The forgotten ideas in computer science-Joe Armestrong
在2020年的第一期里面，一起回顾2018年Joe的 The forgotten ideas in computer science。在40多分钟里面总结了他精挑的个人最佳List.
强烈建议配合着视频回看❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Part 1 Motivation
最初只是想想了解计算机科学中那些forgotten ideas，后来变成了想知道Silly ideas,Hot research topics,Bad ideas...然后就想做个人列表排行。
As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements”; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance ... Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.
Henry David ThoreauWalden (1854)
How to make a list
- Collect lots of items easy
- Assign to lists difficult
- Shorten the lists to N items (N is small) very difficultThrowing things away is much more difficult than collecting things - but what’s left is better.
Part 2 Things to learn
Essential Guide to CS
- 80 things in 18 categories(some old, some new, some forgotten)
- Pix and Mix
- Not all equally importantI’ll talk about the most important oneslater
- 2 great papers to read
- 4 old tools to learn
- 4 really bad things
- 3 great books to read
- 7 reasons why software is difficult now
- 10 reasons why software was easier back in the day
- 1 fun programming exercise
- 8 great machines from the past
- 3 performance improvements
- 5+ YouTube videos to watch
- 6 things not to do
- 5 sins
- 4 languages to learn
- 4 great forgotten ideas
- 6 areas to research
- 2 dangers
- 4 ideas that are obvious now but strange at first
- 2 fantastic programs to try
2 great papers to read
- A Plea for Lean Software - Niklaus Wirth
- The Emperor's Old Clothes- ACM Turing award lecture - Tony Hoare
4 old tools to learn
- emacs (vi)
- bash
- make
- shell
4 really bad things
- Lack of Privacy
- Attempts to manipulate us through social media
- Vendor Lock in
- Terms and Conditions
3 great books to read
- Algorithms+Data Structures=Programs
- The mythical man-month(人月神话)
- How to win friends and influence people(人性的弱点-卡内基)
7 reasons why software is difficult now
- Fast machines
- Huge memory
- Hundreds of PLs
- Distributed
- Huge programs
- No specifications
- Reuse
10 reasons why software was easier back in the day
- Small machines
- Small memory
- Few languages
- Not distributed
- No reuse of code
- No Xcode etc
- No GIT.
- Complete control
- Did not communicate
- Understandable in it’s entirety
8 great machines from the past
3 performance improvements
- Better algorithms ( x 6) (Interpreter -> Compiler)
- Better Programming language (x50) (Prolog -> C)
- Better Hardware (x1000 per 10 years)
5+ YouTube videos to watch
- The computer revolution has not happened yetAlan Kay
- Computers for CynicsTed Nelson
- Free is a lie (Aaron Balkan)
- How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day Tristan Harris (TED-Talk)
- Matt Might - Winning the War on Error: Solving Halting Problem, Curing Cancer - Code Mesh 2017
6 things not to do
- Backdoors
- Violate privacy
- Put microphones in everybody's houses
- Hijack our attention system
- Hijack our social systems
- Sell crap that we don’t want or need
5 sins
- Crap documentation
- Crap website
- Crap dependencies
- Crap build instructions
- Group think
4 languages to learn
- C
- Prolog
- Erlang
- Javascript
Great forgotten Ideas
- Linda tuple spaces
- Boyer–Moore string search algorithm
- Flow-based programming
- Project Xanadu
- Unix pipelines
Pipes :The output of my program should be the input to your program A | B | C
Text-flows across the boundary, Killed by GUI sand Apps.
Part 3 Important noncomputer science things
learn to write
A program with excellent documentation is not going to go anywhere
3 rules at work
- If you get a bad boss move immediately do not try to change your boss
- The relationship comes first (Jane Walerud)
- Engage with managementjust because they do not understand what you are saying is no reason not to talk to them - and whose fault is it anyway (that they don’t understand you)
7 distractions
- Open plan offices
- The latest stuff
- Twitter/Facebook (social media)
- Notifications (turn ‘em off)
- Links (don’t click on them)
- Ban Scrum etc.
- We can only do one thing at a time Our brains are terribly bad at context switching
6 ways to get your boss to
- Do things that gain trust
- Tell success stories
- Reduce fear of failure
- Introduce on a small scale - for a part of the problem
- Network with Erlang folks
- Make a prototype at home
1 thing to look for when applying for a new job
Look at their balance sheeta company with a positive cash flow and increasing profits is good to work for - a company that makes a loss is not good to work for
3 general laws
- Software complexity grows with time (because we build on old stuff)
- Bad code crowds out good (Gresham’s law) bad money drives out good (clipping)
- Bad code contaminates good code
Part 4 Important half forgotten BIG ideas
Things can be small
- Forth OS 24 KB
- Forth compiler 12KB
- IBM PC DOS < 640KB
- USCD Pascal
- Turbo Pascal
- Turbo C
The old truths
- Keep it simple
- Make it small
- Make it correct
- Fight complexity
Learning
- Kids can learn computing
- OAPs can learn computing
- Everybody can learn computing It was easy to learn BASIC back in the 80’s sowhy is it more difficult now?
Part 5 What we can do
- Unbreak the webMake it read/write symmetric
- Bring computation to the edge network
- Ensure that all personal data is owned by the individual and not by large corporations
- Make computing easy again
- Build Apps so they can communicate with each other
A program that is not secure and cannot be remotely controlled should not be written.
个人感受
感觉老爷子是一个聪明(智慧)且非常有激情的人，乐于分享。恨不得在这40分钟内把所有的技术积累、人生经验都能分享给大家。老一辈也有信息过载的焦虑，可能感受到他对现代人对社交平台的过度依赖的担心。中间一大段对tiddlywiki的推荐和Joe把自己的博客主页全部变成tiddlywiki，让我花了2小时在去官网上下载体验了一把，但是给人的感觉是上世纪的东西，我想这也是它不火，特别小众的原因吧。看样子几乎没有人用。官网例子也是几年前。
