unalog

"Should we even try to teach programming? I have met hundreds of programmers in the last 30 years and can see no discernable influence of programming on their general abiltity to think well or to take an enlightened stance on human knowledge. If anything, the opposite is true." "The first siren's song we need to be wary of is the one that promises a connection between an interesting pursuit and interesting thoughts." "Strong paradigms like LISP and Smalltalk are so compelling that they eat their young: when you look at an application in either of these two systems, they resemble the systems themselves, not a new idea." "My guess is that Smalltalk had moved into the final phase I memntioned at the beginning of this story, in which a way of doing things finally gets canonized into an inflexible belief structure." "Again, the whole point of OOP is not to have to worry about what is inside an object. Objects made on different machines and with different languages should be able to talk to each other--and will have-to in the future." "Another late-binding scheme that is already necessary is to get away from directo protocol matching when a new object shows up in a system of objects. In other words, if someone sends you an object from halfway around the world it will be unusual if it conforms to your local protocols." "...I think the enormous commercialization of personal computering has smothered much of the kind of work that used to go on in universities and research labs, by sucking the talented kids towards practical applications." "A counter to this is to generate enormous disatisfaction with one's designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the disatisfaction from self worth--otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results."