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Systems Past: The software innovations we actually use

135 points by vilhelm_s 13y ago

gumby 13y ago
This is an outstanding essay -- more fields need this kind of thinking. Plus it's doubly ironic having it in computation, a field that has always seemed determined to ignore history, and reinvent it. A nano nit: Yes, GC came from Lisp, but its first mention was in AI Memo #1 (the first MIT AI Lab working paper) by Minsky. I have a copy someplace -- it was only a few pages long.
- grinich 13y ago
  I would love to read that if you could post it.
  - DougMerritt 13y ago
    I found a PDF (page images): http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/MIT/AIM-001.pdf http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/MIT/AIM-00...
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    Argh. http://publications.csail.mit.edu/ai/browse/0000browse.shtml http://publications.csail.mit.edu/ai/browse/0000browse.shtml (It is not there)
  - chaz 13y ago
    http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6080 http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6080
  - gumby 13y ago
    The memo was not #1 but #58 (apologies -- my hardcopy is buried someplace, and I made it years ago when rummaging through Marvin's file cabinets for something interesting and ran across it). But thanks to the miracle of modern science, it's online here: ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-058.pdf #1 was JMC's memo on Lisp, but (tying back to this thread) you had to manage memory with CONS (malloc()) and erase (free()). (I note the date was around the time the first PDP-6 was delivered to the AI Lab so the memo was probably timely. Boy, the PFP-10 (basically the 'real version' of the PDP-6) was such a pleasure to write for, with an instruction set that was basically lisp primitives.)
- MaysonL 13y ago
  micro nit: McCarthy, not Minsky
- eruditely 13y ago
  Agreed, this essay was incredible.
TrainedMonkey 13y ago
"ARPAnet is the quintessential computer network. It was originally called “the Intergalactic Computer Network” and ultimately became known as simply “the Internet”." Awesome, I did not know that.
- fjarlq 13y ago
  It was something J.C.R. Licklider envisioned in the early 1960s when he was the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_Computer_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_Computer_Network M. Mitchell Waldrop delves into the history in his wonderful book about Licklider titled "The Dream Machine". Here's chapter one: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/books/chapters/07-1st-waldr.html http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/books/chapters/07-1st-wald... Here's an example of a memo written by Licklider discussing the Intergalactic Computer Network: http://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider-IntergalacticNetwork.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider-IntergalacticNetwork.pd...
leggo2m 13y ago
Didn't know what to expect going into this with a title like that, but was pleasantly surprised. A legitimate list.
ariwilson 13y ago
Haven't people been communicating information to other people as text for thousands of years? I'm not so convinced that there's a universally better mechanism for communicating with machines.
- NoodleIncident 13y ago
  Yes. This is what I always think when people criticize text-based programming languages. People also point and gesture and use body language to communicate. Both can be done at once, and you can communicate without using a single spoken or written word.
- Millennium 13y ago
  Text isn't as important as language itself, but there's the rub: no one has yet devised a better way to program computers than language. Even the so-called "visual environments" we see today ultimately boil down to recognizable linguistic concepts: they do it by arranging shapes in space rather than writing text, but you can pick out the same nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech. And that's the problem. Visual environments are trying to represent language, and they're just not as good at it as text, which is the closest thing to a native format yet devised for the stuff. Eventually the inefficiencies start to get annoying, people go for the greater efficiency of text, and the visual environment languishes. The bottom line is that visual environments will never be as good as text for representing programming languages. Rather than trying to do language better than text, they need to find a paradigm that's better than language, and implement that. I don't have any clue what something like that would even look like; to be honest, I'm not sure it can even be done. But the greatest victories against the most hopeless-seeming odds are won by changing the whole nature of the fight, and that's what visual programming is going to have to do.
  - nzp 13y ago
    Finding a paradigm better than language, i.e. an abstract symbolic system, would be a such a revolutionary turning point in the ... um, everything that I think programming would at that point seem just silly. What would that even mean? We would become some sort of gods. Mathematics as we know it would certainly become irrelevant. I'm not sure this is even science fiction.
mildtrepidation 13y ago
[Transactions] enabled the development of systems called databases, which can reliably maintain the state of complex data structures across incessant read and write operations as well as some level of hardware failures. This is interesting. It suggests to me that either the author is using a nonstandard or outdated definition of "database" or that a denotation-fundamental tenet of database implementation, transactions, has been left for dead by the side of the road by many modern "database" projects. Regardless, this is a great and informative piece.
- ArkyBeagle 13y ago
  How is transactional integrity an outdated concept? And you are actually telling me that there are "databases" that don't have transactional integrity?
  - eropple 13y ago
    MySQL with MyISAM tables.
    - ArkyBeagle 13y ago
      Ah. Thanks.
akkartik 13y ago
Only? No mention of viewport clipping? Compression? Encryption? Bittorrent?
- TheZenPsycho 13y ago
  would the way we use computers be completely unrecognisable without those things?
  - jagger27 13y ago
    What would the internet look like without encryption?
    - TheZenPsycho 13y ago
      so wait. are you saying encryption… encryption was invented after 1970?
      - Pitarou 13y ago
        Asymmetric encryption (public-key cryptography) was developed in the 1970s. The internet would be very different without it.
    - davidad_ 13y ago
      I included a footnote to address this criticism. http://davidad.github.io/blog/2014/03/12/the-operating-system-is-out-of-date/#fn:8 http://davidad.github.io/blog/2014/03/12/the-operating-syste...
sixdimensional 13y ago
I find that in the pursuit of the latest and greatest, a pattern we so often see in society, it is easy to forget to let our historical experiences of the past inform our current and future thinking. There is a place for both - pure forward thinking creation as well as innovation inspired by the past.
javajosh 13y ago
You want to throw out the OS and programming languages? You think that text is a poor interface for specifying machine behavior? Then show me. Show me something real. Perhaps not text (since text is a dirty word, right?) but something I can install on my machine. If you're going to pull an Emperor's New Clothes, then it's not enough to loudly (and snarkily) proclaim that the emperor has no clothes on - you need to produce a naked emperor. Heck, it should be easy, right? If you think that the conventions of the last 50 years are all shit, then how hard could it be to come up with some new ones? If you want to shake the pillars of computer programming, you need to be able to do more than say "everything is crap," and if you can't, then you sound like nothing more than surly, precocious, ignorant teenager.
- secstate 13y ago
