Joe Armstrong - Keynote: The Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science - Code BEAM SF 2018

the it started in 2013 I think code mesh in London I say I think code mesh because Francesco changes the names of the conferences every year and so when you're referring to the previous conference you can never quite remember what it was called and if he'd read my blog you should really name the confidence by the sha-1 checksum of the title and then it would be immutable and you'd always be able to find it in the future anyway this is code mesh in 2013 and Francesca is a very good cook actually the thing you don't know about francesco he's he's a mean cook that's because he was a short-order cook in the university I mean he was earning a bit of extra money in his spare time as a cook right is he very good at cooking he's Italian right and why do these conferences is quite often he says ok so conference over on a Friday chill out party at Francesco's place and and you feel very privileged to be invited and he invites some of the speakers back there and you have a few beers and things and now you relax you know the conference having done it all everything's fine and it was this competence at down and I can't number who who told me but but they said that Tim Allen Kay was going to give a keynote at strange loop and I thought I'd never met Alan Kay and I thought um I got this idea in my head I thought um I'd like to interview Alan Kay on stage and then why would I want to do that well it goes back to the Old Grey Whistle does anybody know the Old Grey Whistle test no sorry it's not the old great time remember late night with Jools Holland or whatever was it called that yeah something like that so Jools Holland for those of you don't know as a jazz pianist and he has this show in in Britain and he interviews people who invited Elton John to be his guest and a fantastic interview because you know the first question with was like you know what was your you know the normal interviews is Elton John what was your first album and you know when was your first break for and all that kind of crap and and Jools Holland says you were highly influenced by you know somebody who's no I've never heard a piano I've never heard of this person and for once Elton John went oh yeah and they had this lovely conversation and I thought I thought I'd like to do that with without and Kay and ask him about his influences and things so um so I mailed Alex Miller and and said and suggested this is it there's an idea for talk or for a keynote thing on stage and he emailed back and said yeah that'll be cool and we'll do that and and that's what that was planned for 2013 and then months later or something I got mail from Alex saying how Ann Kaye pulled out of that and and yeah would you would you like to give the keynote a strange too because because we've lost a speaker and so I gave a keynote at strange soup and that didn't happen but I still had the idea in my head and then in I tried to contact a lean he's very friendly if you mail him you get mail back immediately and we arranged to meet for the first time here in 2016 I held a course here earlier in the week and I was doing the same thing in sorry yeah 2016 and Alan Kay had arranged to come and have a conversations he wanders in and Francesco's never met him Francesco wanted to meet him so Francesca is holding a course in the room up there and we wander in through the back and Francesca seems both of us wandering and doesn't bat an eyelid he just says and now we'll take a 10-minute coffee break and smiles ever returned around and it's me and Alan Kay have wandered in and we start talking and so that year we invited him to London because he was in London and I want to do this interview thing or or think and so I thought well the hell am I going to ask him yeah he's my great hero you know a lot of really good ideas he said he's the guy who invented object oh he coined the term object-oriented programming he's the guy who persuaded Steve Jobs to build the iPad and he's guide he's the guy who's had a hell of a lot of ideas so I thought so so what do I ask him and so I thought yeah I'll ask him what what the good ideas they had back in the 70s late 60s that we've forgotten so that was a genesis of this stream of thought one of the one of the good ideas we've had and we've forgotten and I tried to ask him that but you know if you get someone over Alan Kay on stage you asked him X and they answer Y instead so it was a mixture of history and what he wanted to say and then okay so we did it Larry wall came along and I again asked him what were the Forgotten ideas and every time I met one of my colleagues some professor here and there I am I said you know what what are we forgotten I wasn't writing these things down at the time I thought they're just in my head what have I myself forgotten so I started writing these things out and then I thought I'll tweet because I'm preparing a talk not this talk out it's this this is a prototype of a talk I'll give in Chicago later on in the year and actually the the probably the title is misleading a better title might be what are the ideas what some might you see it's a prototype sorry well I've got it on the plane and last week oh the sorry ideas we might have forgotten or never knew or needed reminding of all should have forgotten I mean I can't say that the Forgotten ideas we you might have never known them so you can't have forgotten them if you never knew them so they might be completely new ideas whatever or well they might just be silly idea it should be forgotten ideas anyway so I tweeted let me see yeah oh good this is sort of blank slide so these are the Forgotten ideas this is supposed to be completely black on the slide it's black but it should it doesn't come out