Hacker News Reader

> We think the age of Mozart was particularly wonderful, because we have Mozart's music. But there was plenty of other music in that era, most of it bellowed by bad musicians in taverns. That's not so different from today's music scene.

That's easily disproven-- even musicologists tasked with cataloging Mozart's output erroneously attributed symphonies and other pieces to him that were written by lesser known composers.

The reason attribution is such a hard problem is because it's non-trivial to separate the stylistic characteristics of late 18th century courtly and sacred music from the characteristics of Mozart's music we wish to claim were inspired by his genius. (There's a great paper written I believe by Rifkin on Josquin scholarship having been circular in just this way.)

What your royal "we" finds "particularly wonderful" about the "age of Mozart" is the style, not the particular composer. And there is plenty of well-written, beautiful symphonic, choral, and chamber music written by all kinds of composers of that period.

The modern world does not strive to have a composer in each and every town who can competently write compelling tonal music with the constraints of late 18th century form, texture, and counterpoint. As misguided as it may be, the longing of your royal "we" for the age of Mozart is a valid longing, regardless of what drinking songs bad musicians were playing in biergartens.

Mozart composed somewhere less than 700 works (according to wikipedia), and for your point about misappropriation to amount of a disproof, this production should account for at least of 70 % of all works during the period (else the assertion of "plenty other" still stands).

The conclusion is that for your remark to be a proof, during the latter half of the 18th century no more than 30 new works of music was made. Importantly, by the structure of the original claim, this number necessarily includes all popular music played in taverns and the like, of which there was certainly at least 3000 across the whole of Europe.

> Mozart composed somewhere less than 700 works (according to wikipedia), and for your point about misappropriation to amount of a disproof, this production should account for at least of 70 % of all works during the period (else the assertion of "plenty other" still stands).

I'm refuting OP's claim that people today are generally hearing something "particularly wonderful" in Mozart's output and applying that level of extraordinary output to music from the "age of Mozart." In order to do that, all I really need to get started is a single case of a scholar tasked with cataloging all of Mozart's "particularly wonderful" output and mis-attributing the work of a "lesser" composer to Mozart. There are in fact many cases of that. So if scholars can't always tell the difference between "piece written during the time of Mozart" and bona fide "output of Mozart," it brings into question OP's initial assumption that "we"-- e.g., non-expert listeners-- are generally hearing something "particularly wonderful" in Mozart's output. It's much more likely we're hearing something "particularly 18th century"-- in terms of lightness of texture, balance of phrasing, catchy melody-and-accompaniment textures, etc.-- finding that wonderful, and ascribing that wonder to the genius of Mozart because we generally don't seek out the work of other composers from the period unless we're experts.

The point about bad musicians in bars is irrelevant. If we're to be generous, we understand when people pine for the "age of Mozart" they're speaking about traveling back in time to the late 18th-century (probably to Vienna) as a rich person, probably of nobility, and seeking out all the venues where the type of music Mozart became famous for was performed. That would be concert halls, churches, various subscription concert venues, and opera halls. The music of other composers played in those places would have had the same characteristics which "we" today find wonderful in his output. It would have also been performed quite well. If anything it would convince such a time-traveler beautiful music in that style does not require a one-in-a-civilization genius to produce.

Also-- even the narrow assertion that late 18th-century Austrian bar music is "not so different" from music today is almost certainly wrong. Just comparing bars to bars-- in nearly every facet of music I can think of-- melody, rhythm, harmony, tempo, genre, lyrical content, timbre, form, allusions to other music, spatialization, improvisation, price, accessibility-- we have vastly more variety in terms of what you might hear when you walk into a bar. And that variety ends up providing way more quality music today than was available or even conceivable to your average Austrian bargoer in the late-18th century. Just consider it-- if you got transported to the past and came back you'd say you heard some repetitive out of tune music. If one of them got transported here and back they'd spend the rest of their lives trying to explain how some guy's cheap walmart keyboard "can produce all the sounds of our modern orchestra." It's not even close.

> I'm refuting OP's claim that people today are generally hearing something "particularly wonderful" in Mozart's output and applying that level of extraordinary output to music from the "age of Mozart."

You are simply reading something that isn't really there. OPs original claim is clearly that the music production of the time was much larger than what survives (in popular culture) to this day, and that the surviving body of works has been selected for quality.

Your point amounts to little more than insisting the time period shouldn't be called "the age of Mozart", which is fine for what it is: a discussion of nomenclature.

>>Music and literature work like that.