  I'm sad that you got downvoted, though I have a feeling its simply your choice of language, as your points are spot on. This is a wonderfully curated list of where computers have come from. But to go further and claim that we're all somehow fools for not exploring new ideas without offering any overview of what a new idea might look like is disingenuous. Plenty of artists can dream up interfaces like in Minority Report, Tron, or Hackers, but to actually build something that achieves a human goal is much, much more difficult. For what it's worth, I think the Self object environment, Squeak smalltalk and Flow programming are beginning to approach the paradigm shift the author hopes for. But in the meantime, I'm communicating with all of you in words, so I might as well communicate with my computer in them as well.
  - gfodor 13y ago
    Honestly I feel like this type of viewpoint is one that almost every programmer gets to after about 10 years doing real work. The difference is tact. Some hack out some experiments in new programming paradigms and some post detailed ideas or concepts of how things can be improved, and others just try to gain street cred by just saying everything is obviously shit and we are all fools for not "fixing" things.
    - secstate 13y ago
tikhonj 13y ago
> FORTRAN’s conflation of functions (an algebraic concept) and subroutines (a programming construct) persists to this day in nearly every piece of software, and causes no end of problems. This is exactly what Haskell solves. Not by eliminating subroutines, but by separating the two concepts out again. In particular, functions are functions in the algebraic sense, and subroutines just become values in the IO type. > Tracing compilers scratch the surface of reversing this mistake, but so far I know of no programming languages that are specifically designed around such a mechanism. I'm not sure why he thinks tracing compilers help rectify the issue. Perhaps they can claw back some performance gains from knowing a function is pure, but static compilers can do that too. And I think it's fair to say that Haskell was basically designed around "such a mechanism"; it's a shame the author doesn't know about it. > ISWIM (which some programming language histories identify as the “root” of the ML family) is based on ALGOL 60 (source), which of course is based on FORTRAN While ISWIM was influenced by ALGOL, it was based on the λ-calculus. And the λ-calculus, of course, precedes Fortran—and, in fact, computers in general—by quite a margin! It was originally developed in the 1930s. Many modern functional languages are just thin layers over a typed λ-calculus: Haskell's Core intermediate representation is actually exactly that extended with some low-level primitives. This means that they are far closer to formal logic than they are to Fortran!
- cscheid 13y ago
  > functions are functions in the algebraic sense This is a minor nit, but there are effects in pure Haskell functions, namely partiality and non-termination. (In other words, the sense in which "functions are functions" is actually a deep question) There's plenty of academic discussions on how to solve this problem. See stuff like this: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2003 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2003
  - stevepike 13y ago
    Non-termination makes perfect sense, but would you mind sharing a layman explanation of what you mean by the effects of partiality?
    - 13y ago
ATLobotomy 13y ago
Reminds me of the "Future of Programming" presentation given by Bret Victor [0]. Bret's talk is much more focused on the concepts that were created during the early period of CS, but abandoned(more or less) over the years rather than the major concepts that have persisted. [0]: http://vimeo.com/71278954 http://vimeo.com/71278954
mneary 13y ago
Considering the idea of a programming language a fundamental innovation derived from FORTRAN disregards earlier concepts, like Gödel numbering from the year 1931, which exhibit language interpretation. I guess what I'm trying to say is that every good idea is closely related to countless others; pigeon-holing them into the Only 8 categories and naming a "first" doesn't do justice to all of the interesting ideas of computation.
greatsuccess 13y ago
Quite a load of shit. Those innovations are now taken for granted and the "this was then", "this is now" comments it where you see the leakage in the arguments. Im not going to quote anything from this to dismiss it. Its simply wrong, a bit extreme, and out of context. You would have to be an idiot to buy the entire premise.
- TheZenPsycho 13y ago
  This comment is a load of shit, and so since you're happy to dismiss an entire essay without any back up, evidence or argument, I can just as easily dismiss your comment. Hitchen's razor.
zanny 13y ago
> Virtual memory should have been extended to network resources, but this has not really happened. I get that we are already operating in heterogeneous virtual memory worlds, but network transactions are so slow. I can't see it being useful to have them as virtual addresses if random reads and writes to network space take literal seconds of round trip. That is so much worse than even disk, there is a reason networking is at most virtual filesystem bound and at least just its own thing above that via URIs. It really pokes holes in Von Neumann computer models around memory when the memory has heavily disparate access times. You can have networked devices via drivers (like printers) that do have those huge round trip times, or you can have cache hits that give you single digit cycle retrieval. It is NUMA before you even get to the hardware version. > Reject the notion that one program talking to another should have to invoke some “input/output” API. You’re the human, and you own this machine. You get to say who talks to what when, why, and how if you please. All this software stuff we’re expected to deal with — files, sockets, function calls — was just invented by other mortal people, like you and I, without using any tools we don’t have the equivalent of fifty thousand of. Let’s do some old-school hacking on our new-school hardware — like the original TX-0 hackers, in assembly, from the ground up — and work towards a harmonious world where there is something new in software systems for the first time since 1969. So if you had a machine executing code - without an operating system - it would need to pull in functions from disk or something whenever they get invoked by another program? And have some means to deduce which function that is, via some mechanism to scan the filesystem to find it. Because you need to discretize out "programs" because each one is inherently insular in its world view. So you just execute dynamic code that invokes other dynamic code. That sounds like a real big performance hit, though, to have an indirection on every function call to see if its property resident in memory or just fake - at least a conditional every time saying "is this function at 0x00? then it needs to be looked up!".
- thristian 13y ago
  > I can't see it being useful to have them as virtual addresses if random reads and writes to network space take literal seconds of round trip. It's just another stage of the storage hierarchy, isn't it? Registers → CPU cache → DRAM → Flash storage → spinning-rust storage → network storage → archive storage. It's not practical to cover all of those with the one abstraction (having a CPU read-byte instruction pause while a robot navigates a warehouse to find the right backup tape is a bit ridiculous), but what we have at the moment is mostly a reflection of the way our technology ecosystem has developed, rather than the best way to organise and cache information.
HaloZero 13y ago
Shared Memory seems dangerous because you assume that both actors are behaving correctly. The reason why programs are isolated I always thought wasn't because programmers were lazy but to ensure that a malicious or a badly written program can be contained.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  Well, if that's the goal, it failed completely. If you run a malicious program once, it can spread to all your data. Isolation was a protection about badly written programs, but it was mainly about simplifying things and increasing the (virtual) memory available.
