We could, for instance, begin with cleaning up our language by no longer calling a bug a bug but by calling it an error. It is much more honest because it squarely puts the blame where it belongs, viz. with the programmer who made the error. The animistic metaphor of the bug that maliciously sneaked in while the programmer was not looking is intellectually dishonest as it disguises that the error is the programmer's own creation. The nice thing of this simple change of vocabulary is that it has such a profound effect: while, before, a program with only one bug used to be "almost correct", afterwards a program with an error is just "wrong" (because in error).
E.W. Dijkstra Archive: On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (EWD 1036)
9 years
As to Nelson's comment about "keeping the links outside the file," he refers to the important point that HTML embeds the links in the HTML file, which largely limits linking and annotating to the author/distributor of the HTML page. Nelson views this a crippling to the vision he and Engelbart (and Bush) had, in which links could be created by third parties and associated with the page from outside, thus allowing anyone to link from, annotate, and enhance any work.
Reisman on User-Centered Media: Digital Camelot - The Once and Future Web of Engelbart and Nelson
9 years
...d even policy-oriented and would have much more knowledge about what it was trying to do. But a variety of different things conspired together, and that next generation actually didn’t show up. One could actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects.
You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of ge... A Generation Lost in the Bazaar - ACM Queue
You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of ge... A Generation Lost in the Bazaar - ACM Queue
9 years
8 years
Newcastle Upon Tyne in England was the UK's first coal exporting port and has been well-known as a coal mining centre since the Middle Ages, although much diminished in that regard in recent years. 'Carrying coal to Newcastle' was an archetypally pointless activity - there being plenty there already. Other countries have similar phrases; in German it's 'taking owls to Athens' (the inhabitants of Athens already being thought to have sufficient wisdom). 'Selling snow to Eskimos' or 'selling sand to...
Carry coals to Newcastle - meaning and origin.
9 years
9 years
...some of the encomia that had been written after Wallace’s passing. “The curious thing about David’s fiction…is how recognized and comforted, how loved, his most devoted readers feel when reading it,” Franzen wrote, noting elsewhere in the essay—whose nominal subject is actually Robinson Crusoe—“the near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love.”
That may be so, though it presupposes that people read fiction to learn how Montague-Capulet romances resolve. Some do, maybe. But nobody could possibly read Wallace for that, especially since he was so much more than just a novelist. By mixing his fiction and nonfiction, and throwing some teaching materials ... The Turbulent Genius of David Foster Wallace
That may be so, though it presupposes that people read fiction to learn how Montague-Capulet romances resolve. Some do, maybe. But nobody could possibly read Wallace for that, especially since he was so much more than just a novelist. By mixing his fiction and nonfiction, and throwing some teaching materials ... The Turbulent Genius of David Foster Wallace
9 years
Infinite Jest, published in 1996, was his great screaming across the sky. More than 200 pages of it are excerpted in the Reader, but that makes up only about a fifth of the novel. A lap at the pool doesn’t quite approximate traversing the English Channel; nevertheless, Pie...
The Turbulent Genius of David Foster Wallace
9 years
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