in black but nevermind okay so and I would say this this is this is work in progress with an awful lot of personal bias let's go on a bit here so the plan of the plan of this talk is first of all the motivation to the talk already and then it's going to turn out to be some things we should learn I think and and these are these are sort of a mixture of the Forgotten ideas I think should be forgotten I'll explain as I go along and and then doing computing it's not just computer science it's other stuff you should know and then it's the sort of big stuff that we've really forgotten and then what should we go what can we do then and it this is a bit this bit will take part it will take a long time and I haven't rehearsed this and I don't know how long it's gonna take so so you know if I'm if I'm light in the middle of that and there's ten minutes to go can somebody like do play windmills promise good who's going to do windmills you could have do windows great okay some motivation motivator is all motivated well I have to think about the things I've forgotten and what we've achieved in the last few years so back in the 1980s when I when I was when I joined the lab I thought what well well well problems should we solve one of the big problems to solve that's what I asked in ninety I cuz I had to give a talk I'd go back to my talks of the nineteen eighty what problems they all want to solve well I thought I'd write down three problems how do we find things how do we store things and how do we program things that seemed a good thing so had a plan learning max learn Unix and learn a programming language that was my personal goals when I joined the computer science lab so what happened I didn't learn Emacs and I didn't learn Unix and I invented a new programming language right so so what's the progress well there has been a small amount of progress on these problems in the last 30 years so so finding things it's actually better than it was back in the 1980s so Google and all these good people have made it easy to find things of course can't find everything but it's a lot better and it's getting better all the time it's also getting worse and I'll explain the reasons for that in a bit later saving things it's getting slightly better Dropbox and Friends but they're not that good I mean it's still gonna be we have to save it until the Sun becomes a red giant and then we're done so got a store on DNA or something like that I keep going I keep asking these people you know you know this stuff on Facebook my image is well what will my Genet you know if I grandchildren Gregory will they be able to find these images they're encrypted in the cloud that's a technical guy at Facebook who's fairly high up method isn't that's a very good question Jeff very good question which is in danger of losing our history I store this stuff for a long time programming things have we got better at programming things in the last 20 years 25 years I think the answer would be no actually they've been oh well they've been some small improvements everybody thinks that advances in computer science are quick but they're not take like the lambda calculus you know lambda Calvin's great invented around about 1930 when did they put lambdas into Java rate last year or something I mean progress is very very very very slow but you wouldn't get that impression if you see everything it's all the latest thing it's fantastic I think it's very slow so what problems should be solved now right so I've changed my agenda okay so um so this is too much stuff I mean once upon a time there wasn't enough stuff and then right about the mid 80s it was about enough stuff and now there's too much stuff I mean take programming language for example round round about round about 19 I started programming in like 76 there wasn't enough stuff if you define stuff to be programming languages there was Fortran and COBOL and Fortran and that wasn't enough stuff for the mid 80s there was enough stuff there was C and there was Fortran and it was Pascal and they were thing and now there's 250 500 800 programming languages and one new one each week there's far too many of them and for a beginner that's incredibly confusing I mean of all and every all of them say I'm great this is a greatest language since monkeys and how can you choose and we've invented all this stuff Internet of Things and what what are we gonna do with it all right do we really need to hijack our attention systems every 10 seconds with a banner III can't do flashing text in oh maybe I can do flashing texting clean oh but but really I should be I should have notifications turned on and big flashy you know if Trump seized I said I mean it's really important you know Karl my god Trump sneezed my god this is not a new phenomena III I'm minded of Thoreau in 1854 said and as with our colleague so with a hundred modern improvements there is illusion about them there is there is not always a positive advance our inventions are want to be pretty toys which distract us from sour attention from serious things and about I don't know what Thor out would would have said about notifications because he was complaining about the penny post because the penny post was sending news and as he said to a philosopher all news as it is called is gossip and they who edit and read it are old women in their teeth and as for England almost at last significant scrap of news from that quarter was a revolution of 1649 and he's writing it in 1854 so you know he didn't really think that the penny post was an advantage because it was sending him trivia that were distracting him from the important things of life and I don't think he would have liked instant messaging and notifications and things okay so the methodology for what I was going to do ask some questions get some