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Comment by TruthElixirX | Hacker News Reader

Eventually, I think, there will cease to be icons within the industry. What we have now are the people who invented the internet/computers and the basic components.

The people who are doing the inventing now are just as smart, but they aren't creating fundamental things, they are improving on an existing system.

We don't say, "engineer team y invented the iCore series of processors." we sort of just say "Intel is coming out with a new set of processors."

I'm not sure if I am making my point very clear. :\

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Between Gates, Zuckerberg, Larry and Sergey, Torvalds, RMS, Knuth, and a few others, there're still plenty of icons left and so I don't forsee your scenario happening anytime soon. I am generally an optimist, and think the number of icons to come is far greater than those who have come and gone.

Is it really fair to compare Zuckerberg to Knuth? Zuckerberg made a PHP site for people to stalk their classmates. Knuth wrote TeX, hundreds of papers, and a series of books considered among the 100 most important scientific works of the 20th century.

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/100-or-so-boo...

Zuckerberg is definitely a successful dude that one can look up to. But in terms of advancing the field of computing, he hasn't done a whole lot yet.

Your comment presupposes that advances in mathematics are more important than advances in social communication. Is Mozart less iconic because his achievements were in music?

I think it's more about how hard it is than how important. Facebook represents a lot of work but nothing that seems to demand superhuman insight; an army of Stanford CS grads supplied with pot and Red Bull could probably make a tolerable substitute in five or ten years. But it's far from certain any of them could ever produce the kind of work Turing or McCarthy brought us. (And I say this knowing I won't, either.)

I think an army of top end CS grads with caffeinated beverages is what Facebook currently employs.

> Your comment presupposes that advances in mathematics are more important than advances in social communication.

I don't see that... he just said it wasn't a fair comparison. If it comes off like he thinks advancements in mathematics are more important that other advances, it might be because he does think so, but that's not exactly what he's saying.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Somehow people have this picture of mathematics as this universal body of knowledge, but that couldn't be further from the truth. They are as earthly as anything else we've been doing as a human race. For an interesting perspective on mathematics from a cognitive-scientific point of view, check out George Lakoff's book "Where Mathematics Comes From."

> Gates, Zuckerberg, Larry and Sergey, Torvalds, RMS, Knuth

It's not too hard to imagine a world without facebook, but I'd find it very hard indeed to imagine a world without Microsoft, Google, Linux, Open Source or the Art of Computer Programming.

It's almost like this is one of those trick questions: "which name does not belong in this list". Zuckerberg pops out at me immediately.

All the rest is timeless, Facebook will one day be gone again, I'm fairly sure of that.

I have to disagree on this one. If there is one who does not belong in the list, it would be Knuth. Zuckerberg, as well as Gates, Larry and Sergey, has created a technology company that changed the lives of millions. They are all well known by the "civilians". Torvalds less so, but still, the Linux project has had a relevance that trascends beyond mere technology.

Mr. Knuth's contributions, on the other hand, are much more fundamental. But, because of this, his name remains unknown for the general population. For us, he is a titan amongst men; for the world, he'd be an old, retired professor who cannot even figure out email.

> in terms of advancing the field of computing, he hasn't done a whole lot yet.

Theory, no. Practice, oh Hell yes. Facebook changed the game, for everyone. The "Social Revolution" has changed the face of business, investing, interpersonal communication, friendships, revolutions... the list goes on. Maybe Zuck was just in the right place at the right time, but he made the most of it and his company's impact has been enormous.

In terms of science, absolutely not. But impact, yes. Facebook changes everything. From now on, most people will be a part of an online social network. It's as important to human communication as the telephone was. Know how we use letters from the Civil War era to understand what that society was like? Imagine what will be possible in that regard in 100, 200 or 500 years.

I hate to sound negative, but things won't get better. OK, this month has been a shocker, but next year might be just as bad.

The real fundamentals of computing happened a long time ago. Hero of Alexandria, some Chinese and Islamic scholars, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Joseph Marie Jacquard, Turing, non Neumann. But progress was linear, not exponential - the tools they made were so impractical that they didn't make further tools easier. You used a computer as a curiosity, or to solve a specific problem, not to build a better computer.

Then the singularity hit. Computers got faster, IO got richer, and you could practically write computer programs that would help you write computer programs. It's hard to say exactly when that happened, but the inventions of C, UNIX, and Lisp were certainly part of that critical period in history. This shift started around the mid-1960s to early 70s.

The people who were working on it are now in their 60s and 70s. The next generation (who are in their 50s and 60s) wasn't just inspired by them, they were given very useful tools, which made later advancements easier. It's easier to write a C++ compiler if you already have a C compiler. It's easier to write git if you have a CVS repo to store your work in. People no longer had to bootstrap using nothing but assembly, they started with a sound foundation, and could iterate.

Because of the work of these founders, I think there's a lot more icons left.

    It's easier to write git if you have a CVS repo 
    to store your work in

Not to diminish your point or anything, but regarding Git, I'll just quote Linus Tolvards:

    For the first 10 years of kernel maintenance, we 
    literally used tarballs and patches, which is a much
    superior source control management system than CVS is

Basically Git started as a bunch of scripts written by Linux for dealing with "tarballs and patches" and nobody starts something like this unless there's lots of hatred involved. What you get if you're a CVS user and want something better is SVN. You get Git when you consider CVS such an abomination that you'd rather do without any existing VCS altogether.