- renox 13y ago
  I think that shared memory is bad because it doesn't scale: once you've saturated your memory bus because you have too many cores that use it, then you need to have several memory buses and 'shared memory' doesn't seem so nice anymore..
netdog 13y ago
See David Wheeler's page, The Most Important Software Innovations <http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html> http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html>. The page has been online and refined for 12 years. It lists things such as the Stack, Packet-Switching Networks, Spelling Checker, Relational Model and Algebra (SQL), and quite a few other useful and important software innovations.
- MaysonL 13y ago
  http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html
owenversteeg 13y ago
> Every programming language used today is descended from FORTRAN As a matter of fact, everything didn't descend from FORTRAN. COBOL was heavily influenced by FLOW-MATIC which descended from the A-0 System. All three of these were created mostly due to the work of Grace Hopper, commonly called "the mother of COBOL."
- quotemstr 13y ago
  Lisp is also a language isolate. The first EVAL was written by hand in assembly.
- beagle3 13y ago
  APL did not descend from Fortran either - it wasn't even designed as a programming language - rather as a standard notation for algorithms
nzp 13y ago
Interesting article, but I think that the basic premise, that it's "bizarre" that we're still using concepts developed 50+ years ago, is a bit naive. To give an analogy from a different engineering field, the basics of rocketry and space travel have been conceptually almost completely developed almost 100 years ago. Multistage rockets, orbital stations, etc. Should it be considered bizarre that we still use those same concepts and mechanisms to fly into space? I don't think so. People had figured out an optimal (sometimes the best or only possible) method to do something and we're using it. Sometimes a better idea isn't possible because a better method can't exist. Some ideas are simply timeless. One of those ideas, I believe, is expression of programs as text. It wasn't even a distinct idea, it's just the most efficient, natural way to express algorithms. You can't get around the fundamental mathematical fact that you need a formal symbolic system to express algorithms, i.e. you need a language. Until we gain the ability to directly interface our brains with computers we'll need to express language in written symbols, and even then I doubt we could get away without text for cognitively expensive activities such as programming (because of limitations of our working memory, etc.). "Lines of text" are anything but limiting. What the article says are some drawbacks of operating systems I don't think are drawbacks at all. Having the OS lying to programs so that they don't have to know irrelevant details of the machine is a really good thing. > But when it comes to what the machine is actually doing, why not just run one ordinary program and teach it new functions over time? What?! You mean like one monolithic piece of code doing everything ranging from memory management to email and multimedia? I must be missing something, am I stupid and just don't understand the proposal? > Why persist for 50 years the fiction that every distinct function performed by a computer executes independently in its own little barren environment? Because it's a good idea, it reduces complexity for the function (program) in question. > A righteous operating system should be a programming language. Like we had with some early PCs where you essentially had a BASIC interpreter for an OS? That concept got replaced because it was a horrible way for humans to do actual work instead of dicking around all day with toy programs. > Let’s do some old-school hacking on our new-school hardware — like the original TX-0 hackers, in assembly, from the ground up — and work towards a harmonious world where there is something new in software systems for the first time since 1969. While I have nothing against assembly (to quote Michael Abrash: "I happen to like heroic coding."), first, I find the idea of regressing to old methods of producing programs to yield new ways of computing a little strange, and second, there's a good reason assembly isn't used unless necessary--it's a horribly unproductive way to solve problems. Unless the assembly in question is Lisp. ;) Or Haskell. So if we're dreaming, let's dream all the way--we need pure functional computing machines, not just "better mouse traps".
mwcampbell 13y ago
On the one hand, the article challenges us to question established ways of doing things. On the other, the first footnote correctly points out some projects that were economic failures because they were technology for its own sake rather than providing something of value to people. Some of us may have the freedom and the desire to hack on things that are destined to be economic failures. But for the rest of us, I think it's more important to err on the side of technologically conservative but economically successful projects. So, most of us, myself included, will continue to work within the context of established programming languages, operating systems, and other groundwork that has already been laid for us.
pdonis 13y ago
If this writer is so convinced that we need a new way of interacting with computers, why isn't he building it, instead of just writing about it?
- TheZenPsycho 13y ago
  Because software actually is kind of hard, and to get anywhere you need to convince a somewhat larger group than one to all work towards the same goal. And how do you know he is not?
  - davidad_ 13y ago
    Yes. I am working on it, but it is "kind of hard" to do by oneself. Also, writing about it is a good step, regardless of who might be convinced or not, simply because it forces me to get my ideas more straightened out.
    - andrewflnr 13y ago
      I'm quite curious where you intend to go with the "mesh" project on Github. "An operating system with the heart of a database" sounds like some of my ideas, as does your doc/index.md, but it seems to stop there.
    - pdonis 13y ago
      I am working on it I don't see that mentioned in the article; a mention or a least a link to your own work would be helpful.
  - pdonis 13y ago
    to get anywhere you need to convince a somewhat larger group than one to all work towards the same goal I don't think this is true. For example, Linus Torvalds didn't convince a larger group to work on Linux first, and then build it; he built Linux first and then the larger group came to it because they saw that it was worth working on. Granted, Linux was not as ambitious as the kind of thing the article is talking about; but that doesn't mean the method has to be different. Working code, even if it's for a very small subset of what you eventually want to build, is a great convincer.
wes-exp 13y ago
The author forgot node.js! It has... modules!
StandardFuture 13y ago
Most of the comments in this discussion are missing the point of this article in almost its entirety. I am seeing everything from "Haskell is the most mathy of the languages and resolves an approach to algebraic concepts!" to "This article is bullshit!" ... Sad, really. An easy way to summarize what this article is trying to convey can be derived from the title of the article: Systems Past. The next chapter would simply be: Systems Future. And this is what the author is trying to get across. There is nothing wrong with languages or OSes. What's wrong is a seemingly pervasive attitude throughout the hacker community to never want to improve on foundational concepts. This is usually argued as: 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'. One critique of this article I will give is: these software innovations are dependent on the hardware architectures used. And we have been using the same basic computer architecture for decades. So maybe it is not fair to assume revolutionary systems innovations should happen before we have revolutionary hardware systems to program?
