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Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

Tablet computers the pinnacle? They're fairly generic from a conceptual point of view. Pretty much the straightforward logical evolution of computing, as size gets smaller and computational power gets higher.

Please don't mention the iPad as a pinnacle of anything. It is not. It is merely a rehash of old technologies packed into a slick exterior and heavily marketed. It is more a tool of social status than a utility. Compare this to the HP Compaq TC1100, which was a tablet computer released seven years before the first iPad and the specifications of which trumped those of the iPad by double.

As for being victims of a constrained Von Neumann mindset, perhaps so. On the other hand I haven't really noticed any non-Von Neumann languages that are too practical for human purposes. Languages like APL and FP are quite esoteric, compared to the straightforward, if theoretically lacking, ALGOL model.

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> Please don't mention the iPad as a pinnacle of anything. It is not. It is merely a rehash of old technologies packed into a slick exterior and heavily marketed. It is more a tool of social status than a utility. Compare this to the HP Compaq TC1100, which was a tablet computer released seven years before the first iPad and the specifications of which trumped those of the iPad by double.

The iPad is more than heavily marketed dribble; it was actually usable when compared to the TC1100, and basically "realized the dream" of tablet computing when predecessors couldn't: specifications are shit, usability is king. Engineers often don't get that.

> As for being victims of a constrained Von Neumann mindset, perhaps so. On the other hand I haven't really noticed any non-Von Neumann languages that are too practical for human purposes. Languages like APL and FP are quite esoteric...

CUDA dominates the HPC world right now; MapReduce dominates big data processing. Vector machines and data-parallel pipelines have won big in their own domains. And I'm not even going to talk about relational database, all of which are very non Von Neumann computing models and have been very successful.

I had the TC1100, was able to pick it up cheap from liquidator of computers.

I had to figure out ways to undervolt the CPU so I could extend the battery. The battery typically lasted maybe 1-2 hours, but by undervolting I had gotten it to about 3. It was incredibly bulky and heavy, and it had no actual touch ability. It would heat up quite a bit.

Now the one good thing about it was it had a very accurate Wacom digitizer and man could it write notes. Shame there was never a good app for it.(OneNote maybe).

I think Microsoft took a cue from the way TC1100 provides a keyboard(not a shitty SurfaceRT one) that you can connect to and it's sturdy. Something I think the Surface is doing.

So overall not a usable device. My only question is that someone like Steve Jobs being around the same time never thought to release an Ipad at the time. I wonder why, did he think that the tech just wasn't ready hence not worth spoiling the user experience.

The iPad is the pinnacle of the marketing job of making people forget everything that came before :)

But, seriously, Haskell, for example, is quite practical (better than the imperative languages) for a big set of applications. One problem is that people want a language to rule them all - and that language can only be imperative; the other problem is that people don't want to learn different things, and a new paradigm is as different as you can get in programming. That makes everything else unpopular.

Haskell has very good support for imperative programming.

People say this a lot, but I honestly don't think it does. Code written using monads, whether the IO monad or a custom monad stack provided by a web framework, tends not to play too nicely with other Haskell code. It kind of demands everything be on its own terms and isn't as simple, clear, and transparent as the best Haskell code can be.

Don't get me wrong, I love Haskell, but I don't think it's very good at imperative programming, and I think there are much better solutions to be found to problems such as I/O.

I would say that the iPad is the pinnacle of "not having to think about anything".

Battery life is solid, unlike the tablets before (the figure I found for the TC1100 is 2-3h), the operating system is built for touch unlike Windows (or OS X). There are just no quirks to it that have to be explained by historical or technical circumstances. It just is. That's probably why it is so frustratingly non-futuristic :)

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