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Comment by dpwm | Hacker News Reader

I remember using these somewhere, perhaps a music player, and how amazing they were.

It's interesting to note that Thunar (XFCE file manager) and Dolphin (KDE manager) have removed Miller columns, in KDE's case because the column view had "been used by only very few people but was tricky and time consuming to maintain." [0]

A slight side note, I've been a fan of Mark S. Miller's work for a while now and I never knew these were named after him. Mark S. Miller's other contributions, particularly his work on popularizing capability-based security[1] and the E programming language[2] are well worth looking into if you're interested in how easy secure, race-condition-free, distributed computing could be made.

[0] http://ppenz.blogspot.com/2012/01/dolphin-20-status-update.h...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(programming_language)

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Came here to say much the same. I spent much of my youth reading reading ERights.org [0] and related capabilities-based security sites (Hardy, Shapiro, etc.). Weird how it seems nothing ever came of it (or am I wrong?).

[0] http://www.erights.org

Cap'n'proto's RPC layer[0] is interesting and is heavily inspired by E language's network layer (capTP) and the author says that Miller was involved in the design [1].

I also seem to remember that one of the authors of Pony language[2] says that Miller had been involved in discussions with the authors of Pony language.[1]

I seem to remember a comment stating that Cap'n Proto is used by Cloudflare, but I'm not sure if they use the RPC layer as well as the serialization layer.

I also think that we are in an age where promises are widely used and promise pipelining[3] could somehow end up a future mainstream language feature.

[0] https://capnproto.org/rpc.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9483735

[2] https://www.ponylang.io/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_and_promises#Promise_p...

Cloudflare uses both Cap'n Proto serialization and RPC, though at present the serialization is used by a lot more systems than the RPC is. Serialization is most notably used in the logging aggregation pipeline, though shows up in a number of places as well. At present the only place I'm aware of RPC being used is the control protocol for Argo Tunnel (the tool which lets your web server connect to Cloudflare, rather than the usual arrangement where Cloudflare connects to the web server, hence letting it stay behind a firewall with no public IP). We're investigating more use cases, though, particularly around IPC (communicating between processes on the same machine) and Workers (communicating between sandboxes in the same process), both places where zero-copy is likely to shine. I'm also excited by the possibilities for capability-based interaction between Workers.

(I'm the tech lead for Cloudflare Workers and also the creator of Cap'n Proto, though Cloudflare was using Cap'n Proto long before I joined. And yes, Mark Miller is a friend and I worked with him on the RPC design.)

Mark ended up designing several things in JS (like WeakMaps), influenced by his work on Caja (object capabilities for JS). I ran into him a couple of times while he was doing standards work with Dave Herman.

I would be surprised if he was not involved with Fuchsia. Fuchsia has object capabilities written all over it.

Can you explain the Fuschia part in more detail?

He cofounded a startup recently: https://agoric.com/blog/

I thought a lot of the agoric computing folks turned to cryptocurrency-related stuff recently? (Sorry, haven't been following this much lately)

> * I remember using these somewhere, perhaps a music player, and how amazing they were.*

Maybe foobar2000 (possibly with some UI plugin?) It's been a very long time, but I recall somethign similar.

https://yuo.be/columns_ui looks a little like it, but this would have been mid 2000's, probably on windows XP.

I originally thought it was on Windows XP, but I think it's most likely it was Quod Libet on Linux.

It's the second picture on the article. Don't know how I missed it.

He also played a nontrivial role in the development of Xanadu. The 1995 Wired article on it figures him prominently: https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/

He told me that article got all kinds of things wrong. Don't forget Gell-Mann amnesia.

> I remember using these somewhere, perhaps a music player, and how amazing they were.

yuck, I always hated software that uses them. I find them highly unpractical

> I've been a fan of Mark S. Miller's work for a while now and I never knew these were named after him.

Note [citation needed] in the article. I‘d also really like a real reference.

(Ted Nelson once pointed out that Mark Miller's name is also his occupation.)

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