13 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2023
    1. how important is the concrete syntax of their language in contrast to

      how important is the concrete syntax of their language in contrast to the abstract concepts behind them what I mean they say can someone somewhat awkward concrete syntax be an obstacle when it comes to the acceptance

  2. Dec 2022
    1. I just can’t stop dreaming about a perfect world where I could go back to any of my old JavaScript projects with an ease of mind and knowing that everything just works. A perfect world where my program is going to stand the test of time.

      That's a you-problem. The pieces are there—the language is stable, and there's a ludicrously backwards compatible World Wide Wruntime that you can trust to be around—it's on you if it fails.

    1. On the onehand we have our technical toolbox full but on theother, we cannot use these tools effectively becausea proper infrastructure is absent.
  3. Nov 2022
    1. it is principally a display technology

      It's not. It's a document markup language.

      Most Web developers, however—going back to 1999 and before—certainly treat it like it's a display technology.

  4. Oct 2022
    1. we must acknowledgethe root of the scientific-repeatabilityproblem is sociological, not techno-logical
  5. Aug 2022
    1. I think we can define an "archival virtual machine" specification that is efficient enough to be usable but simple enough that it never needs to be updated and is easy to implement on any platform; then we can compile our explorable explanations into binaries for that machine. Thenceforth we only need to write new implementations of the archival virtual machine platform as new platforms come along

      We have that. It's the Web platform. The hard part is getting people to admit this, and then getting them to actually stop acting counter to these interests. Sometimes that involves getting them to admit that their preferred software stack (and their devotion to it) is the problem, and it's not going to just fix itself.

      See also: Lorie and the UVC

    1. Finally, in anticipation of an argument that I expect to see, let me stress that this is not a technical issue. Computing technology moves at a fast pace, but that doesn’t mean that lack of stability is a fatality. My last Fortran code, published in 1994, still works without changing a single line. Banks have been running Cobol code unchanged for decades. Today’s Java implementations will run the very first Java code from 1995 without changes, and even much faster thanks to JIT technology. This last example also shows that stability is not in contradiction with progress. You can have both if that’s a design goal. It’s all a matter of policy, not technology.
  6. Jul 2022
    1. @2:10

      They didn't publish the code. They published the algorithm. And they prided themselves on—the computer scientists at the time—of describing the algorithm, not GitHubbing the code. These days we don't—we GitHub the code. You want the algorithm? Here's the code.

      This is not always reliable. There are some non-highly-mathematical things that you'd prefer to have the algorithm explained rather than slog through the code, which is probably adulterated with hacks for e.g. platform gotchas, etc.

      There is a better way, though, which is to publish a high-level description of the workings as runnable code that you can simulate in a Web browser. Too many people have misconceptions about the stability of the Web browser as a platform for simulations, however. We need to work on this.

  7. Jun 2022
    1. Want to animate navigations between pages? You can’t (yet). Want to avoid the flash of white? You can’t, until Chrome fixes it (and it’s not perfect yet). Want to avoid re-rendering the whole page, when there’s only a small subset that actually needs to change? You can’t; it’s a “full page refresh.”

      an impedance mismatch, between what the Web is (infrastructure for building information services that follow the reference desk model—request a document, and the librarian will come back with it) versus what many Web developers want to be (traditional app developers—specifically, self-styled product designers with near 100% autonomy and creative control over the "experience")—and therefore what they want the Web browser to be (the vehicle that makes that possible, with as little effort as possible on the end of the designer–developer)

    1. In 2010, we didn’t have ES modules, but once it was standardized it should have been brought into Node.

      Fun fact: the amount of time between 2010—the year Dahl mentions here—and ES2015—aka ES6, where modules appeared—is less than the amount of time between ES2015 and today. And yet people act like modules are new (or worse, just over the horizon, but still not here). It's a people problem.

  8. May 2022
    1. Yes, you could write Python utilities that are easy to install and run, but people don't. And the last bit of that sentence is the one that actually counts. "Could have" doesn't actually count in an engineering context.
  9. Mar 2022
    1. immediately purchased

      People are so quick to point out the lack of interest for people (and programmers, esp.) to pay for software. If this were distributed as HTML, maybe a way to hack around this unfortunate cognitive hangup would be to frame it as If you're buying an ebook: the manual for the software. It just so happens that this manual can be interpreted by a machine.