Wirth's Revenge
jmoiron.net
jmoiron.net
You can run NeXTStep in your browser by clicking above link. A couple of weeks ago you could run Framemaker as well. I was blown away by what Framemaker of the late 1980s could do. Today's Microsoft Word can't hold a candle to Framemaker of the late 1980s!
Edit: Here's how you start FrameMaker:
In Finder go to NextDeveloper > Demos > FrameMaker.app
Then open demo document and browse the pages of the demo document. Prepare to be blown away. You could do that in 1989 with like 64 MB of RAM??
In the last 37 years the industry has gone backwards. Microsoft Word has been stagnant due to no competition for the last few decades.
But it's not a lot of space for documents of hundreds of pages, so typical customers who were using FrameMaker to write user manuals for their products had to use "book" files to tie together individually edited chapter files. Then, once in a while you'd have to push the "generate" button on the book to get all the page numbers consistent between chapters, all the cross-references updated, and generate the updated Table Of Contents, Index, etc. You're welcome.
But there's a potential degenerate case where Chapter 1 might have a forward reference to Chapter 2 ("see page 209"), but due to some editing in Chapter 2, the referenced material now on page 210. Well, in some fonts, "209" is wider than "210" (since "1" can be skinny). So, during the Generate operation, the reference becomes "see page 210". But there's some tiny chance that this skinnier text changes the including paragraph to have one less line, so there's some tinier chance that Chapter 1 takes one less page, so Chapter 2 starts one page earlier, and now the referenced material is back on page 209. So now we're in a loop.
This was such an unlikely edge case that nobody else noticed that it even existed, much less that it was detected. I didn't bother with a fancy error message; it would just give a little one-word popup: "Degenerate". Years later, mild panic ensues when a customer calls in, irate that the software is calling them a degenerate. (And it wasn't even a real example, just some other bug that triggered it.)
You are saying that because the word processing and publishing software hasn't moved forward since those days, in fact it has moved backward. You can thank Microsoft's monopoly for this.
Aldus Pagemaker was a closer competitor to Framemaker, but Pagemaker's bread and butter was at the lower end of the market.
see this review for MS Word for Windows 1.0. The competitors listed for their benchmarks include Ami Pro, and the DOS versions of WordPerfect and MS Word.
Review: https://computerhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Infow...
The article talks mentions Interleaf as their main competitor.
Look at the fancy page layout that was possible in the late 1980s. Can Word do this today?
The tragedy is that serious large document authoring systems died with the invention of hypertext and the CDROM. Instead of an elegant set of FrameMaker or Interleaf documents for print you got a cdrom with a private site. And then once the web took off, just a site. Something got lost in that transition beyond the pallet of manuals showing up on your loading dock when you bought a system.
Sadly because Word won, technical authors still try to produce some content with it, but (not their fault) it's a horrible broken experience for both writer and reader. One example is the 3GPP specs that define how the mobile phone network works. Giant 200 page Word docs that take minutes to open and paginate.
It is not only a dump of functions, but also with examples for each one of them. I think the Go one is pretty good: https://go.dev/doc/
I've been trying via Literate Programming:
http://literateprogramming.com/
and applying the concepts of:
(originally developed at: https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/) which divides documentation along two axes:
- Action (Practical) vs. Cognition (Theoretical)
- Acquisition (Studying) vs. Application (Working)
resulting in a matrix of four things
- Tutorials
- How-to Guides
- Explanation (of the code)
- Reference (of the code)
which seems to be working well for my current project: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview/blob/main/gcodepre...
Unfortunately I think Publisher has faired even worse than Word in terms of stagnation, and now looks to be discontinued?
Note: Adobe bought FrameMaker and continues to sell FrameMaker. But Word has captured the market not because of its technical merit but because of bundling.
You don't. For APIs and such, documentation is published online, and you don't need Word for that. Word is used in some industries, where printed manual is needed.
