brainstorms

Wednesday February 16, 2005

nebula award ballot

this year's nebula ballot announcement is here. some tough choices. [i am rooting for doctorow, but am also a very big fan of mcdevitt and mcmaster bujold. note: "down and out" link is a free download from craphound]

Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold
(Eos, Oct 2003)

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom , by Cory Doctorow
(Tor, Feb 2003)

Omega, by Jack McDevitt
(Ace, Nov 2003)

Cloud Atlas: A Novel, by David Mitchell
(Sceptre, Jan 2004)

Perfect Circle, by Sean Stewart
(Small Beer Press, Jun 2004)

The Knight, by Gene Wolfe
(Tor, Jan 2004)

(2005-02-16 18:58:30.0) Permalink Comments [0]

alan kay in conversation

an interesting conversation with alan kay. here are some notes, re/paraphrased sentences or full quotes. marginal notes in [] brackets.

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kay repeats a strange land claim and mentions hewitt's "wonderful" (but mostly paper) planner as a "predecessor" to prolog. [similar but funnier version of this claim can be found in a SICP (steele/sussman) footnote.] here is a bit of history from Colmerauer and Roussel's The Birth of Prolog:

While attending an IJCAI convention in September ‘71 with Jean Trudel, we met Robert Kowalski again and heard a lecture by Terry Winograd on natural language processing. The fact that he did not use a unified formalism left us puzzled. It was at this time that we learned of the existence of Carl Hewitt’s programming language, Planner [Hewitt, 1969]. The lack of formalization of this language, our ignorance of Lisp and, above all, the fact that we were absolutely devoted to logic meant that this work had little influence on our later research.

very odd (be polite) commentary about "lack of software engineering" in the current pop culture. mention of low-pass filters; one cannot help but wonder about the density of his filter.

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early-binding languages lock you into stuff you've already done. you cannot reformulate things easily. [not clear what he means by "reformulate." what about early-binding OO languages? bertrand meyer would be dismayed]

a benchmark from 1979 Xerox PARC runs only 50 times faster today. [should be 40,000 to 60,000] a factor of 1,000 in efficiency has been lost by bad CPU architectures. [hah. time to dust off those old compilers and benchmarks.]

a lot of the success of various programming languages is expeditions gap-filling. Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

[smalltalk, lisp] have so many ways of dealing with problems that the early-binding languages don't have, that it's very, very difficult for people who like lisp or smalltalk to imagine anything else.

if the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. [Kay needs to say more, but does not]

most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

you have to be a different kind of person to love C++.

the agglutinative languages tend to produce agglutinations and they are very, very difficult to untangle when you've had a new idea.

all creativity is an extended form of a joke. most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. there is an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the "Aha."

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ag·glu·ti·na·tive (adj)
1. adhesive
2. characterized by linguistic agglutination

ag·glu·ti·nate (v)
from latin agglutinatus, past participle of agglutinare to glue to, from ad- + glutinare to glue, from glutin-, gluten glue

(2005-02-16 18:57:49.0) Permalink Comments [0]