Computer Software (1984) | Hacker News Reader

Computer Software (1984)

fermatslibrary.com

95 pointsBerislavLopac20 comments

Looking at this reminds me of reading Scientific American when I was a child. The articles were in-depth, scholarly, and often difficult, even when simplified for general consumption. I know Scientific American changed its format to survive, but I miss this rigorous style.

I've just bought this Scientific American issue a week ago in an used book store for around 2$. Mainly because of Wirth and Kay and to read some early Wolfram. Strange coincidence to see this here now.

If you are interested in reading the original paper without the annotations, as I was, you can find it on Alan's Viewpoints Research Institute site here [0].

[0] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr1984001_comp_soft.pdf

Thanks, much appreciated! Prefer this to all that JS non-sense.

Er, can't you just ignore the annotations? They are in a different part of the screen and don't modify the original paper. Not affiliated with this website but wondering why you felt the need to seek the original paper from a different place when it's clearly right there...

Not the parent but when you click it slides out a sidebar to show the discussions, covering the content. The annotations also take up a lot of space making the text smaller.

On the plus side they (Fermat's Library) converted it to text, where the PDF versions are all image scans.

I'm new to Fermat's Library, but I'm perplexed by what they've done. They appear to have OCR'ed the paper, and it appears that you can select a region of text, but if you copy that region and paste it, it consists entirely of garbage characters. Similarly, they've somehow broken CMD+f.

Looking at the HTML source, it appears they've used pdf2htmlEX: https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX / http://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/ -- the first demo there (which is also from a scan) also seems to have the same property you mentioned.

Whenever I read material from a syndicated site I want to know where the canonical source is. This is essentially an electronic transcription, and it may not be 100% correct.

In addition I wanted to download the material, and Fermat's Library made that difficult by design.

Also I disable JavaScript for pretty much every website, and don't really like when I have to selectively re-enable scripts in order to achieve basic functionality, as was required for Fermat's Library.

Thanks for explaining. From previous looks at this website, I did not consider it an electronic transcription but an embedding of the original PDF; a closer look reveals some differences in this case (the image at the side of the first page has disappeared, and the subheading / pullquote at the top of the first page has been retypeset somehow). Apart from that, all the line breaks and character positions seem to match, so it does appear to be identical to the canonical source. The other reasons make sense (it didn't occur to me that it may not display properly; my understanding of their technology was that they simply took the original PDF and added dots as markers; I hadn't noticed that it wasn't downloadable).

Not displaying properly for me.

> “What [the computer field] needs first is a William of Occam, who said “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” The idea that it is worth while to put considerable effort into eliminating complexity and establishing the simple had a lot to do with the rise of modern science and mathematics, particularly from the standpoint of creating new aesthetics...

The tricky thing is he argues for “sophistication” here[0], which on the surface seems antithetical.

Picking (and committing-to) a (correct) abstraction can be tricky. Also, these “axioms” are often made true by useless qualifiers like “unnecessary” complexity, or even “complexity”. If it’s required, it’s not “complexity”, but a necessary implementation detail. Pick in good faith, keep a loose grip, have fun.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs?t=345

Alan Kay’s YC Startup School lectures “How to Invent the Future” really influenced me, wonderful humanitarian wisdom: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/11

It was also a privilege conversing with him via email about them and otherwise, here are a few interesting quotes from him: “By all means, please take a look at my colleague Bret Victor's ideas -- he is one of the two or three strongest thinkers to emerge since Engelbart.” + “Minsky's "Society of Mind" (and the later "The Emotion Machine") are still very good evokers of what needs to be done. (It is generally more complex that most people would like to think and do).”

Do we have a transcript of “How to Invent the Future” available?

I prefer to read.

Click "Lecture Transcript" below the video.

I found it somewhat humorous that at every level above Fortran in the diagram of language abstraction level there was an entry for Lisp.

Well, Lisp is the language family where you get to choose the level of abstraction you need.

I love the care taken in writing artfully and entertainingly.

That graphic on inheritance programming - is that why it's called a web "browser?" (This graphic is a great explanation of object oriented programming!)

Nice how in the diagram only LISP appears under HLL, VHLL and UHLL.

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