Or, maybe a legacy example -- how were the printed manuals of Microsoft C 6.0 written? That was in the early 90s I think.
Microsoft has never made a technical publishing package, so it has to be outsourced.
Nowadays businesses simply don't care. They already achieved the feudal-ish bastion they have dreamed about, and there is no "business value" to spend too much time on it, unless ofc if it is something performance related, like A.I. or Supercomputing.
On the other hand, hardware today is 100X more complicated than the NeXTStep/Intel i486 days. Greybeards starting from the 70s/80s can gradually adapt to the complexity, while newcomers simply have to swim or die -- there is no "training" because any training on a toy computer or a toy OS is useless comparing to the massive architecture and complexity we face today.
I don't know. I wish the evolution of hardware is slower, but it's going to get to the point anyway. I recently completed the MIT xv6 labs and thought I was good enough to hack the kernel a bit, so I took another Linux device driver class, and OMG the complexity is unfathomable -- even the Makefile and KBuild stuffs are way way beyond my understanding. But hey, if I started from Linux 0.95, or maybe even Linux 1.0, I'd have much elss trouble to drill into a subsystem, and gradually adapt. That's why I think I need to give myself a year or two of training to scroll back to maybe Linux 0.95, and focus on just a simpler device driver (e.g. keyboard), and read EVERY evolution. There is no other way for commoners like us.
- TeXview.app which at least inspired the award-winning TeXshop.app
- Altsys Virtuoso which became Macromedia Freehand (having been created as a successor to Freehand 3) --- these days one can use Cenon https://cenon.info/ (but it's nowhere near as nice/featureful)
- WriteNow.app --- while this was also a Mac application, the NeXT implementation was my favourite --- WN was probably the last major commercial app written in Assembly (~100,000 lines)
Still sad my NeXT Cube stopped booting up....
wikipedia says that the Windows version, released in 1992, was priced at $500, which cannibalized sales on other platforms.
For example, there was a case of how Claude Code uses React to figure out what to render in the terminal and that in itself causes latency and its devs lament how they have "only" 16.7 ms to achieve 60 FPS. On a terminal. That can do way more than that since its inception. Primeagen shows an example [0] of how even the most terminal change filled applications run much faster such that there is no need to diff anything, just display the new change!
It's not even that performance is unimportant in absolute terms, but rather that the general state of software is so abysmal that performance is the least of your problems as a user, so you're not going to get excited over it.
Maybe the RAM prices will help bringing those skills back.
Good: (*) no extra memory needed (*) can read directly from CD/DVD/HD to memory - not through buffered i/o (*) no parsing time
Bad: (*) change or add a single field in to any part of the saved data and all previous files are now invalid.
I'd solve this with a version number and basically print a message "old version in file, rebuild your data"
Modern apps use JSON/Protobufs, etc. They are way slower to load, take way more memory as there are usually 2 versions of the data, the data in the file and the parsed data your app is actually using. They take time to parse.
But, they continue to work even with changes and they can more trivially be used across languages and apps.
That's just one example of 100s of others where the abstraction is slower and uses more memory but provides flexibility the old ones didn't.
Followed by actually reading a data structures and algorithms book.
Finally, using compiled languages instead of interpreted ones.
No need to count bytes to fit into 48 KB.
Many application programmers could make things faster - but their boss says good enough, ship it, move to a new feature that is worth far more to me.
That's because performance is critical to games (where the graphics programmers usually are), and if the game crashes, no big deal as long as it doesn't happen so often as to seriously impact normal gameplay experience. Exploits are to be expected and sometimes kept deliberately if it leads to interesting gameplay, it is a staple of speedruns. Infinite money is fun in a game, but not in serious banking software...
I am all for performance, and I think the current situation is a shame, but there are tradeoffs, we need people who care about both performance and security, maybe embedded software developers who work on critical systems, but expect a 10x increase in costs.
