3 ms·

to quote gp, "beautiful software is still being made today". It's not a competition.

kragen 3y ago
you don't get to be described as an 'apostle of simplicity' just because you like simplicity. you have to actually change the world by creating simplicity. devine and rek are still a long way from a turing award
- amatecha 3y ago
  you don't get to dictate who does or doesn't get recognized for creating awesome works that influence and inspire others. take your persistent negativity elsewhere. btw, uxn is absolutely the exemplification of "software built for humans to understand" and simplicity. I mean... > the resulting programs are succinct and translate well to pen & paper computing. > to make any one program available on a new platform, the emulator is the only piece of code that will need to be modified, which is explicitly designed to be easily implemented https://100r.co/site/uxn_design.html https://100r.co/site/uxn_design.html how one can frame this as trivial is beyond me.
  - kragen 3y ago
    i don't think uxn is trivial, i think it's a first step toward something great. it definitely isn't the exemplification of "software built for humans to understand"; you have to program it in assembly language, and a stack-based assembly language at that. in that sense it's closer to brainfuck than to hypertalk or excel or oberon. it falls short of its goal of working well on small computers (say, under a megabyte of ram and under a mips) the bit you quote about uxn having a standard virtual machine to permit easy ports to new platforms is from wirth's 01965 paper on euler http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/euler-2/ http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/euler-2/; it isn't something devine and rek invented, and it may not have been something wirth invented either. schorre's 01963 paper on meta-ii targets a machine-independent 'fictitious machine' but it's not turing-complete and it's not clear if he intended it to be implemented by interpretation rather than, say, assembler macros i suggest that if you develop more tolerance for opinions that differ from your own, instead of deprecating them as 'persistent negativity' and 'dictating', you will learn more rapidly, because other people know things you don't, and sometimes that is why our opinions differ. sometimes those things we know that you don't are even correct i think this is one of those cases. what i said, that you were disagreeing with, was that uxn was not the same kind of achievement as oberon, pascal, quicksort, forth, and structured programming (and, let me clarify, a much less significant achievement) and that it is a long way from [meriting] a turing award. i don't see how anyone could possibly disagree with that, or gloss it as 'uxn is trivial', as you did, unless they don't know what those things are i am pretty sure that if you ask devine what he thinks about this comment, you will find that he agrees with every word in it
    - jibal 3y ago
      Yeah, these younguns have a lot to learn. :-) The notion that there's something innovative about using a small VM to port software is hilarious. BTW, here is a quite impressive and effective use of that methodology: https://ziglang.org/news/goodbye-cpp/ https://ziglang.org/news/goodbye-cpp/ Dewey Schorre and Meta II, eh? Who remembers such things? Well, I do, as I was involved with an implementation of Meta V when I was on the staff of the UCLA Comp Sci dept in 1969.
      - kragen 3y ago
        nice! which direction did meta-v go meta in? i recently reimplemented meta-ii myself with some tweaks, http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/meta5ixrun.py http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/meta5ixrun.py i guess i should write it up
        jibal 3y ago
        Heh, no way do I remember the details. I just remember that we were rewriting it in 360 assembler but I left before that was completed (if it was), and that I wrote an Algol syntax checker in Meta V that was obliquely referenced at the end of RFC 57.
        kragen 3y ago
        oh, that's too bad. i guess memories fade it's interesting to see programming language advancement cited as a major contribution to the development of a network protocol
        jibal 3y ago
        I think it was a very minor contribution ... they wrote a pseudo-Algol program as a form of documentation of their network protocol and were concerned about checking the grammar/syntax of the program (people actually cared about the quality of documentation back then), and I wrote a syntax checker for it in Meta V, as it was on hand because it was written at UCLA (I don't know whether it was Dewey (Val) who designed and implemented Meta V or someone else) and was used by people in the Comp Sci Dept. to design programming languages. But the dept was shifting to networking at the time (the IMP had just arrived) under the direction of Leonard Kleinrock and through the efforts of pioneers Steve Crocker, Vint Cerf, and Jon Postel (all of whom had attended Taft High School together) ... this is why the authors of that network protocol were visiting UCLA. I got involved because I worked for Crocker, under the direct management of Charley Kline, who was the fellow who made the first ever networked login.
- Ringz 3y ago
  From your Wikipedia link about the meaning of the Word Apostle: “The term [Apostle] is also used to refer to someone who is a strong supporter of something.[5][6]“ So I would call many people and myself (as someone who started studying Computer Science with Assembler and Modula-2) Apostle of simplicity. No need for techno-classism.

