3 ms·

Knuth writes eloquently what I have thought for a while. Some of these early works and ideas, even and perhaps especially those that did not evolve into somethi

Knuth writes eloquently what I have thought for a while. Some of these early works and ideas, even and perhaps especially those that did not evolve into something successful today, are worthy of study. I strongly suspect some of them could take us in new directions. Some of those that “blocked” may now be unblocked by related developments in our field. Maybe we have to go back to forwards. https://blog.eutopian.io/the-next-big-thing-go-back-to-the-future./ https://blog.eutopian.io/the-next-big-thing-go-back-to-the-f...

guidoism 6y ago
This this this. We’ve sort of settled on the architecture of our “stack” mostly by historical accident. It has constantly been the local maxima for various variables throughout our short history. And because of the inertia of the mass of what we’ve built that mostly works we don’t look outside very far. There are a lot of excellent ideas that were too early, or due to a coin toss not taken, or killed because of winner-takes-all market competition, or because they were just some footnote at the bottom of a paper some researcher wrote and never investigated. These ideas are ripe for investigation. I’ve been reading papers and looking at source code from the early days of programming languages. There was definitely more interplay between the design of the machine’s API (the instruction set) and programming language designers than we see these days. Our ISAs are made to emulate a PDP-11 running C (a glib take I know but not entirely inaccurate). Oh yeah, we also now get an instruction that handles JavaScript floats better. :-)