And I really think the world needs more people like Linus, as some wheels are worth reinventing.

    The real fundamentals of computing happened a long 
    time ago.

In the words of Alan Kay: The computer revolution hasn't happened yet ... http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521 (listen to this talk because it's great).

I think it's worth noting that git did not replace tarballs and patches. Git replaced Bitkeeper. Bitkeeper, as far as I know, replaced tarballs and patches. And as far as I know, git did not start as a bunch of scripts for dealing with tarballs and patches. The design was inspired by his knowledge of and experience with Bitkeeper.

The workflow was indeed inspired by Bitkeeper, nothing is truly revolutionary, but Bitkeeper itself was not the status quo in a world dominated by CVS, SVN and Perforce.

On "tarballs and patches", I was referring to this famous quote from http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=111288700902396 ...

     So I'm writing some scripts to try to track 
     things a whole lot faster. Initial indications
     are that I should be able to do it almost as 
     quickly as I can just apply the patch, but 
     quite frankly, I'm at most half done, and if I 
     hit a snag maybe that's not true at all. 
     Anyway, the reason I can do it quickly is that
     my scripts will _not_ be an SCM, they'll be a 
     very specific "log Linus' state" kind of thing. 
     That will make the linear patch merge a lot more
     time-efficient, and thus possible.

Bitkeeper was not the status quo, but I don't think that's important in the overall point. The original point was that git was inspired by previous software. The original software pointed at, cvs, was wrong, but I don't think the original point changes when we put the correct software, Bitkeeper, in its place in the sentence.

Yes, but I included a "not to diminish your point" right in the first sentence.

This was just a facts correction because I find the story of Git being fascinating.

Then I suppose my comment was a correction to the correction.

I think Alan Kay would disagree with you: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-in...

   The basic idea here is not to bash the current state 
   of things but to try to understand something about the 
   progress of coming up with fundamental new ideas and 
   principles. 
  
   I claim that we need really new ideas in most areas of 
   computing, and I would like to know of any important and 
   powerful ones that have been done recently. If we can't 
   really find them, then we should ask "Why?" and "What 
   should we be doing?"

Which sounds to me like "The real fundamentals of computing happened a long time ago."

Perhaps there will be a more significant revolution in our future but that doesn't contradict the above statement.

OMG, Alan Kay is on Stack Overflow? That's freaking awesome :)

If any of those people die before October ends I'm blaming you directly.

I disagree, here's why:

First, the software engineering field is still very immature. The tools and terminology in use are still very primitive. Studies seeking to identify best practices via evidence are still few and far between. Worse yet, known best practices with substantial evidence behind them are widely ignored in the industry on average. I believe there is still a lot of room for new techniques, and new models of software engineering, which will serve to guide developers for generations.

Second, we are at a critical juncture in programming languages. There are a lot of new languages gaining popularity, and a lot of older languages seeing substantial change. The fundamental paradigms in use by the average programmer are changing (becoming increasingly more functional, generally). Meanwhile, there are even more advanced concepts on the horizon (monads, for example) which are still not accessible to most programmers. There's a huge opportunity there for the next generation of languages to increase the accessibility of those advanced techniques. Additionally, we're in the midst of a revolution in terms of compiler technology. We are seeing things like modular compilers, very advanced run-times capable of incredible speed improvements, cutting edge garbage collectors, and the potential for massive parallelization on the desktop. Again, there's a huge potential there for some very fundamental innovations.

Third, we are no where near the end of the line in computing hardware. Over the next few decades we could see some very crazy things. 3D micro-chips putting trillions of transistors into every cpu. Even more massive parallelization than what we've seen today. RSFQ processors that could put petaflops computing power on a single chip. MRAM married to processor cores leading to breakthroughs in performance. Non-Von Neumann architectures enabled by memory and processing power being mixed together. FPGAs with billions of gates with the capability to operate and reconfigure at multi-gigahertz speed. Asynchronous CPUs.

And these are just things at a very fundamental level. There's still a huge potential for lots of innovations in the software and hardware space closer to the end-user. There's plenty of room for more icons in the future.

I think the distinction you're highlighting is between the people who start the giant companies of the industry, and the people who keep those companies successful. Everyone knows that Noyce/Moore/Grove built Intel, not many people knows who runs it today.

The '50s computing leaders (mostly academics) are in their old age, the '70s leaders (academics and businessmen) are heading into retirement (except for Jobs unfortunately), and the later leaders (Google, Facebook) are still going strong.

People have been about the same intelligence for a long time. Steve, Dennis, and John were no smarter than their predecessors, they were just applying their intelligence in an area other smart people weren't looking at. Woz was designing calculators before he designed the Apple II. So what's the next area a smart person can make a big difference in?

Fundamental inventions and discoveries are never recognized right away. That's why Nobel prizes are usually awarded for a work done several decades ago. The guys who do revolutionary work in computing right now do exist, we just haven't recognized them yet.

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