- davidad_ 13y ago
  I am very happy that you get the point! :-) To address your criticism: Internetworking fundamentally required new hardware, Interactivity and Hypermedia depended on advances in display technology, and Virtualization and Transactions benefit substantially from hardware acceleration. However, the OS, the PL, and the GC were all independent of any new developments and hardware. Our display technologies are already way ahead of the computational features they should be able to support. Same goes for telecommunications. And the hardware acceleration that powers virtual memory and memory locking is versatile enough to be applied to more advanced abstractions as well (although the advanced abstractions might later benefit from more advanced acceleration). I spent a few years at MIT trying to design revolutionary hardware systems and left with a deep respect for Intel. Much as I'd like to have a PC based on the Lisp Machine or the Connection Machine, I've come to believe it's we software folks who really aren't keeping up, rather than any kind of stagnation in the hardware world. In fact, Intel comes out with a whole pile of new machine instructions every other year, and they probably never get invoked once on most PCs: most binaries are effectively compiled for AMD Opteron (the first x86_64 processor, released in 2003) so that they'll run seamlessly on anything since then.
merak136 13y ago
Am I the only one impressed with how long some of these technologies have been around? I know most of the common ones such as the internet and FORTRAN but I did not realize how long markup languages have existed. Also at the rate that technology improved in such a short amount of time. That must have been an exciting time to work in the field.
sanxiyn 13y ago
For some truly innovative operating system and programming language, I recommend everybody to go learn about Urbit. http://www.urbit.org/ http://www.urbit.org/
- davidad_ 13y ago
  I am very glad that Urbit exists and is being funded. I have corresponded with the author and differ with him on some design decisions that I consider significant. Nonetheless, it is an excellent example of the "rethink everything" type of ambition that I would like to see expressed more.
- kabdib 13y ago
  Urbit made my head hurt. Interesting, but in an "I don't want to go there and do real work with it at all ever" way.
  - agumonkey 13y ago
    I'm still scared after watching their videos, too psychedelic.
  - urbit 13y ago
    Edith Piaf said it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFtGfyruroU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFtGfyruroU
- contingencies 13y ago
  Quote from their tutorial: Whipping or clamming on a %weed simply ignores the sample and reproduces the example - as does bunting, of course. However, %weed remains quite useful. Clearly free thinking people.
teddyh 13y ago
Is it just me, or is #2 (Operating System – running separate programs concurrently independent of one another) effectively the same as #6 (Virtualization)? It is the same idea – the programmer can pretend that the program has a machine all to itself.
- thepicard 13y ago
  A modern OS is definitely a virtual machine, where each process perceives that it is running on a single CPU with its own single contiguous bank of memory. Threads are a bit of a leaky abstraction but whatever. What is interesting is that the operating system virtualizes a machine that doesn't actually exist: fake "hardware" that can execute syscalls like read/write/exit. A VM in the contemporary sense has the exact same functionality, with a different interface. Rather than read/write as syscalls, you have to send SATA commands to disk, or commands to a network card, or whatever. Instead of an exit system call as an interface you work with a hardware interface that powers down the physical machine. Containerization is actually a logical next step from this. Why virtualize a REAL hardware interface only to virtualize a fake one on top of it? The only reason to do that is if you want multiple fake interfaces, eg Linux and Windows. When virtualizing a bunch of Linux machines, mostly you really just want isolation of your processes. Virtualizing real hardware is a hack because Linux was not capable of isolating processes on its own, so you had to run multiple copies of Linux! Now with cgroups and other resource namespacing in the kernel, it can isolate resources by itself.
  - teddyh 13y ago
    The fact that an OS supplies system calls is mostly irrelevant – it is a separate concept (not listed in the original article) which we usually call “Software Libraries”. But innovation #2 did not list the standard libraries as a point of an Operating System – the process isolation is the point. Libraries had been in use long before. I definitely agree that hardware virtualization is going the long way around, and that more refined process isolation is the way to go. The Operating System was made for this, and it should continue to do this; there is no architectural need for an additional level of isolation.
cliveowen 13y ago
A very well-written article that promotes thinking, or better yet, re-thinking. The main point to take away is this: don't take for granted current, commonly-used constructs and architectures, they're the result of decades of tradeoffs designed to tip-toe technology's constraints. Today most of those constraints are long gone and the assumptions don't hold anymore, if we could just forget the bad parts instead of accepting them as gospel and use these five decades of experience to build something new and better, maybe we could finally stop our current methodologies from curbing our progress. Kudos to the author.
agumonkey 13y ago
This reminds me of golang vs brand-x http://cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/ http://cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/
pinealservo 13y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment expressed by the introduction to this article. We really do seem to have got stuck in a deep rut, where we can make progress laterally but can't seem to come up with anything truly novel to move the state of the art dramatically forward. I have some issues with the style of the rest of the article, though. It consists of a lot of very interesting and thesis-supporting facts, but they are couched in a lot of arbitrary statements ("only 8 software innovations...") of dubious facts that don't seem very well supported on their own. I mean, yes, you say there are eight and then list eight, but I am not left convinced that those are the ONLY eight. You say that all languages (aside from a bit of backpedaling in the footnotes) are descended from FORTRAN, which is a pretty bold claim to make, but the justification you provide seems to reduce "descended from" to a mostly meaningless "probably borrowed some ideas from" that is hard to base any value judgement on. Surely not all ideas in FORTRAN were misguided! The whole rest of the article continues in this pattern, distracting from basically good points with brash and sometimes bizarre (from my perspective, at least) statements that seem to belie a wide but very spotty understanding of computing history. Granted, it's been chaotic and not terribly well-documented, but that ought to give one second thoughts about writing with such a definitive and dismissive tone. I want to repeat that I agree with the general premise, and I think that it's unfortunate that I came away from the article feeling like I disagreed with it due to the problems noted above. I had to re-read the intro to remember the intent. Hopefully this criticism is accepted in the constructive sense in which I offer it, as I think that there's some great insight there that could be more effectively conveyed.