It's possible to go too far with this kind of thinking. Yes the pyramid still in pristine condition is the best built one, with all the shoddy pyramids long collapsed. That does encourage a bias. This does not mean any "golden era" thinking I necessarily fallacious, just that we need to watch out for a particular fallacy.

Between about 1967-73 a lot of good rock albums were recorded. A lot of shite too, mostly forgotten about. The filter of time applies equally to the next 7 years, but most people's record collections feature more "golden age albums."

> Music and literature work like that. We think the age of Mozart was particularly wonderful, because we have Mozart's music. But there was plenty of other music in that era, most of it bellowed by bad musicians in taverns. That's not so different from today's music scene.

Yep, it's the good old nostalgia filter in action. You see the good stuff that survives the passage of time, but ignore the crap that gets rapidly forgotten:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NostalgiaFilter

"It's just nostalgia" is an easy cop out.

It presupposes either a linear progression towards better things, or a constant quality.

The reality is that periods have ups and downs, the middle ages were not as good in many things as the Ancient Greek and Roman times, the period after the Renaissance wasn't as good as it, the WWI and WWII era weren't as great as the periods that followed, etc.

This can happen across every industry, art, field, including politics and science.

There are always regressions, ups and downs, stagnation periods, local maxima we waste time on, etc.

It's good to recognise them, as opposed to knee jerking "it's just nostalgia speaking".

Fork is elegant only in the sense of a 1980s process with one thread. It's basically undefined otherwise.

Even back then CreateProcess() would have worked just fine.

Also, fork and exec really should be combined into one function.

Why? Exec is only one thing you might want to do after a fork...

Because exec is the thing you want to do 99% of the time.

Maaaybe... you might want to daemonize, or you might want to start a "thread" like in the Apache pre-forking mode...

Yeah, there should be a separate daemonize() call too.

Pseudo-threading is really the only reason you should ever have to make a direct call to fork().

It's called Survivor Bias[0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w

Your argument does make sense, but I'm now wondering if there was a significant number of cathedrals that collapsed? I don't remember ever hearing of such a thing happening without external factors like fire or war.

The Hagia Sophia was completed in just 5 years and "Earthquakes in August 553 and on 14 December 557 caused cracks in the main dome and eastern half-dome. The main dome collapsed completely during a subsequent earthquake on 7 May 558,[21] destroying the ambon, altar, and ciborium. The collapse was due mainly to the unfeasibly high bearing load and to the enormous shear load of the dome, which was too flat.[18] These caused the deformation of the piers which sustained the dome.[18] The emperor ordered an immediate restoration. He entrusted it to Isidorus the Younger, nephew of Isidore of Miletus, who used lighter materials and elevated the dome by "30 feet"[18] (about 6.25 meters or 20.5 feet)[clarification needed] – giving the building its current interior height of 55.6 meters (182 ft).[22] Moreover, Isidorus changed the dome type, erecting a ribbed dome with pendentives, whose diameter lay between 32.7 and 33.5 m.[18] Under Justinian's orders, eight Corinthian columns were disassembled from Baalbek, Lebanon, and shipped to Constantinople around 560.[23] This reconstruction, giving the church its present 6th-century form, was completed in 562."

"Backward compatibility" is holding back creativity a fair bit, I would think. You can build two completely different cathedrals, both surviving the ages. But straying from the fork/exec pattern would make you completely incompatible with the current software landscape, and leave you with no users, and no lasting impact, no matter how "elegant" your solution is.

As long as you are able to support that pattern, a thin emulation layer would let you run Unix software.

Well put.

Having worked with plenty of software developed by the priesthood in the era of the cathedral might I observe that it was mostly fractally terrible. For every UNIX there were so many terrible pieces of software, and UNIX itself is pretty fractally horrible. (See “The UNIX hater’s handbook” for thorough criticism of UNIX as it was when when Raymond published his book.)

There‘s a single reason software doesn‘t work like that:

Bits don‘t fall apart.

If you can have a perfect copy of something you can easily keep it in existence forever.

If not, your artifact will sooner or later decay. It will only prevail through conscious action, being subject to incremental evolution of thought. Which copies are not.

Sure, but your ability to run said bits (the scaffolding, if you will humor an architectural analogy) certainly decays over time, whether through hardware incompatibility, software changes, or new abstractions becoming the norm. The result is no different than the code itself decaying.

Still, but in practise you can adapt in a mediocre way to new scaffolding by copying large parts. That way you introduce new bugs, which is part the problem we're talking about, but you kept it alive for another couple of years by relatively low effort.

fork is the exact example of a structure that is only elegant from the outside but entirely unworkable otherwise. It keeps getting fixed and patched and worked around because at this point in time this enormous blunder has blinded too many.