replies organizer result choose the best things to do started here code mesh the videos online you can see it that was quite fun and my question then was what ideas we've forgotten I said that let's ask some well-known people let's ask everybody and then I tweeted I'm interested in the forgot nowadays it could be decided to need it for a talk can you post examples of CS ideas that have been forgotten example Linda duplicate I put boy or more in there and everything I nobody's forgotten boy oh boy how many of you have forgotten boy or more so all the rest how many don't have never heard of boy or more right proof of concept you don't know what boy amorous body huh finally somebody with gray hair take them in a corner and ask them what boy or more isn't they will tell you if they were paying attention 20 years ago so I tweeted this and and the next day I had a little look to see what had happened and I got two hundred thirty six thousand two hundred four engagements I am a clue what I mean gate no impression I don't know what impression is apparently freshmen means somebody sort of clicked on it and looked at that tweet so it had reached 200 the sort of two hundred thirty six thousand people have done this disadvantage of having Twitter followers whenever I get stuck I ask them the question there and it's really great actually so please follow me so that when I have problems which I have all the time I can ask you guys and you can reply this is I tell you you know what I do when I'm solving problems first of all I Google Google Google then I can't solve it and then I tweet and so I had to do this and that is much better than searching in Google but you have to have a few followers for that to work so it's really good right and the next day I woke up I looked and it was this little thing 277 so that's the number of people had replied and I turned that into a PDF I wanted that in a PDF file so I could save it and of course I couldn't figure out how to save this is PDF so I had to tweet how the hell do you save this stuff because it's not obvious and and yeah somebody told me and I turned it into PDF and it was 56 pages of stuff oh yeah hey hang on this is fun so are some more questions I thought hey what what what interested in the silly ideas I thought um hey um I just asked about the Forgotten ideas let's ask about the silly ideas yeah what ideas I mean we think the stuff they thought you know that stuff some of the stuff they did 20 years ago how could they be so what you know 20 years today what's really really really stupid I got a few right so what started has forgotten ideas became forgot notice silly ideas hot research topics money making ideas bad ideas social good projects until I started tweeting about this and collecting information and so then what you do with that I want to sort this stuff and this became what I would call the essential guide to computer science or what you need to learn or a guide for the confused for the confused so now I'm trying to make this into a list or Arbour a list of lists and well how to make a list well collecting the data that's the easy bit sorting it into categories is slightly more difficult and shortening the lists is the most difficult part that's a really difficult problem it's what to omit here's the difficult part and I was thinking to myself this is one thing I learned throughout my professional life if somebody puts a big list of things up my question is always what is the most important thing on that list so I remember in Erickson there was an agun project manager he's telling us about the glorious future of three 5g and he puts up a slider remote medicine self-driving cars engine I mean I said excuse me what's the most important thing what do you mean he said well I can only implement one thing at a time you know I'm a one thing at a time person so if you give me that huge list of things I will implement the most important thing which is it we didn't know so whenever you've got a big list of things just ask the person what's the most important thing we can't do if you see a list of 20 things you can't do 20 things empowering do one of them do the next so what's the most important thing and I again I thought lists of books if you're teaching committees that you know so if the professor hands out a list of 20 books to read that's a cop-out because no student's going to read 20 books but for this teacher it's okay because the teacher can say I've handed out a list of 20 books if the student chose the wrong books that's a student phone it's not my fault because now I have given the list of 20 books but if they hand out a small list then they become responsible they haven't handed out 20 books they have chosen so I've tried to reduce these lists to a very small number of things I'm gonna recommend some papers to read some books to read some things like that and I'm not I'm not recommending them they all reckon you'll recommend I have read the books I'm recommending and there's not a big list and I'm gonna recommend some programs so this could be the basis of a computer science course or something because it's the forgotten ideas and the new ideas and so here's how we doing for time this is a big list of what 20 minutes bloody hell okay right okay so there were 18 things in 80 things in 18 categories and this is an experimental lecture if it might be a book you know if you all put your hands up I might write a book and they'll organize it that way so if 18 things 80 things in 80 categories so two great paper 3/4 old tool still and five through three book but read the slides later right okay what's up two great papers to read a plea for leading software by Nicolas Viet and we amp with new clothes anybody read them one or both well they're good yeah come on say yeah yes right all of us haven't