135 points by vilhelm_s 13y ago

gumby 13y ago

This is an outstanding essay -- more fields need this kind of thinking. Plus it's doubly ironic having it in computation, a field that has always seemed determined to ignore history, and reinvent it. A nano nit: Yes, GC came from Lisp, but its first mention was in AI Memo #1 (the first MIT AI Lab working paper) by Minsky. I have a copy someplace -- it was only a few pages long.

grinich 13y ago
I would love to read that if you could post it.
- DougMerritt 13y ago
  I found a PDF (page images): http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/MIT/AIM-001.pdf http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/MIT/AIM-00...
- maxerickson 13y ago
  Argh. http://publications.csail.mit.edu/ai/browse/0000browse.shtml http://publications.csail.mit.edu/ai/browse/0000browse.shtml (It is not there)
- chaz 13y ago
  http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6080 http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6080
- gumby 13y ago
  The memo was not #1 but #58 (apologies -- my hardcopy is buried someplace, and I made it years ago when rummaging through Marvin's file cabinets for something interesting and ran across it). But thanks to the miracle of modern science, it's online here: ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-058.pdf #1 was JMC's memo on Lisp, but (tying back to this thread) you had to manage memory with CONS (malloc()) and erase (free()). (I note the date was around the time the first PDP-6 was delivered to the AI Lab so the memo was probably timely. Boy, the PFP-10 (basically the 'real version' of the PDP-6) was such a pleasure to write for, with an instruction set that was basically lisp primitives.)
MaysonL 13y ago
micro nit: McCarthy, not Minsky
eruditely 13y ago
Agreed, this essay was incredible.

TrainedMonkey 13y ago

"ARPAnet is the quintessential computer network. It was originally called “the Intergalactic Computer Network” and ultimately became known as simply “the Internet”." Awesome, I did not know that.

fjarlq 13y ago
It was something J.C.R. Licklider envisioned in the early 1960s when he was the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_Computer_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_Computer_Network M. Mitchell Waldrop delves into the history in his wonderful book about Licklider titled "The Dream Machine". Here's chapter one: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/books/chapters/07-1st-waldr.html http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/books/chapters/07-1st-wald... Here's an example of a memo written by Licklider discussing the Intergalactic Computer Network: http://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider-IntergalacticNetwork.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider-IntergalacticNetwork.pd...

leggo2m 13y ago

Didn't know what to expect going into this with a title like that, but was pleasantly surprised. A legitimate list.

ariwilson 13y ago

Haven't people been communicating information to other people as text for thousands of years? I'm not so convinced that there's a universally better mechanism for communicating with machines.

NoodleIncident 13y ago
Yes. This is what I always think when people criticize text-based programming languages. People also point and gesture and use body language to communicate. Both can be done at once, and you can communicate without using a single spoken or written word.
Millennium 13y ago
Text isn't as important as language itself, but there's the rub: no one has yet devised a better way to program computers than language. Even the so-called "visual environments" we see today ultimately boil down to recognizable linguistic concepts: they do it by arranging shapes in space rather than writing text, but you can pick out the same nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech. And that's the problem. Visual environments are trying to represent language, and they're just not as good at it as text, which is the closest thing to a native format yet devised for the stuff. Eventually the inefficiencies start to get annoying, people go for the greater efficiency of text, and the visual environment languishes. The bottom line is that visual environments will never be as good as text for representing programming languages. Rather than trying to do language better than text, they need to find a paradigm that's better than language, and implement that. I don't have any clue what something like that would even look like; to be honest, I'm not sure it can even be done. But the greatest victories against the most hopeless-seeming odds are won by changing the whole nature of the fight, and that's what visual programming is going to have to do.
- nzp 13y ago
  Finding a paradigm better than language, i.e. an abstract symbolic system, would be a such a revolutionary turning point in the ... um, everything that I think programming would at that point seem just silly. What would that even mean? We would become some sort of gods. Mathematics as we know it would certainly become irrelevant. I'm not sure this is even science fiction.

mildtrepidation 13y ago

[Transactions] enabled the development of systems called databases, which can reliably maintain the state of complex data structures across incessant read and write operations as well as some level of hardware failures. This is interesting. It suggests to me that either the author is using a nonstandard or outdated definition of "database" or that a denotation-fundamental tenet of database implementation, transactions, has been left for dead by the side of the road by many modern "database" projects. Regardless, this is a great and informative piece.

ArkyBeagle 13y ago
How is transactional integrity an outdated concept? And you are actually telling me that there are "databases" that don't have transactional integrity?
- eropple 13y ago
  MySQL with MyISAM tables.
  - ArkyBeagle 13y ago
    Ah. Thanks.

akkartik 13y ago

Only? No mention of viewport clipping? Compression? Encryption? Bittorrent?

TheZenPsycho 13y ago
would the way we use computers be completely unrecognisable without those things?
- jagger27 13y ago
  What would the internet look like without encryption?
  - TheZenPsycho 13y ago
    so wait. are you saying encryption… encryption was invented after 1970?
    - Pitarou 13y ago
      Asymmetric encryption (public-key cryptography) was developed in the 1970s. The internet would be very different without it.
  - davidad_ 13y ago
    I included a footnote to address this criticism. http://davidad.github.io/blog/2014/03/12/the-operating-system-is-out-of-date/#fn:8 http://davidad.github.io/blog/2014/03/12/the-operating-syste...

sixdimensional 13y ago

I find that in the pursuit of the latest and greatest, a pattern we so often see in society, it is easy to forget to let our historical experiences of the past inform our current and future thinking. There is a place for both - pure forward thinking creation as well as innovation inspired by the past.

javajosh 13y ago

You want to throw out the OS and programming languages? You think that text is a poor interface for specifying machine behavior? Then show me. Show me something real. Perhaps not text (since text is a dirty word, right?) but something I can install on my machine. If you're going to pull an Emperor's New Clothes, then it's not enough to loudly (and snarkily) proclaim that the emperor has no clothes on - you need to produce a naked emperor. Heck, it should be easy, right? If you think that the conventions of the last 50 years are all shit, then how hard could it be to come up with some new ones? If you want to shake the pillars of computer programming, you need to be able to do more than say "everything is crap," and if you can't, then you sound like nothing more than surly, precocious, ignorant teenager.