The people that could make terminal stuff super fast at low level are retired on an island, dead, or don't have the other specialties required by companies like this, and users don't care as much about 16.7ms on a terminal when the thing is building their app 10x faster so the trade off is obvious.
I think the Internet made 'waiting' for a response completely normalized for many applications. Before then, users flew through screens using muscle memory. Now, when I see how much mouse clicking goes on at service counters, I always think back to those ultra-fast response time standards. I still see a few AS/400 or mainframe terminal windows running 'in the wild' and wonder what new employees think about those systems.
On the other hand, if the guy in the video ran his app over a remote connection with limited bandwidth, diffing would probably perform better. I have a one Gbps google fiber connection to my job but at times my vpn bandwidth can choke down to a couple hundred kbps and sometimes worse.
Not that everything we want an agent to do is easy to express as a program, but we do know what computers are classically good at. If you had to bet on a correct outcome, would you rather an AI model sort 5000 numbers "in its head" or write a program to do the sort and execute that program?
I'd think this is obvious, but I see people professionally inserting AI models in very weird places these days, just to say they are a GenAI adopter.
It contains a helpful insight that there are multiple modes in which to approach LLMs, and that helps explain the massive disparity of outcomes using them.
Off topic: This article is dated "Feb 2nd" but the footer says "2025". I assume that's a legacy generated footer and it's meant to be 2026?
Today the same argument is rehashed - it's outrageous that VS Code uses 1 GB of RAM, when Sublime Text works perfectly in a tiny 128 MB.
But notice that the tiny/optimized/good-behaviour of today, 128 MB, is 30 times larger than the outrageous decadent amount from Wirth's time.
If you told Wirth "hold my bear", my text-editor needs 128 MB he would just not comprehend such a concept, it would seem like you have no idea what numbers mean in programming.
I can't wait for the day when programmers 20 years from now will talk about the amazingly optimized editors of today - VS Code, which lived in a tiny 1 GB of RAM.
Both, compute and memory, are getting closer to fundamental physical limits and it is unlikely that the next 60 years will be in any way like last 60 years.
While the argument for compute is relatively simple it is a bit harder to understand for memory. We are not near to any limit for the size of our memory but the limiting factor is how much storage we can bring how close to our computing units.
Now, there is still way to make and low hanging fruit to pick but I think we will eventually see a renaissance of appreciation for effective programs in our lifetimes.
In theory, yes. But I bet that the forces of enshittification will be stronger. All software will be built to show ads, and since there is no limit to greed, the ad storage and surveillance requirements will expand to include every last byte of your appliance's storage and memory. Interaction speed will be barely enough to not impact ad watching performance too severely. Linux will not be an out, since the megacorps will buy legislation to require "approved" devices and OSs to interact with indispensable services.
This and a huge amount of size in applications is features and libraries that allow compatibility between all kinds of different formats. Being able to open and convert almost everything is a boon, while also being a security nightmare.
Lastly I bet a lot of these applications could be way smaller if a lot of the UI prettiness was stripped from them.
You'll get bitten. I think you mean "hold my beer."
I find this amusing as my Czech girlfriend -- well, now my wife -- used to consistently make the same substitution. :-)
This is a flip side of the bitter lesson. If all attention goes into the AI algorithm, and none goes into the specific one in front of you, the efficiency is abysmal and Wirth gets his revenge. At any scale larger than epsilon, whenever possible LLMs are better leveraged to generate not the answer but the code to generate it. The bitter lesson remains valid, but at a layer of remove.
Really wish that there were drivers available to make that run nicely/natively on a Raspberry Pi rather than in an emulator:
http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/project-oberon/obe...
So very much this.
The Pi range has redefined public expectations of what a small cheap computer is and can do. But it runs a cut-down version of a huge, complex OS.
We should give it its own small OS, one simple enough for a single ordinary person to read and understand.
The core of Project Oberon is about 4000 lines of code, and that's a compiler, an editor, a windowing TUI OS to run it in, and enough OS to save source, create and store binaries, and run them.