read them read them okay they're good so what does Viet say the belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong a system that is not understood in its entirety at least to a single degree of individual of data by a single individual should probably not be built it's very good advice reducing complexity size must be the goal at every step to gain experience there is no substitute for one's own programming experience this is very good advice what's Tony Hoare say Tony Hoare tell me what's a more conversational stylist so it's very nice readable papers it's cheering ward lecture and years and years ago and this guy and recently he had just beaten project manager of a big project that failed and the managing director of the company stormed into his office and shouted guys called Anderson Johnson I was surprised that he'd ever heard of me you know what went wrong he shafted he always shouted you let your programmers do things which you do yourself not understand I stared at this in astonishment he was obviously out of touch with present reality how could one person understand the whole system I realized later he was absolutely right he had diagnosed the true cause of the problem he had planted the seed of its latest solution when I worked at Erickson the managing director of a big project I mean the world a new managing director he his first day and he stood there and he said does anybody understand the entire system if so please come and talk to me and nobody put their hand up that's serious in the airline group if somebody had asked that question several hands would go up we have to understand things in their entirety if you push the little bits you don't understand to the side and think you'll solve them later it's very very dangerous you must you must your first question must always be what is the most difficult part of this problem that I'm trying to solve and then try and solve that if you can't solve the most difficult bit give up seek advice find somebody who can solve it it's going to fail your project if you take the easy bits first deliberately because you can't solve the difficult bit your project will fail late rather than failing early and your company will lose lots of money right to good papers I'm not going to get through all these this rapidly so we'll do it very quickly for old tools to learn Emacs bash making shell you could use the eye i'm not religious here makes pretty damn good I use make for everything I don't use a different build system for every programming language I use I use make for everything right for really bad things I'll only talk about one of them here vendor lock-in we've been locked into platforms you got a big conference half of them are going round dot net net dotnet they're not they're not no not that and there's a lot JVM they can't talk to each other I'm running goo I'm on Atlas platform I want girl I've got this Apple look at the iPad all these things locked in locked in locked in we have given everybody super computers this this thing it's like 200 maybe I common the numbers two thousand times the capacity for Cray one so this is more powerful than the sum total of all the supercomputers in the 1980s and what's happened they've made it so it's so bloody difficult to program that we can't use it basically and you've got to use these Xcode or whatever it's called an easy appalling lis horrible things to do the simplest of thing and then this terms of conditio sorry I wanted a show of hands here hands up everybody has read the Terms and Conditions and understands them right I thought so hands up everybody Joe I just clicked on accept okay three three great books to read algorithms prostate a structure teachers program my Nicholas Viet the mythical man-month and how to print how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie the first book is all you need to note that's not all you need to know about computer science but that book has got a P code interpreter in Pascal and that is basically the JVM or the.net virtual machine or the a language we need to start with mmm when everything you need to know it's got theory of parsing its how to go from syntax diagrams to code and it's very it's written for a programmer or a beginner the it is the most talented computer scientist on the planet he's the only person who has made a programming language well several actually actually not really because Pascal and modular two and an O brought up pretty much the same it's like tweaks so he's invented a programming much he's written an operating system Hanny's built the chips he's the only person who masters chip design operating system design and language design other people like me we've done the language you know we haven't done an operating system and a chip mind you he did start doing his operating system when he was about 65 or something seventy so you know there's hope for us yet it's really good the mythical man-month who's read the first one by the way just kind of cool who's never heard of it okay so there's hope for you and the mythical man-month that's the only book you need to read about it software management it's really great it's kind of it just points out the fallacy of partitioning and nonpartisan herbal jobs you notice project managers think if you do if you're in this project manager space you think come I wanna have a baby in a month okay let's get nine women having a baby it's a non partition of all tasks there's a non partition tour tasks it's a headful for one person and it takes a certain amount of time if you try and split it into multiple heads it with the illusion that it's gonna speed it up just doesn't work that's not good and then that's how to friend win friends and influence people it's got nothing to do with programming this is about the human about how