Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: First steps on the road to reinventing computing * 4:15PM, Wed Feb 14, 2007 in Gates B01
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 11:50:30 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: "Steven J. Davidson" <davidson () pobox com> Date: February 15, 2007 10:38:20 AM EST To: dave () farber netSubject: RE: [IP] Re: First steps on the road to reinventing computing * 4:15PM, Wed Feb 14, 2007 in Gates B01
Dave-All true, perhaps. I can't comment upon the computing language discussion.
But as to learning, it has been my experience and that of many I teach and have learned from that sometimes information from a distantly related field
(chemistry to cooking; logic structure to language; others?) "stirs thepot." Or at least it stirs my pot and many of my students over the years.
During my years in the academy, I often attended seminars on topics with limited (no?) relation to my own field just to meet people and "stir the pot." Isn't that part of why seminars are presented on campus? Must we assume every presentation is offered as polemic? Regards to you and your list. /Steve -- Steven J. Davidson, MD, MBA, Chair, Emerg. Med. | Maimonides Med. Ctr. 4802 Tenth Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11219 | 718.283.6030/6042 voice/fax -----Original Message----- From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net] Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2007 09:22 To: ip () v2 listbox comSubject: [IP] Re: First steps on the road to reinventing computing * 4:15PM,
Wed Feb 14, 2007 in Gates B01 Begin forwarded message: From: "Skomra, Stew" <sskomra () qualcomm com> Date: February 14, 2007 10:56:51 PM EST To: David Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: FW: [IP] First steps on the road to reinventing computing * 4:15PM, Wed Feb 14, 2007 in Gates B01 Dave: For IP. Interesting perspective from Peter Clare of Oracle fame. Stew. Stewart A. Skomra Director Business Development QUALCOMM Wireless Business Solutions 5775 Morehouse Drive San Diego, CA 92121-1714 E-Mail: sskomra () qualcomm com Office: 858-845-2302 Fax: 858-651-5102 Mobile: 858-740-4643 From: Peter Clare [mailto:pclare () apacheta com] Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2007 12:51 PM To: Skomra, Stew Subject: RE: [IP] First steps on the road to reinventing computing * 4:15PM, Wed Feb 14, 2007 in Gates B01 The problem w/ this approach philosophically (I think) is that most layered abstractions in real life undergo paradigm shifts as you move from one domain to another. Sure, you can describe cooking via atomic reactions, or even chemistry, but who cares - I guarantee you that a chemical model of cooking won't likely taste as good as a traditional mixing ingredients w/ a pinch here or there approach. The same is true for computer paradigms. Every (computer) modeling language is designed to solve a particular set of problems, and will likely be miserably inadequate for problems outside the domain for which this language was intended. Sure, pgmrs can do amazing things w/ languages using techniques that the language designers themselves didn't forsee - but this is just stretching the limits, not making any fundamental paradigm shift. I have always tho't that computer weenies want to play at being God, and that our systems reflect this basic arrogance and prejudice. Somehow, we feel that this modeling Deus ex Machina is going to solve some implausable problem by inserting the genius of Our-New-Computer- Language-in-God's-Image into the mix. I am skeptical. The real world seems rather complex to me and we seem to have varying degrees of comfort and discomfort using many different (internal) systems and models to navigate our way through The Maze. Such is the World. If we look at the evolution of computer-as-language today, we use a wide variety of linguistic mechanisms ranging from Imperative to Dialogue to point-and-click Exploration to You-Name-It. At the end of the day, most of these linguistic mechanisms are basically proxies for communicating our intent to other people, usually communally through space and time, much as literature communicates intent through space and time. If we look at the chaos that is the current landscape of ways to communicate our intent via these linguistic automatons, it is pretty easy to see that computer language mechanisms are evolving much the way natural languages evolve - via our ad hoc social systems that determine in a willy nilly way what works and what doesn't over long periods of time. Fun stuff. P -----Original Message----- From: Skomra, Stew [mailto:sskomra () qualcomm com] Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2007 11:43 AM To: pclare () apacheta com Subject: FW: [IP] First steps on the road to reinventing computing * 4:15PM, Wed Feb 14, 2007 in Gates B01 FYI -- From Dave Farber's Interesting People. Stew. -----Original Message----- From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net] Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2007 10:37 AM To: ip () v2 listbox com Subject: [IP] First steps on the road to reinventing computing * 4:15PM, Wed Feb 14, 2007 in Gates B01 Begin forwarded message: From: allison () stanford edu Date: February 14, 2007 1:34:55 PM EST To: dave () farber net Subject: [EE CS Colloq] First steps on the road to reinventing computing * 4:15PM, Wed Feb 14, 2007 in Gates B01 Reply-To: ee380 () shasta stanford edu Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium 4:15PM, Wednesday, Feb 14, 2007 HP Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B01 http://ee380.stanford.edu[1] Building your own dynamic language is fun and easy! Topic: First steps on the road to reinventing computing Speaker: Ian Piumarta Viewpoints Research Institute About the talk: Viewpoints Research Insitute recently began a five-year project to reinvent how we program and interact with computers. An early goal of our work is to make a practical, working mathematical model of a complete personal computer system that invites understanding and modification by users at all levels. An essential part of the model is a programming language and environment that exhibit the properties desired of the system at large. In computer science terms, this language and environment are: metacircular -- they are sufficiently powerful to implement themselves with no extrinsic behaviour or other `magic'; and self-similar -- the essential data abstractions and mechanisms used to describe the most primitive levels in the implementation are the same as those presented to the user as the building blocks of arbitrary computation. The result is a compact and understandable programming environment in which nothing is hidden from, or beyond the influence of, its users. In this talk I will describe several significant aspects of the design and implementation of this programming environment. The foundation is a pair of mutually-supporting abstractions for behaviour and state. These abstractions are individually very simple and incapable of completely describing their own implementation. When combined, however, each abstraction provides all of the necessary `extrinsic magic' required for the other to describe itself. The behavioural abstraction is inspired by McCarthy's rendering of LISP in LISP. In a half-page description, McCarthy created a recursive model that was small enough to be easily understandable and yet sufficiently complete to permit fruitful thinking about its meaning. In the spirit of McCarthy's LISP I will show how the abstraction for state in our system is modelled in terms of objects responding to messages, where the semantics of message sending are defined recursively in terms of objects responding to messages. I will finish by describing of the remaining components of our programming system (from parsing to code generation) and the techniques that keep everything open, understandable and dynamically extensible by the user. Links to References: NSF Grant: Steps Toward The Reinvention of Programming http://www.vpri.org/html/work/NSFproposal.pdf[2] An evolving whitepaper about the "combined object-lambda abstractions" http://piumarta.com/papers/colas-whitepaper.pdf[3] A small paper describing just the object model in detail http://piumarta.com/pepsi/objmodel.pdf[4] Slides: Download[5] the slides for this presentation in PDF format. About the speaker: Ian Piumarta is a computer scientist at Viewpoints Reseach Institute. He studied at the University of Manchester (UK) where he was awarded a B.Sc. followed by a Ph.D. for work on code generation techniques. After a couple of years as a post-doc at Manchester he moved to Paris to work at IRCAM. He then spent ten years working at INRIA and the University of Paris VI before moving to the United States and taking his current position at Viewpoints. He spends most of his time thinking about and implementing technologies for making computer languages more open, reflexive, dynamically self-describing and understandable. The rest of his time he spends listening to music, playing Bach on the guitar, building hi-fi equipment and flying airplanes. Contact information: Ian Piumarta Viewpoints Research Institute 1209 Grand Central Ave Glendale, CA 818 332 3001 ian () squeakland org[6] Embedded Links: [ 1 ] http://ee380.stanford.edu [ 2 ] http://www.vpri.org/html/work/NSFproposal.pdf [ 3 ] http://piumarta.com/papers/colas-whitepaper.pdf [ 4 ] http://piumarta.com/pepsi/objmodel.pdf [ 5 ] http://piumarta.com/papers/EE380-2007-slides.pdf [ 6 ] mailto:ian () squeakland org ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/@now Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/@now Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/@now Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- First steps on the road to reinventing computing * 4:15PM, Wed Feb 14, 2007 in Gates B01 David Farber (Feb 14)
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- Re: First steps on the road to reinventing computing * 4:15PM, Wed Feb 14, 2007 in Gates B01 David Farber (Feb 15)
- Re: First steps on the road to reinventing computing * 4:15PM, Wed Feb 14, 2007 in Gates B01 David Farber (Feb 15)