With the recent revival of a PDP-1 hitting the news, I was wondering if we're going to see a revival in hand-made computing - i.e. systems you really can build yourself from raw components. It seems feasible to me - an ex-boss once impressed me highly by unveiling a full-blown computer he'd made from some recycled relays, and while it wasn't going to kick any ass in the speed department, it was certainly capable of calculating my 6-year olds' homework.
Would be great to see a kit computer, of this scale of old-school, hit the scene some day .. I wonder if it would be viable? I'd certainly buy it .. it'd fit next to my rack-mount modular synth. ;)
For anyone who doesn't know - Linux Voice is the new magazine that was crowdfunded on Indiegogo a few months back.
They've put out three issues so far (this article is from the second issue - next is Alan Turing) and I can honestly say I'm very happy that I bought a subscription. It's well worth a look.
I know re-submissions are a thorny subject for some people. TBH, we've only posted a few things on line so far, and I'm still getting a feel for what's best in terms of posting to HN, Reddit, etc. I am of course biased, but I think a good proportion of the readers of HN will be interested in our stuff, so I don't feel too bad about resubmitting a few times if it doesn't get picked up.
That's a pretty encouraging start - I was going to subscribe but the rate seems exorbitant. Is this just a symptom of small-scale publishing, of crowdfunding, a lack of advertising or all of the above?
We've done our best to match or undercut out main competition, while at the same time providing more pages. The advertising market for Linux magazines isn't great, so none of them get much money from that, but of course it does take up space, so each page of adverts is one page less content you have to pay for (We have few).
Yearly subscriptions start from £38 (digital), which we think is pretty good considering how much we pack into each issue (take a look here for the contents list of issue 3: http://www.linuxvoice.com/issue-3-is-out/).
Print subs are obviously more expensive, mostly due to the cost of postage.
The cover price is £5.99 (around 10 USD) which seems to be about the same as any other UK computer magazine.
I had a quick flick through to the third issue to get a rough estimate of how many pages of ads there were and...erm, I couldn't find any except an EFF ad on the inside cover. I don't know if that means they're struggling to find advertisers until they're more established but frankly I'm happy to pay a bit more to have more content pages, given the choice.
In a military organization, clarity of communication is critical and Hopper had the right idea about language design. Something echoed by Ableson and Sussman and reflected in their choice of Scheme for it's Newtonian lack of complications.
Without even looking at a book or working through a tutorial, I found that I could read and understand the Flowmatic program the first time I saw it. No surprise that it failed. Too much risk that a pointy haired boss could accurately identify an uncaught bug. Nothing offers job security like obfuscating simple ideas.
There is a trade off between a language that is easy to read and that is easy to write. Wordy, English-like programming languages are typically harder to write, and that may often not be the right trade off to make. I think this is a much more credible reason why more succinct languages caught on, rather than your far fetched suggestion that mistakes need to be hidden from bosses.
Well, I wasn't suggesting it as a universal law because obviously some programmers don't work for pointy haired bosses. Some work for themselves and others for another programmer...and what programmer thinks Cobol is so cool they would use it by choice?
In the life cycle of a significant program, which is more important how easily it was initially written, or how easily it can be read and understood over the years?
Because no one can write write a self-documenting Regex, Regex's are only easier to write because any need to document programs is ignored. The extension of this practice is an argument is that code should not contain a lot of comments because comments tend not to be maintained. As Larry Wall noted, Laziness, Hubris, and Impatience all play their role - He being the person responsible for a language so obfuscating as to garner a reputation for author's being unable to understand their own programs {heavy on Regex a coincidence or correlation?}
As Perlis said "It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one." Particularly if the language makes it harder to read the correct program and speeds up the process of writing the incorrect one. Flomatic and Cobol are verbose for exactly the same reason that some programming languages have static type systems and nobody really takes claims about their verbosity seriously because we recognize the tradeoff of keystrokes for clarity.
Hopper was a Naval officer. She took programming seriously and she understood human nature. They're both reflected in her approach to programming languages. She realized that people can die if a program on the fire control computer is incorrect and a 16" artillery shell falls short onto friendlies or long onto a maternity ward. Nothing promotes the importance of clear communication for robustness like combat - as in civilian life you never know who might be dead or retired or reassigned when the code needs to change.
BTW, I was being a bit tongue in cheek. On the other hand, programmers have been known to use obfuscation as a means for protecting their jobs, and bosses being able to read code is the primary argument for using technical people as managers rather than those with general experience as managers. Programmers are no less immune from creating fiefdoms than anyone else.
Actually I don't accept your premise that a wordy, English-like language is easier to read. Code must be both comfortable to read & write (i.e., elegant). If we assume our reader knows both language A & B, then 1 line in language A is definitely easier to read than the equivalent 10 lines in language B. Just because language B looks more familiar does not mean the precise semantics come across better. A small set of keywords is easier to fit in your head. Furthermore, in the more verbose language you are forced to spend energy that could also be spent in thinking about whether the code is correct.
Regular expressions can be properly documented in a multiline style with comments etc. For a non-trivial regular expression, the previous example holds: converting the regular expression to a sequence of if-else statements would easily take 10x the number of lines. On top of that, regular expressions are implemented efficiently. That said, I do believe comments are necessary and don't think Perl is a good language to use.
The argument about static typing and verbosity is moot, because static typing does not have to be manifest typing, since type inference can provide the advantages of static typing without the verbosity.
There is a temporal nexus circa 1980 between the vilification of Cobol; the rise of Ada and with it a myth of the woman programmer as subordinate to the brilliant genius; and the beginnings of the decline in women computer science majors in US universities [from 36% to 7% today].
There is a trade off between a language that is easy to read and that is easy to write.
There is no factual support for this assertion yet it stands as the unquestioned argument against languages like Hopper's[et al] Cobol. It is used to silence an alternative way of writing, to suppress an alternative means of expression and explicitly the only one with a claim to a feminine origin.
Certainly it's not the case that English-like programming languages have disappeared. There isn't a single widely used language that doesn't use English keywords and one of the major arguments against Lisp is it's non-English like syntax...all those parenthesis and verbs at the front. No, the argument against Grace Hopper's languages is that they are not the missionary position.
Would be great to see a kit computer, of this scale of old-school, hit the scene some day .. I wonder if it would be viable? I'd certainly buy it .. it'd fit next to my rack-mount modular synth. ;)