humans interact it's it's ways to persuade people to do things it's the mistakes you make and how to how to alleviate them and I read this book and and use some of the things in it over a beer you can ask me what they were very and actually write back in I completely changed my mind in the 90s 80s you know it's a I'd say an argument was all about the technology as an engineer we we argue the technology and they all kinda neat would say no no it's not about that and Jane Valerie who was with us when we from blue tell she used to say it's all about the relationship she said the relationship comes first no Jane no no no no no it's a we've had a long arguments over this but then you see I saw her getting results that I couldn't get she she thought you had to be friends with people I thought you had to have to argue so she said you know first you make friends with people and then you out argue right okay so uh I'll show that they'll be on camera and the blue PDF file so I'm gonna oh yeah I do have to slow down this is one fun programming exercise get a syntax oriented compiler writing language by DV sorry seriously fun might damage your brain Dan Ingalls tipped me off on this he said don't read it it's like a virus in your brain once you've read it a month of your life will vanish in a blackhole and it did this is seriously good fun anybody know this paper one person isn't it fun yeah he's naughty anybody not know it right a month of your life is going to vanish down a drain hole when you read it it's seriously cool stuff notice my lists are short I would maybe maybe this be a book eight great machines from the past these are things you can learn from performance improvement three great performance improvements better algorithms I reckon that gives you a factor six this is the Ellen experience better algorithms probably gave us a factor six in performance changing the programming language going from prologue to see that gave us a factor fifty all the rest comes from hardware so wait ten years you've got a thousand wait twenty years you get a million improvement in Hardware performance so basically if you're trying to fiddle around with your code to make it efficient that's the wrong thing to do keep on track with the latest hardware that's the right thing to do wait for the harbor to get faster Aaron thought fast because a gigahertz clocks not because we're smarter five YouTube 5 plus YouTube videos to watch this is kind of the theme of a lot of stuff alakay has a talk on YouTube the computer revolution has not happened yet it's kind of provocative title but he explains why and a lot of people think the computer revolution has happened I agree I haven't agree with Alan I don't think it's happened yet we're starting it it hasn't happened now if you go back even further further back then now in care you get to check Nelson Google computers for cynics you will find he's got about five things that only 2,000 people have watched them it's very small number of people watch this stuff Ted Nelson's a guy who invented hypertext Tim berners-lee has implemented like a half a pill not half a percent a very small percentage of Technol since ideas these are good things fix things not to do five sins are you should have seen my list before I got it down to five perhaps if I write a book it'll be in the appendix you know 252 stupid things that people do write 5 since 4 languages to learn 4 great forgotten ideas now I'm putting things in read they're more important than the others Linda tuplespace is something called flow-based programming by John Paul Morrison and Vandu by kik Nelson kneading UNIX pipes of course I've been really forgotten about UNIX pipes so they've been destroyed really and let me just say something about pipes the great UNIX philosophy was the output of my program should be the input to your program to compile together so text flows across this boundary now Lang it's easier because messages flow across the boundaries no pausing in my opinion these are killed by gooeys so you don't have a text flow into a GUI in a text flow out of the GUI so things that are goodies you can't pipe together in sequences so that's killed the notion of a pipe and it's killed the notion of reusing things so do away with GUI so horrible right oh and applications they're horrible things you're locked inside your apps and they all do different things with varying degrees of success you know each one is kind of buggy and it's good and you know hell away how do I transfer a file from this app to that at all you can't oh I know you can send it by email to Dropbox and the NSA can have a quick beep at it while it's on its way and six hours to do research into yep precision medicine this was great good stuff we can use machine learning to diagnose diseases and things we don't need to use machine learning to target advertisements to people we can use it to cure their cancers just think about that great security we need secure devices to dangers groupthink bubble think four ideas are obvious now but strange at first it's kind of funny indentation for programming Fortran four by Daniel B McCracken Daniel hadn't thought of indenting to code versioning nobody thought that was a good idea hypertext across smoke pipes o2 fantastic programs to try the tiddlywiki more about that later and sonic PI could you do me a favor and tweet tweet tweet both of these immediately all of you chose to surprise Jeremy Rushton who've written the tiddlywiki he needs a lot of love you know then and Sam ahran and if you if you if you tweet sonic PI gel is telling me to use the sonic PI everybody got new Sonic and Sega tiddlywiki they'll get a storm of tweets and wonder what's happened it'll be a big surprise so do that please because they need a lot of a lot of they need all the support they