The successor to Oberon is A2 with the Bluebottle GUI. This is SMP-aware, has a TCP/IP network stack and a simple HTTP web browser, can do email and so on.
Its kernel is about 8000 lines of code.
I believe the Ultibo bare-metal FreePascal system for the Raspberry Pi:
... is the work of one developer, an Australian chap. I feel confident that with such knowledge he could do a native A2 port, and probably not take very long either if he can reuse Ultibo code and drivers.
I wonder how much money he'd want, and if there would be any way to crowdfund it...
Anyway, I will start by seeing if I can contact the author and ask if it's even feasible.
> You can ask an AI what 2 * 3 is and for the low price of several seconds of waiting, a few milliliters of water and enough power to watch 5% of a TikTok video on a television, it will tell you.
This might be what many of the companies that host and sell time with an LLM want you to do, however. Go ahead, drive that monster truck one mile to pickup fast food! The more that's consumed, the more money that goes in the pockets of those companies....
> The instincts are for people to get the AI to do work for them, not to learn from the AI how to do the work themselves.
Improviny my own learning is one of the few things I find beneficial with LLMs!
If the results are expected to be really good, people will wait a seriously long time.
That’s why engineers move on to the next feature as soon as the thing is working - people simply don’t care if it could be faster, as long as it’s not too slow.
It doesn’t matter what’s technically possible- in fact, a computer that works too fast might be viewed as suspicious. Taking a while to give a result is a kind of proof of work.
I don't think that's right, even for laypeople. It's just that the pain of things that take 5 seconds when they could take 50 ms is subtle and can be discounted or ignored until you are doing a hundred things in a row that take 5 seconds instead of 50 ms. And if you don't know that it should be doable in 50 ms then you don't necessarily know you should be complaining about that pain.
In recent times I found myself falling for this preconception when a LLM starts to spit text just a couple of seconds after a complex request.
The cause of that is the companies with the big models are actually in the token selling business, marketing their models as all around problem solvers and life improvers.
But that's missing the point of the writing tools example: The models can unilaterally do this, and if prompted properly they will do this today. Writing an agent loop that will encourage the agent to build up it's own library of tools and prefer that library first, using a small (possibly local) model to select, is literally no more than a couple of hundred lines of code.
I wrote a toy coding agent a while back, and I started just with the ability for it to run shell commands. Every other tool the model wrote itself. At some point it even tried to restart itself to get access to the tool it had just written.
The providers only control a miniscule proportion of tooling, and the models themselves are capable enough that they will never control most of the tooling.
As a result, a lot of effort is going into optimising this to reduce token use.
But what we're seeing is that the main driver for this is not to spend less, but to do more, because we get enough value out of these models that every cost saving measure makes it possible to at a minimum spend the same to do more, but often even to spend more.
I'm doing projects now that would be financially unviable just 6 months ago.
This isn't a different question from "Why is Microsoft office everywhere"
And "Why are all the popular things gigantic".
Features, not speed, are what gets people to adopt software in the vast majority of cases.
Maybe one day that will change
The EU should do a radical social restructuring betting on no growth. Perhaps even banning all American tech. A modern Tokugawa.
Economically, something like memory is in the vicinity of 10 orders of magnitude cheaper today relative to 1970 (a). Similar things can be said about processors. This means the incentive to invest costly engineering resources (b) into optimizing software is very low. In terms of energy, a CPU instruction is at least millions of times more energy efficient today (c). That's another big economic disincentive. Furthermore, time spent optimizing is time not spent doing product development (d). A slower product on the market can be better than late market entry.
So we have production costs of hardware (a), production costs of software (as a function of time)(b), energy costs of hardware (c), energy cost of running software (c), and opportunity cost of late market entry (d). There's also the time cost of running software (e).
(a) is cheaper;
(b) depends on your measurement of utility;
(c) is cheaper;
(d) means unoptimized software tends to be cheaper;
(e) depends on your measurement of utility;
So (b) and (e) are where Wirthian arguments can focus.
