Three interesting items on programming languages have come to my attention in the past 24 hours, so I thought I'd pass them along:
First, on a sad note, I learned today that Ken Iverson, the creator of APL, died back in October of 2004. I learned APL as a freshman in college, and it completely changed the way I looked at computers and programming. While I detected that shift in perception as a freshman, it took me many years to fully appreciate its consequence.
Second, yesterday CJ linked to an interview with Alan Kay in ACM Queue. I have something of a love/hate relationship with Alan Kay. While he's a very smart guy who has done some interesting work (Smalltalk, for example) and who continues to do interesting work (check out Croquet), he never hesitates to blast away at the direction computer science and software engineering has gone. His comparison of programming to literature is faulty; what makes literature good or bad fundamentally comes down to a matter of taste (personal and social), while what makes software good or bad, like other feats of engineering, comes down to whether it works or not. And while the internet is a giant mass of duct tape and baling wire, holy shit, it works. While we can and should do better, don't pretend that this doesn't matter. Had the world decided to wait until everything was perfect, we'd still be waiting.
That segues nicely into the final, humorous item, a parody of Paul Graham's essays. Fantastic stuff.
Alan Kay is such a jackass. He even got at the point in this interview -- there are two separate worlds, that of research, and that of engineering. His achievements in one don't seem to give him any sort of insight into the other. Has he ever worked on any sort of commercial product that had to come out in some reasonable amount of time, or, you know, the company might run out of money?
Research types like him who look down on real-world work drive me nuts. Engineers are the people who make things actually work. That dude is basically my prep cook in the kitchen of computer science. Thanks for the chopped onions, Alan Kay. They are of a very uniform size.
Note 1: I thought it was spelled "bailing" wire before today.
Note 2: It's been 10 years since Bob Metcalfe predicted the collapse of the Internet! Dang!
Posted by: Ficus | February 11, 2005 at 10:38 AM