can get and and I would say that in an hour spent an hour of your life that's not much to ask an hour spent using the tiddlywiki will be more valuable to you than an hour spent listening to me in this lecture so really you're wasting your time listening to me you should spend an hour was a tiddlywiki important non computer science things goodness it's speeding up now how long have I got five four three can I look like five minutes over maybe maybe okay these are not computer starting learn to write I was crap at writing I learned to ride I wrote a few books and after you written a few books you get good at it but I was really rubbish at writing to start with well you rubbish it riding before you wrote your first book yeah Francesco with rubbish writing I mean I was good at maths at school I wasn't good at dots and commas and spelling I got a contract to write Dave Thomas said we've got people who can spell you don't worry about spelling you know these proofreaders they've got like funny brains they see every spelling mistake okay three rules at work if you get a bad boss move immediately do not try to change them the relationship comes first James Allah rude engage with management Hamming the great Hamming said the great mistake he made was not to engage with management until fairly late in his career that was my great mistake I think I realized on the day I finally quit from Erickson might have been a good idea to talk to the bosses you know just because they breed because they were doing different things to me didn't mean that I shouldn't talk to them so you see I if I follow James rule be friends with the management first maybe things would have been different maybe things would have got a bit 7 distractions open-plan offices the latest uh Twitter Facebook's a notification of turn off links links are horrible you're doing something oh there's a link oh oh oh baby couldn't so books are really good because I've got links in you don't get distracted when you're reading a book turn off the internet banned scrum and all this silly stuff and remember you can only do one thing at a time yeah six ways to get your boss to program in our own yeah you can read that later one thing to look for when applying for new job look at the balance sheet at the company okay crazy crazy crazy engineers they say should I work for this company I say have you looked at the balance sheet they say no I said why not well they're doing interesting technology okay so if if your share price is going down forget it because there won't there will be no room for innovation in that company the share price is going up and they've got excess profits there will be room for innovation so the first thing you look for is the balance sheet of the company right three general laws software complexity grows of time because we build on old stuff bad code grows up good and bad code contaminates good code Oh Oh laws of physics and maths a computation can only take place when the data program are at the same point in space-time you know so that's that's actually why a lot of web things don't work because if all the stuff in Java the javascript in the browser and you suddenly discover that some of the data you need is on the server so you stop what you're doing is in a message to the server wait for an answer to come back but then you might not get the answer come back and it becomes inconsistent and then suddenly all the problems occur so it's actually make sure that your applicant revealed right make sure you've got all the data you need and you send it at the start so that the JavaScript doesn't have to stop and go and ask the server or use something like PHP PHP brilliant language apart from the syntax and the semantics because it takes a view that will perform everything in one place so do all on the server where we have the database where we have everything we need and then we can send the answer to the browser so it's not going to get these consistency problems between the data and the browser and the data on the server causality effect follows cause we never know how stuff is we know how it was in a remote system we know how it was the last time it told us we do not know how it is now most often that doesn't make much difference but in a lot of cases it makes a lot of difference you have to look at the time and so on an entropy and is always increasing in the early days UNIX systems had a small disk so programs that were not used were deleted to save disk space and so the parrot the system evolved getting better now we keep all versions forever on github which i think is rather like junk DNA you know it's sort of in our bodies forever and nobody knows what it's good for no it's just crap get rid of it all like can I won't say that oh yeah this is help helping helping helping your non-compete your non-technical neighbor tell them it's not your fault tell him it's cracked software Tim I don't understand this crap either and tell them computers can't do everything I'm telling just because you're a computer scientist you don't know how its works either right the big ideas now we're getting to the big idea and it's speeding up this is a big idea things can be small they don't have to be gigabytes fourth compiler with 12 kilobytes the fourth OS is 24 kilobytes kilobytes I don't know gigabytes or megabytes IBM dos was less than 640 kilobytes UCSD Pascal to the old truths keep these still true keep it simple make it small make it correct fight complexity learning kids can learn competing old-age pensions like me can learn computing well how come was difficult how come it was easy to learn basic back in the 80s and it's really difficult to program today right and now the web is broken well that was completely broken why is it broken well it's not symmetric they easy to read stuff