However, AI may yet play a major role in optimizing software. They are already being used in this space.[0]
W.r.t. complexity, one consequence of abstraction is that it further decouples the cost of an operation from the difficulty of implementation. Of course, the two were never identical to begin with. It is easier to implement bubble sort than quick sort, easier still to come up with it when you have no knowledge of sorting algorithms. But greater abstraction is better at concealing computational complexity. The example involving ORMs is a good one. When you have to write SQL by hand, you have a clearer picture of the database operations that will be performed, because the correspondence between the operations and what the database is doing is tighter. ORMs, on the other hand, create an abstraction over SQL that is divorced from the database. Unless the ORM is written in some crafty way that can smartly optimize the generated SQL (and optimizers have their limitations), you can land yourself in exactly the situation the author describes.
W.r.t. learning from LLMs, that is perhaps the better application in many cases, as a kind of sophisticated search engine. The trouble is that people treat LLMs as infallible oracles. Another issue is that people seem not to care about becoming better themselves. You see this with thought experiments where we posit some AI that can do all the thinking and working for us. Many if not most people react as if this makes human beings "obsolete"...which is such a patently absurd and frankly horrifying and obscene notion that it can only be an indictment of our consumerist culture. Obsolete with respect to what? A human life is not defined by economic utility. Human purpose is not instrumental. Even if an AI understood philosophy, science, etc., if I don't understand them, then I don't understand them. I am no better for it when someone or some fictional AI does. I am made no wiser.
The root problem with 2FA is that the average computer is full of vulnerabilities and cannot be trusted 100% so you need a second device just in case the computer was hacked... But it's not particularly useful because if someone infected your computer with a virus, they can likely also infect your phone the next time you plug it in to your computer to charge it... It's not quite 2-factor... So much hassle for so little security benefit... Especially for the average person who is not a Fortune 500 CEO. Company CEOs have a severely distorted view about how often the average person is targeted by scammers and hackers. Last time someone tried to scam me was 10 years ago... The pain of having to pull up my phone every single day, multiple times per day to type in a code is NOT WORTH the tiny amount of security it adds in my case.
The case of security is particularly pernicious because complexity has an adverse impact on security; so trying to improve security by adding yet more complexity is extremely unwise... Eventually the user loses access to the software altogether. E.g. they forgot their password because they were forced to use some weird characters as part of their password or they downloaded a fake password manager which turned out to be a virus, or they downloaded a legitimate password manager like Lastpass which was hacked because obviously, they'd be a popular target for hackers... Even if everything goes perfectly and the user is so deeply conditioned that they don't mind using a password manager... Their computer may crash one day and they may lose access to all their passwords... Or the company may require them to change their password after 6 month and the password manager misses the update and doesn't know the new password and the user isn't 'approved' to use the 'forgot my password' feature... Or the user forgets their password manager's master password and when they try to recover it via their email, they realize that the password for their email account is inside the password manager... It's INFURIATING!!!
I could probably write the world's most annoying book just listing out all the cascading layers of issues that modern software suffers from. The chapter on security alone would be longer than the entire Lord of the Rings series... And the average reader would probably rather throw themselves into the fiery pits of Mordor than finish reading that chapter... Yet for some bizarre reason, they don't seem to mind EXPERIENCING these exact same cascading failures in their real day-to-day life.
“ To some, complexity equals power
A system’s ease of use always should be a primary goal, but that ease should be based on an underlying concept that makes the use almost intuitive. Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling — the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.
Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user. (What it does confer is a feeling of helplessness, if not impotence.) Therefore, the lure of complexity as sale incentive is easily understood; complexity promotes customer dependence on the vendor.”
I am typing (no screenshots or copy and paste) this 30 year old wisdom in to reply here as an archived reminder for myself.
The irony is that the websites which require such passwords are often low-importance.