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Author here... thanks so much for the interest! Clearly there are other things that need to be put on that list. One challenge I had was finding clear citation
by dwheeler 8y ago
Author here... thanks so much for the interest!
Clearly there are other things that need to be put on that list. One challenge I had was finding clear citations to the very first example. It is often very hard to find where some idea comes from. In addition, sometimes there is no one single place, because there's this gradual improvement.
- sharemywin 8y agoThe title was a little confusing to me. I thought you were highlighting innovations from 2001-2017.
- charlysl 8y agoOP here, the years were appended by HN to the title that I submitted, wrongly IMHO
- charlysl 8y agoThanks for the list, it is food for thought. Yesterday there was a discussion about pseudocode in HN with many interesting observations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18691446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18691446
- jonstewart 8y agoHowdy, I have a slight correction to the page. You note "no patent identified" for Ken Thompson's regular expression work from 1968. To the contrary, Bell Labs was granted a patent in 1971 for ken's work, with a priority date of 1967. See https://patents.google.com/patent/US3568156A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US3568156A/en.
- aasasd 8y agoI humbly submit a lamentation: the tabulated format is inconvenient to read on a phone, since the right column gets very slim and tall. Simple paragraphs with headings would do much better―the olde HTML 2.0 without tables generally has excellent usability on phones. (However, on desktop it's recommended to limit paragraph width to ~80 characters, to not make the eye travel too far back and forth, losing the next line.) Also, just in passing, I'm tempted to note that afaik few fonts are generated automatically, and vast majority are still done by hand―partly, I think, because computers aren't trusted to do the right thing for different sizes and widths, but likely primarily because font authors don't seem to be inclined to learn all the necessary mathematical parameters (of which Knuth's Metafont has ~60). There are some automatic features in font renderers, but that's far from full generation of a font.
- zellyn 8y agoA couple of suggestions: Immutable Data Structures. And perhaps something that captures the kind of type inference Haskell/Elm/etc. can do. Not sure if they're big enough to compete with something like B-trees :-)
- scottlocklin 8y agoVideo compression seems like a big one. So does FFT. Even if they were conceptually around for a long time (Gauss instead of Tukey probably originated FFT, Fano -compression in general, etc), particular implementations of them made for huge differences in what people could do with computers. If not compression, certainly coding theory in general, which is so all-pervasive now, people forget it exists.
- chubot 8y agoFWIW I recently read "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldorf, and it has interesting details that bear on the "1945 Stored Program" entry in your list. Basically it said that von Neumann was reporting the work of others in "draft", and he didn't include the people who actually did the work as authors because it was a draft. In other words, it was prematurely circulated without proper attribution. Ironically, I don't remember their names. It may have been Eckert and Mauchly as you list on your page. If anyone wants to know more, e-mail me (address in profile) I will look it up. There was also a patent dispute between von Neumann and the other party, IIRC, and that is why there is no patent. So basically the "von Neumann machine" is probably not a great name. You don't call it that in your page, which is good, but that's how I always thought of the stored program! I believe I was taught that in computer architecture class in college. ---- EDIT: Yes now that I googled, the way the Dream Machine portrayed it, Eckert and Mauchly had a stronger claim to inventing the stored program than is portrayed on your page. You did say von Neumann "described" the stored program rather than invented it, and that's the issue that is discussed at some length in the book. Some snippets here: https://books.google.com/books?id=7HpQAAAAMAAJ&dq=dream+machine+waldorf&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=von+neumann+patent https://books.google.com/books?id=7HpQAAAAMAAJ&dq=dream+mach...
- aasasd 8y agoWikipedia has a paragraph on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the... Apparently there was a whole team of people participating in the design: > some on the EDVAC design team contended that the stored-program concept had evolved out of meetings at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering predating von Neumann's activity as a consultant there, and that much of the work represented in the First Draft was no more than a translation of the discussed concepts into the language of formal logic in which von Neumann was fluent. The elegiac Stigler's law of eponymy is mentioned there: “no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.”
- rs86 8y agoShould PLT be included? There's the Backus lecture on why functional programming matters, the ML language and hindley milner type inference, object oriented programming, polymorphism, dependent types, lambda calculus, curry howard isomorphism, Martin lof type theory, Automath, coq...