the key differentiators from general purpose computation. Perhaps they were important first steps, but clearly what e.g. Turing/Church did was something else entirely. And I'm aware Leibniz was very much concerned with the problem earlier on, but where I get a bit fuzzy is whether general purpose computers really needed the more fleshed out results of e.g. Turing (or perhaps a predecessor) in order to really build a general purpose computer—and whether that was a major limiting factor even after we had access to the necessary memory, or if we knew conceptually that what we were shooting for all along was fully general purpose computation and we were really just waiting for the hardware to be possible.