Someone at Wired.com just found pg's "The Hundred Year Language". | Hacker News Reader

Someone at Wired.com just found pg's "The Hundred Year Language".

wired.com

23 pointszck12 comments

I ran into a paper called "The Next 700 Languages" while doing Scala research. The paper, written in 1966, is lengthy but awesome. Its conclusion reminded me a lot of PGs paper, which I hadn't read:

The languages people use to communicate with computers differ in their intended aptitudes, towards either a particular application area, or a particular phase of computer use (high level programming, program assembly, job scheduling, etc). They also differ in physical appearance, and more important, in logical structure. The question arises, do the idiosyncracies reflect basic logical properties of the situations that are being catered for? Or are they accidents of history and personal background that may be obscuring fruitful developments? This question is clearly important if we are trying to predict or influence language evolution.

To answer it we must think in terms, not of languages, but of families of languages. That is to say we must systematize their design so that a new language is a point chosen from a well-mapped space, rather than a laboriously devised construction.

PDF: http://ttic.uchicago.edu/~blume/classes/aut2008/proglang/pap...

Where "Someone"=="Bruce Sterling"

And it also happens to be an interesting response to pg's essay, as it brings up the question of the "main branch" of evolution in programming languages, which, in choosing Lisp as the basis for his own 100 year language, pg seemingly ignores.

Does it actually bring up any points? The only added text I saw were three jokes that didn't add anything to the essay.

Actually, you're quite right. I guess it's been too long since I've read pg's essay. I thought this was a response, rather than a re-post. So, that makes me wonder whether pg thinks Lisp is on a main branch...

That was one of the reasons I posted this link -- it adds nothing of value to pg's essay, and quotes a whole lot of it; I think bordering on plagarism.

This is Sterling's basic mode of blogging: the original, plus commentary. Granted, usually it's a lot more commentary.

A lot of people lately are being prodigal with the P word (the other P word, I mean: "plagiarism") in referring to blogs that quote at length. The blogs in question almost always make it clear that the quote is a quote. Sterling is less good at this, but his regular readers have no trouble and PageRank is not his goal. Can we please reserve our ire for the real plagiarists, which are plentiful?

I looked over Sterling's other posts before submitting a "this guy's stealing from pg" post, and came to a similar conclusion. I thought about it, and came to the conclusion that I don't like it, but it wasn't worth raising the alarm over. I still think this is a Bad Thing to do. His post didn't quote the whole thing, and links to the source, which are good. However, here are some of the things that bother me: He doesn't make it obvious that it is a quote -- the link doesn't have any helpful text; it's just a link. It doesn't say "from pg". He adds nothing of value. (This is arguably similar to reddit, boingboing, or, indeed, hacker news itself, but differs in that on those sites either a very small amount is quoted, or the quoting is obvious (see boingboing's quotes)).

So you're right -- this isn't plagarism, but I still think it's unethical, especially for someone at Wired.

Yeah, if anything it would be copyright infringement, not plagiarism.

@Misuba -- I couldn't agree more. This happens to be a common occurrence in closed communities, academic or otherwise. No one writes within a vacuum, there is always a prior influence.

When someone within the community is dubbed a "plagiarist", that person is cast out to protect the false idea that everyone in the community is creating completely original work all the time.

Your point is apt; There are real spammers and plagiarists out there. To nitpick over a clear quote within a blog post is just our antennas perking up and realizing that most of what we write isn't as ground breaking or original as we'd like to believe. It's convenient for us to rally around how original we are, instead of coming to grips with how unoriginal it all really is.

It started off pretty well, but then didnt go anywhere.

I dont think any of our languages are hundred year languages, although COBOL and FORTRAN are in their early fifties. Mostly they wont survive because they arent concise enough to express our ideas in a hundred years. List comprehension in Python is way more concise than the same operation in C or assembly language. Why should we worry about the bookkeeping details of a container in 2100. But we wont be doing programming then. Our AIs will. I aim to be a philosopher of computation by then. I'll tell the AIs old war stories.

I aim to be a philosopher of computation by then.

Philosophy is what you do when you don't really understand the details. Maybe that's exactly what you meant, though, come to think of it. :)

I think Bruce Sterling with those silly jokes just proves he hasn't written anything good since 1988.

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