secstate 13y ago
I'm sad that you got downvoted, though I have a feeling its simply your choice of language, as your points are spot on. This is a wonderfully curated list of where computers have come from. But to go further and claim that we're all somehow fools for not exploring new ideas without offering any overview of what a new idea might look like is disingenuous. Plenty of artists can dream up interfaces like in Minority Report, Tron, or Hackers, but to actually build something that achieves a human goal is much, much more difficult. For what it's worth, I think the Self object environment, Squeak smalltalk and Flow programming are beginning to approach the paradigm shift the author hopes for. But in the meantime, I'm communicating with all of you in words, so I might as well communicate with my computer in them as well.
- gfodor 13y ago
  Honestly I feel like this type of viewpoint is one that almost every programmer gets to after about 10 years doing real work. The difference is tact. Some hack out some experiments in new programming paradigms and some post detailed ideas or concepts of how things can be improved, and others just try to gain street cred by just saying everything is obviously shit and we are all fools for not "fixing" things.
  - secstate 13y ago

tikhonj 13y ago

> FORTRAN’s conflation of functions (an algebraic concept) and subroutines (a programming construct) persists to this day in nearly every piece of software, and causes no end of problems. This is exactly what Haskell solves. Not by eliminating subroutines, but by separating the two concepts out again. In particular, functions are functions in the algebraic sense, and subroutines just become values in the IO type. > Tracing compilers scratch the surface of reversing this mistake, but so far I know of no programming languages that are specifically designed around such a mechanism. I'm not sure why he thinks tracing compilers help rectify the issue. Perhaps they can claw back some performance gains from knowing a function is pure, but static compilers can do that too. And I think it's fair to say that Haskell was basically designed around "such a mechanism"; it's a shame the author doesn't know about it. > ISWIM (which some programming language histories identify as the “root” of the ML family) is based on ALGOL 60 (source), which of course is based on FORTRAN While ISWIM was influenced by ALGOL, it was based on the λ-calculus. And the λ-calculus, of course, precedes Fortran—and, in fact, computers in general—by quite a margin! It was originally developed in the 1930s. Many modern functional languages are just thin layers over a typed λ-calculus: Haskell's Core intermediate representation is actually exactly that extended with some low-level primitives. This means that they are far closer to formal logic than they are to Fortran!

cscheid 13y ago
> functions are functions in the algebraic sense This is a minor nit, but there are effects in pure Haskell functions, namely partiality and non-termination. (In other words, the sense in which "functions are functions" is actually a deep question) There's plenty of academic discussions on how to solve this problem. See stuff like this: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2003 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2003
- stevepike 13y ago
  Non-termination makes perfect sense, but would you mind sharing a layman explanation of what you mean by the effects of partiality?
  - 13y ago

ATLobotomy 13y ago

Reminds me of the "Future of Programming" presentation given by Bret Victor [0]. Bret's talk is much more focused on the concepts that were created during the early period of CS, but abandoned(more or less) over the years rather than the major concepts that have persisted. [0]: http://vimeo.com/71278954 http://vimeo.com/71278954

mneary 13y ago

Considering the idea of a programming language a fundamental innovation derived from FORTRAN disregards earlier concepts, like Gödel numbering from the year 1931, which exhibit language interpretation. I guess what I'm trying to say is that every good idea is closely related to countless others; pigeon-holing them into the Only 8 categories and naming a "first" doesn't do justice to all of the interesting ideas of computation.

greatsuccess 13y ago

Quite a load of shit. Those innovations are now taken for granted and the "this was then", "this is now" comments it where you see the leakage in the arguments. Im not going to quote anything from this to dismiss it. Its simply wrong, a bit extreme, and out of context. You would have to be an idiot to buy the entire premise.

TheZenPsycho 13y ago
This comment is a load of shit, and so since you're happy to dismiss an entire essay without any back up, evidence or argument, I can just as easily dismiss your comment. Hitchen's razor.

zanny 13y ago

> Virtual memory should have been extended to network resources, but this has not really happened. I get that we are already operating in heterogeneous virtual memory worlds, but network transactions are so slow. I can't see it being useful to have them as virtual addresses if random reads and writes to network space take literal seconds of round trip. That is so much worse than even disk, there is a reason networking is at most virtual filesystem bound and at least just its own thing above that via URIs. It really pokes holes in Von Neumann computer models around memory when the memory has heavily disparate access times. You can have networked devices via drivers (like printers) that do have those huge round trip times, or you can have cache hits that give you single digit cycle retrieval. It is NUMA before you even get to the hardware version. > Reject the notion that one program talking to another should have to invoke some “input/output” API. You’re the human, and you own this machine. You get to say who talks to what when, why, and how if you please. All this software stuff we’re expected to deal with — files, sockets, function calls — was just invented by other mortal people, like you and I, without using any tools we don’t have the equivalent of fifty thousand of. Let’s do some old-school hacking on our new-school hardware — like the original TX-0 hackers, in assembly, from the ground up — and work towards a harmonious world where there is something new in software systems for the first time since 1969. So if you had a machine executing code - without an operating system - it would need to pull in functions from disk or something whenever they get invoked by another program? And have some means to deduce which function that is, via some mechanism to scan the filesystem to find it. Because you need to discretize out "programs" because each one is inherently insular in its world view. So you just execute dynamic code that invokes other dynamic code. That sounds like a real big performance hit, though, to have an indirection on every function call to see if its property resident in memory or just fake - at least a conditional every time saying "is this function at 0x00? then it needs to be looked up!".

thristian 13y ago
> I can't see it being useful to have them as virtual addresses if random reads and writes to network space take literal seconds of round trip. It's just another stage of the storage hierarchy, isn't it? Registers → CPU cache → DRAM → Flash storage → spinning-rust storage → network storage → archive storage. It's not practical to cover all of those with the one abstraction (having a CPU read-byte instruction pause while a robot navigates a warehouse to find the right backup tape is a bit ridiculous), but what we have at the moment is mostly a reflection of the way our technology ecosystem has developed, rather than the best way to organise and cache information.

