RIP John Walker, software and hardware hacker extraordinaire Polymath, pioneering developer of software and hardware, a prolific writer, and true old-school hacker John Walker has passed away. His death was announced in a brief personal obituary on SCANALYST, a discussion forum hosted on Walker's own remarkably broad and fascinating website, Fourmilab. Its name is a playful take on …
One of my favourite short stories is Walker's "We'll Return, After This Message" which he dates December 1989 https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html
It includes the words "Back in '97 Xanadu still wasn't finished...", which suggest that despite his optimistic description in 1988 he very rapidly started having second thoughts.
Clarke in "Odyssey Two" (1982) seems to have swallowed the underlying idea, with just about everything (including electricity bills) stored in a handful of DP vaults scattered around the planet: strongly suggested to be a shared resource. And I think it was in "The Fountains of Paradise" (1979) where he implied that the pinnacle of computer proficiency was being able to generate imaginative SQL one-liners.
Since then we've had the Semantic Web, not to mention indisputable duds like Chandler.
And everybody's gone back to the DP bureau model, where they hire time from Google or Facebook without looking too closely at the fine print.
> "one strike and you're out" policy on poorly written English,
I gotta get off the internet. I keep reading this as "one strike and your out".
Since days of CompuServe forums, _I_ have always felt that if I had 10 readers it was worth my 5 seconds to put all the letters in, than to force 10 readers to work an extra second each to catch my meaning. Theres two much fuckin lasiness tooday.
Ancient languages, e.g. Sumerian, Akkadian, were written with only the consonants. But when you have dialects, the consonants generally sound similar but the vowels can sound very different; for example, in American English, British English, and various others.
What little I remember from reading Ted Nelson's book, "Computer Lib", was that in his proposed Xanadu system, one could navigate it using just four keys: up, down, left, and right. The idea, IIRC, was that the information would be represented in a binary ttee. I wondered at the time, "Who is going to maintain the tree? That looks like a lot of work."
AutoCAD was the first CAD I learnt, back in the mid-80's, and AutoLISP made it quite revolutionarily extensible (scriptable, as often done with Python these days). Today, Cadence (EDA) uses SKILL (adapted from Franz LISP) to similar effect, further validating the approach (god language for extension). Walker's foresight (and animal PERVADE proto-virussing) will be most missed!
(and it doesn't hurt that his name is reminiscent of Johnny Walker!)
Never got to chat with Walker. Saw him around a few times when AutoDesk were still on Marinship Way in Sausalito and before he moved permanently to Switzerland. Would have been late 1980's / early 1990's. All the stories about him around the building were good ones. He reminded me very much of John Warnock at the time at Adobe down in Mountain View . It was very obvious why both companies had been so successful. And why the people who worked there were so interesting and so happy at work.The usual office politics of course but basically happy ships. Both Walker and Warnock were genuinely good people.
Then both founders moved on and the usual C-Suite sharks moved in and soon both companies were just yet another soulless nasty cubicle software feed lot. At AutoDesk the rot started when Carol Bartz moved in. Bringing the nasty crew with her. Even before the great R13 fiasco what had made AutoDesk a great company to work for had been totally destroyed. The move to San Rafael just confirmed that the old company was dead. Pretty much all the good people left and if it had not been for the self inflicted implosion of the most serious competitor at the time, Parametric, its unlikely that AutoDesk would have reached the year 2000 without being broken up and the product lines sold off. Due to serious mismanagement by Bartz and crew.
Of all the books written by tech company founders John Walkers book The AutodDesk File is still easily the best. Five decades later. Still have my copy I picked up in Codys in Berkeley in 1989 just after the earthquake and the advice and observations in the book are still as relevant now as they were when written . Not sure if later editions have Walkers final "letter" which was not in the original edition. But the "last letter" completes the book.
RIP a genuinely good man who did so many interesting things and built (at least for while) a great place to work for the employees lucky enough to have worked there.
So obviously you never wrote a DSL then. A end user Domain Specific Language. Not even from scratch but using bison, ANTLR etc.
A DSL is not a full featured programming language. Repeat after me, a DSL is not a programming language. If a DSL is a full featured programming language then the team lead totally wasted many man months of dev time.
When AutoCad was first shipped in the early 1980's it was running on microcomputers with 32K or maybe 64K of RAM. It was difficult enough getting a full featured BASIC running in that let alone LISP. There were a few very truncated implementations of LISP but you needed at least 256K/512k or memory to even get close to a full (stable) implementation. The reason for the original AutLisp was very simple. A basic Read / Eval / Print Loop is very small and function dispatch is very cheap. In clock cycles. Only FORTH was more compact.
By the time Win NT came around and there was a lot more memory features were added to AutLisp but 99%+ of end users never touched AutoLisp. The only people who used AutoLisp extensively were third party addon developers (there were thousands of those) and they did all the heavy lifting in C etc in their own code. Only using AutoLisp as glue. So why put a lot of effort into something that would never be used. Or more importantly, adding programming language features to a DSL was and always will be a bloody stupid idea.
Suggest you read Bonnie Nardi's book "A Small Matter of Programming" which shows why almost all end user application scripting languages fail so badly. So never used by end users. Because someone implemented yet another programming language rather than a simple goal / task oriented command script with an user task appropriate user interface. Which is why the only successful end user scripting language in the last six decades looks nothing like a traditional programming language. Because its a spreadsheet.
Funny how few programmers get that.
Exactly this.
If you were a serious programmer wanting to extend Acad you'd use ADS or later ObjectARX.
But I used to write quick 'n' dirty little routines to auto-number terminals, say, or bulk prefix or postfix text, and AutoLISP was absolutely ideal.
And without the offputting syntax of BASIC :-)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