you don't get to be described as an 'apostle of simplicity' just because you like simplicity. you have to actually change the world by creating simplicity. devine and rek are still a long way from a turing award

amatecha 3y ago
you don't get to dictate who does or doesn't get recognized for creating awesome works that influence and inspire others. take your persistent negativity elsewhere. btw, uxn is absolutely the exemplification of "software built for humans to understand" and simplicity. I mean... > the resulting programs are succinct and translate well to pen & paper computing. > to make any one program available on a new platform, the emulator is the only piece of code that will need to be modified, which is explicitly designed to be easily implemented https://100r.co/site/uxn_design.html https://100r.co/site/uxn_design.html how one can frame this as trivial is beyond me.
- kragen 3y ago
  i don't think uxn is trivial, i think it's a first step toward something great. it definitely isn't the exemplification of "software built for humans to understand"; you have to program it in assembly language, and a stack-based assembly language at that. in that sense it's closer to brainfuck than to hypertalk or excel or oberon. it falls short of its goal of working well on small computers (say, under a megabyte of ram and under a mips) the bit you quote about uxn having a standard virtual machine to permit easy ports to new platforms is from wirth's 01965 paper on euler http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/euler-2/ http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/euler-2/; it isn't something devine and rek invented, and it may not have been something wirth invented either. schorre's 01963 paper on meta-ii targets a machine-independent 'fictitious machine' but it's not turing-complete and it's not clear if he intended it to be implemented by interpretation rather than, say, assembler macros i suggest that if you develop more tolerance for opinions that differ from your own, instead of deprecating them as 'persistent negativity' and 'dictating', you will learn more rapidly, because other people know things you don't, and sometimes that is why our opinions differ. sometimes those things we know that you don't are even correct i think this is one of those cases. what i said, that you were disagreeing with, was that uxn was not the same kind of achievement as oberon, pascal, quicksort, forth, and structured programming (and, let me clarify, a much less significant achievement) and that it is a long way from [meriting] a turing award. i don't see how anyone could possibly disagree with that, or gloss it as 'uxn is trivial', as you did, unless they don't know what those things are i am pretty sure that if you ask devine what he thinks about this comment, you will find that he agrees with every word in it
  - jibal 3y ago
    Yeah, these younguns have a lot to learn. :-) The notion that there's something innovative about using a small VM to port software is hilarious. BTW, here is a quite impressive and effective use of that methodology: https://ziglang.org/news/goodbye-cpp/ https://ziglang.org/news/goodbye-cpp/ Dewey Schorre and Meta II, eh? Who remembers such things? Well, I do, as I was involved with an implementation of Meta V when I was on the staff of the UCLA Comp Sci dept in 1969.
    - kragen 3y ago
      nice! which direction did meta-v go meta in? i recently reimplemented meta-ii myself with some tweaks, http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/meta5ixrun.py http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/meta5ixrun.py i guess i should write it up
      - jibal 3y ago
        Heh, no way do I remember the details. I just remember that we were rewriting it in 360 assembler but I left before that was completed (if it was), and that I wrote an Algol syntax checker in Meta V that was obliquely referenced at the end of RFC 57.
        kragen 3y ago
        oh, that's too bad. i guess memories fade it's interesting to see programming language advancement cited as a major contribution to the development of a network protocol
        jibal 3y ago
        I think it was a very minor contribution ... they wrote a pseudo-Algol program as a form of documentation of their network protocol and were concerned about checking the grammar/syntax of the program (people actually cared about the quality of documentation back then), and I wrote a syntax checker for it in Meta V, as it was on hand because it was written at UCLA (I don't know whether it was Dewey (Val) who designed and implemented Meta V or someone else) and was used by people in the Comp Sci Dept. to design programming languages. But the dept was shifting to networking at the time (the IMP had just arrived) under the direction of Leonard Kleinrock and through the efforts of pioneers Steve Crocker, Vint Cerf, and Jon Postel (all of whom had attended Taft High School together) ... this is why the authors of that network protocol were visiting UCLA. I got involved because I worked for Crocker, under the direct management of Charley Kline, who was the fellow who made the first ever networked login.
Ringz 3y ago
From your Wikipedia link about the meaning of the Word Apostle: “The term [Apostle] is also used to refer to someone who is a strong supporter of something.[5][6]“ So I would call many people and myself (as someone who started studying Computer Science with Assembler and Modula-2) Apostle of simplicity. No need for techno-classism.