HaloZero 13y ago

Shared Memory seems dangerous because you assume that both actors are behaving correctly. The reason why programs are isolated I always thought wasn't because programmers were lazy but to ensure that a malicious or a badly written program can be contained.

marcosdumay 13y ago
Well, if that's the goal, it failed completely. If you run a malicious program once, it can spread to all your data. Isolation was a protection about badly written programs, but it was mainly about simplifying things and increasing the (virtual) memory available.
renox 13y ago
I think that shared memory is bad because it doesn't scale: once you've saturated your memory bus because you have too many cores that use it, then you need to have several memory buses and 'shared memory' doesn't seem so nice anymore..

netdog 13y ago

See David Wheeler's page, The Most Important Software Innovations <http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html> http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html>. The page has been online and refined for 12 years. It lists things such as the Stack, Packet-Switching Networks, Spelling Checker, Relational Model and Algebra (SQL), and quite a few other useful and important software innovations.

MaysonL 13y ago
http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html

owenversteeg 13y ago

> Every programming language used today is descended from FORTRAN As a matter of fact, everything didn't descend from FORTRAN. COBOL was heavily influenced by FLOW-MATIC which descended from the A-0 System. All three of these were created mostly due to the work of Grace Hopper, commonly called "the mother of COBOL."

quotemstr 13y ago
Lisp is also a language isolate. The first EVAL was written by hand in assembly.
beagle3 13y ago
APL did not descend from Fortran either - it wasn't even designed as a programming language - rather as a standard notation for algorithms

nzp 13y ago

Interesting article, but I think that the basic premise, that it's "bizarre" that we're still using concepts developed 50+ years ago, is a bit naive. To give an analogy from a different engineering field, the basics of rocketry and space travel have been conceptually almost completely developed almost 100 years ago. Multistage rockets, orbital stations, etc. Should it be considered bizarre that we still use those same concepts and mechanisms to fly into space? I don't think so. People had figured out an optimal (sometimes the best or only possible) method to do something and we're using it. Sometimes a better idea isn't possible because a better method can't exist. Some ideas are simply timeless. One of those ideas, I believe, is expression of programs as text. It wasn't even a distinct idea, it's just the most efficient, natural way to express algorithms. You can't get around the fundamental mathematical fact that you need a formal symbolic system to express algorithms, i.e. you need a language. Until we gain the ability to directly interface our brains with computers we'll need to express language in written symbols, and even then I doubt we could get away without text for cognitively expensive activities such as programming (because of limitations of our working memory, etc.). "Lines of text" are anything but limiting. What the article says are some drawbacks of operating systems I don't think are drawbacks at all. Having the OS lying to programs so that they don't have to know irrelevant details of the machine is a really good thing. > But when it comes to what the machine is actually doing, why not just run one ordinary program and teach it new functions over time? What?! You mean like one monolithic piece of code doing everything ranging from memory management to email and multimedia? I must be missing something, am I stupid and just don't understand the proposal? > Why persist for 50 years the fiction that every distinct function performed by a computer executes independently in its own little barren environment? Because it's a good idea, it reduces complexity for the function (program) in question. > A righteous operating system should be a programming language. Like we had with some early PCs where you essentially had a BASIC interpreter for an OS? That concept got replaced because it was a horrible way for humans to do actual work instead of dicking around all day with toy programs. > Let’s do some old-school hacking on our new-school hardware — like the original TX-0 hackers, in assembly, from the ground up — and work towards a harmonious world where there is something new in software systems for the first time since 1969. While I have nothing against assembly (to quote Michael Abrash: "I happen to like heroic coding."), first, I find the idea of regressing to old methods of producing programs to yield new ways of computing a little strange, and second, there's a good reason assembly isn't used unless necessary--it's a horribly unproductive way to solve problems. Unless the assembly in question is Lisp. ;) Or Haskell. So if we're dreaming, let's dream all the way--we need pure functional computing machines, not just "better mouse traps".

mwcampbell 13y ago

On the one hand, the article challenges us to question established ways of doing things. On the other, the first footnote correctly points out some projects that were economic failures because they were technology for its own sake rather than providing something of value to people. Some of us may have the freedom and the desire to hack on things that are destined to be economic failures. But for the rest of us, I think it's more important to err on the side of technologically conservative but economically successful projects. So, most of us, myself included, will continue to work within the context of established programming languages, operating systems, and other groundwork that has already been laid for us.

pdonis 13y ago

If this writer is so convinced that we need a new way of interacting with computers, why isn't he building it, instead of just writing about it?

TheZenPsycho 13y ago
Because software actually is kind of hard, and to get anywhere you need to convince a somewhat larger group than one to all work towards the same goal. And how do you know he is not?
- davidad_ 13y ago
  Yes. I am working on it, but it is "kind of hard" to do by oneself. Also, writing about it is a good step, regardless of who might be convinced or not, simply because it forces me to get my ideas more straightened out.
  - andrewflnr 13y ago
    I'm quite curious where you intend to go with the "mesh" project on Github. "An operating system with the heart of a database" sounds like some of my ideas, as does your doc/index.md, but it seems to stop there.
  - pdonis 13y ago
    I am working on it I don't see that mentioned in the article; a mention or a least a link to your own work would be helpful.
- pdonis 13y ago
  to get anywhere you need to convince a somewhat larger group than one to all work towards the same goal I don't think this is true. For example, Linus Torvalds didn't convince a larger group to work on Linux first, and then build it; he built Linux first and then the larger group came to it because they saw that it was worth working on. Granted, Linux was not as ambitious as the kind of thing the article is talking about; but that doesn't mean the method has to be different. Working code, even if it's for a very small subset of what you eventually want to build, is a great convincer.

wes-exp 13y ago

The author forgot node.js! It has... modules!