very difficult right stuff so we have a community of users who engage passively by reading stuff they do not write stuff they cannot write any page you can't just change any page you see with your browsing I don't like that page I'll change it you can't do that you can only change it in the way that the programmer had written that page had intended camera can we make new things by combining old fragments in new and flexible ways no and the web is dominated by a small number of companies Amazon Google Facebook using huge data centers it should be controlled from the edge network all these super computers that we have in our pockets that's where the control should be and the original vision of the web was citizen programming you know we hand out all these computers and the citizens should use them for their mutual benefit look at some talks by Ted Nelson so HTTP and HTTPS H Royal HTML have several problems it's non-symmetric it's easy to read difficult arrive pages get lost they just disappear you know this 404 problem gone gone forever there's no there's no way to reuse and to have attribution rights there's no there's no micropayments anything like that it's controlled by very small normal company and what's a fundamental problem with HTML it's lack of symmetry if you say if these be things say xrefs is a so the a the all these B's knows who the a is but the a doesn't know that all these B's are pointing to it so if it's a over here that they're pointing to it doesn't know it's pointed to by the the B's so the the a person could just move to a new machine renamed you see if a changes the name of the thing or becomes unavailable it breaks all the B's so you know at the webpage people link to it I didn't know they'd link to it I say nobody reads that webpage or delete it I've just coincidentally broken all these other web pages so what you'd really want is something like that you want the bees to know about the a and it want the a to know about all the B's so that if you moved the a you could tell all the B's you want to do something like that one model where this kind of works quite well is the wiki because the links can't get lost they are in the same wiki space by the Wikipedia there's no such thing as a non-existent link if you click on a link you go somewhere if you click on a link in that page doesn't exist if hey hey you clicked on the link it doesn't exist we'd like to create it when you create it it's a very nice model and it's very tightly it's a tightly integrated system and it's all in one place so it's got much less entropy than the web the web is scattered all over the place when you go to the Wikipedia basically you have to add new knowledge you can't add old knowledge again because really somebody will reject that knowledge so you are slowly refining and improving this knowledge it's highly intertwined it's got very low entropy it's but a social model of building it where a large number of people can make small contributions so it's actually a very good model of interaction and it's not controlled by any single large corporation and this goes back to the ideas of Xanadu now Xanadu was an invention of Ted Nelson's it's been called the longest vaporware project ever because even after 50 years it's never been implemented it was really ambitious in Xanadu there would be no broken links by design broken links could not exist there would be no difference between readers and writers data could be reused in any way attribution and copyright and all these things would be strictly enforced you could charge for your work you could say to what extent you wanted it to be reused and in fact the the fault lies in editors in text editors because we can type text into an editor we can just cut and paste the link and do that if we had a fear improver together with an editor that manipulated the metadata we could say you know you could ask in a sense in a contract you know am I allowed to renew our am I allowed to quote from your sides yeah you can do I have to pay to quote how many copy you know you could put a little contract and say here's a little fragment of information I allow you or I love this I don't allow you to make 21 copies and you could enforce this actually and you could you could pay for it or you could not pay for it or you could have any degree from open source completely open to closed source in any sort of spectrum and my goodness well early on Friday t5 of 114 so the problems we want to get rid of this 404 not found so you know get rid of all that stuff it's speeding up what can we do what can we do okay hey so you guys let's unbreak the web the web is broken let's go out and unbreak it and let's bring computation back to these supercomputers that we've got in our pockets and bring the computation back to the edge network and let's ensure that our personal data is owned by us and not by large corporations and let's make computing easy again like it was in the past and let's build apps that could communicate with each other and I've said before I've said a program that is not secure and that cannot be remotely controlled should not be written did I say yeah I don't think it should be written so we've given millions of people supercomputers so let's make a system where they can use them and now it's your turn to do this stuff not mine because I've been doing it for so many years and you're younger than me and you're gonna be around for a few more years so go and do this stuff thank you you

Channel: Code Sync

Views: 26,769

Rating: 4.8879552 out of 5

Keywords: Code Beam SF, 2018, erlang

Id: -I_jE0l7sYQ

Length: 49min 35sec (2975 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 16 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/zethien]

you could basically skip the first 15 - 20 minutes of this lecture...