StandardFuture 13y ago

Most of the comments in this discussion are missing the point of this article in almost its entirety. I am seeing everything from "Haskell is the most mathy of the languages and resolves an approach to algebraic concepts!" to "This article is bullshit!" ... Sad, really. An easy way to summarize what this article is trying to convey can be derived from the title of the article: Systems Past. The next chapter would simply be: Systems Future. And this is what the author is trying to get across. There is nothing wrong with languages or OSes. What's wrong is a seemingly pervasive attitude throughout the hacker community to never want to improve on foundational concepts. This is usually argued as: 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'. One critique of this article I will give is: these software innovations are dependent on the hardware architectures used. And we have been using the same basic computer architecture for decades. So maybe it is not fair to assume revolutionary systems innovations should happen before we have revolutionary hardware systems to program?

davidad_ 13y ago
I am very happy that you get the point! :-) To address your criticism: Internetworking fundamentally required new hardware, Interactivity and Hypermedia depended on advances in display technology, and Virtualization and Transactions benefit substantially from hardware acceleration. However, the OS, the PL, and the GC were all independent of any new developments and hardware. Our display technologies are already way ahead of the computational features they should be able to support. Same goes for telecommunications. And the hardware acceleration that powers virtual memory and memory locking is versatile enough to be applied to more advanced abstractions as well (although the advanced abstractions might later benefit from more advanced acceleration). I spent a few years at MIT trying to design revolutionary hardware systems and left with a deep respect for Intel. Much as I'd like to have a PC based on the Lisp Machine or the Connection Machine, I've come to believe it's we software folks who really aren't keeping up, rather than any kind of stagnation in the hardware world. In fact, Intel comes out with a whole pile of new machine instructions every other year, and they probably never get invoked once on most PCs: most binaries are effectively compiled for AMD Opteron (the first x86_64 processor, released in 2003) so that they'll run seamlessly on anything since then.

merak136 13y ago

Am I the only one impressed with how long some of these technologies have been around? I know most of the common ones such as the internet and FORTRAN but I did not realize how long markup languages have existed. Also at the rate that technology improved in such a short amount of time. That must have been an exciting time to work in the field.

sanxiyn 13y ago

For some truly innovative operating system and programming language, I recommend everybody to go learn about Urbit. http://www.urbit.org/ http://www.urbit.org/

davidad_ 13y ago
I am very glad that Urbit exists and is being funded. I have corresponded with the author and differ with him on some design decisions that I consider significant. Nonetheless, it is an excellent example of the "rethink everything" type of ambition that I would like to see expressed more.
kabdib 13y ago
Urbit made my head hurt. Interesting, but in an "I don't want to go there and do real work with it at all ever" way.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  I'm still scared after watching their videos, too psychedelic.
- urbit 13y ago
  Edith Piaf said it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFtGfyruroU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFtGfyruroU
contingencies 13y ago
Quote from their tutorial: Whipping or clamming on a %weed simply ignores the sample and reproduces the example - as does bunting, of course. However, %weed remains quite useful. Clearly free thinking people.

teddyh 13y ago

Is it just me, or is #2 (Operating System – running separate programs concurrently independent of one another) effectively the same as #6 (Virtualization)? It is the same idea – the programmer can pretend that the program has a machine all to itself.

thepicard 13y ago
A modern OS is definitely a virtual machine, where each process perceives that it is running on a single CPU with its own single contiguous bank of memory. Threads are a bit of a leaky abstraction but whatever. What is interesting is that the operating system virtualizes a machine that doesn't actually exist: fake "hardware" that can execute syscalls like read/write/exit. A VM in the contemporary sense has the exact same functionality, with a different interface. Rather than read/write as syscalls, you have to send SATA commands to disk, or commands to a network card, or whatever. Instead of an exit system call as an interface you work with a hardware interface that powers down the physical machine. Containerization is actually a logical next step from this. Why virtualize a REAL hardware interface only to virtualize a fake one on top of it? The only reason to do that is if you want multiple fake interfaces, eg Linux and Windows. When virtualizing a bunch of Linux machines, mostly you really just want isolation of your processes. Virtualizing real hardware is a hack because Linux was not capable of isolating processes on its own, so you had to run multiple copies of Linux! Now with cgroups and other resource namespacing in the kernel, it can isolate resources by itself.
- teddyh 13y ago
  The fact that an OS supplies system calls is mostly irrelevant – it is a separate concept (not listed in the original article) which we usually call “Software Libraries”. But innovation #2 did not list the standard libraries as a point of an Operating System – the process isolation is the point. Libraries had been in use long before. I definitely agree that hardware virtualization is going the long way around, and that more refined process isolation is the way to go. The Operating System was made for this, and it should continue to do this; there is no architectural need for an additional level of isolation.

cliveowen 13y ago

A very well-written article that promotes thinking, or better yet, re-thinking. The main point to take away is this: don't take for granted current, commonly-used constructs and architectures, they're the result of decades of tradeoffs designed to tip-toe technology's constraints. Today most of those constraints are long gone and the assumptions don't hold anymore, if we could just forget the bad parts instead of accepting them as gospel and use these five decades of experience to build something new and better, maybe we could finally stop our current methodologies from curbing our progress. Kudos to the author.

agumonkey 13y ago

This reminds me of golang vs brand-x http://cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/ http://cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/

pinealservo 13y ago

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment expressed by the introduction to this article. We really do seem to have got stuck in a deep rut, where we can make progress laterally but can't seem to come up with anything truly novel to move the state of the art dramatically forward. I have some issues with the style of the rest of the article, though. It consists of a lot of very interesting and thesis-supporting facts, but they are couched in a lot of arbitrary statements ("only 8 software innovations...") of dubious facts that don't seem very well supported on their own. I mean, yes, you say there are eight and then list eight, but I am not left convinced that those are the ONLY eight. You say that all languages (aside from a bit of backpedaling in the footnotes) are descended from FORTRAN, which is a pretty bold claim to make, but the justification you provide seems to reduce "descended from" to a mostly meaningless "probably borrowed some ideas from" that is hard to base any value judgement on. Surely not all ideas in FORTRAN were misguided! The whole rest of the article continues in this pattern, distracting from basically good points with brash and sometimes bizarre (from my perspective, at least) statements that seem to belie a wide but very spotty understanding of computing history. Granted, it's been chaotic and not terribly well-documented, but that ought to give one second thoughts about writing with such a definitive and dismissive tone. I want to repeat that I agree with the general premise, and I think that it's unfortunate that I came away from the article feeling like I disagreed with it due to the problems noted above. I had to re-read the intro to remember the intent. Hopefully this criticism is accepted in the constructive sense in which I offer it, as I think that there's some great insight there that could be more effectively conveyed.