I'll be that guy who points out Pascal is the name of a once very popular programming language. Its heyday was the late 20th century, but it is still in use here and there. Confusion seems likely.
Is there any connection between this product and the Pascal programming language?
There is something else here to feel sad about, which is bigger than the effect of AI on the lives and careers of individual programmers.
In the last eighty years or so, humanity has created something called 'Computer Science' which is ingenious and even beautiful. Now much of it will be forgotten. When the present generations of programmers age out, almost no one will know how to program. In fact almost no one will understand one of the key sciences and technologies that our civilization depends on. Some might say, "no problem, the AI will know all that stuff so we won't have to". Somehow I don't find that very comforting.
This guy lost me right at the beginning. He says that we write software in English because the USA won World War II with the help of the Colossus computer to break codes. Then he shows a picture of ENIAC, and suggests it was also used in World War II codebreaking.
This is completely wrong - it was the British who used computers to break codes during that war. Colossus was built for that purpose by the British. ENIAC was built in the USA but did not become operational until after the war and was not used for codebreaking.
I quit watching after that. I don't trust anyone who garbles well-known history that badly to tell my why we should write software in Latin.
Instead, let this other guy tell you why you should write software in Latin -- and show you how! He's the real deal - he programs in C89 with Latin keywords, by using the C preprocessor:
Such corrections become even more important in the age of LLMs where we're gonna see more fake stuff. I honestly thought this is some kind of a joke but it turned out be a talk.
> Don't use nomen as a variable name. Seriously. It's a macro for typedef
For all the warnings so far about not using nomen as a variable, wonder why not just do "typus_definire", since both "type" and "define" are Latin-derived...
Absurd. There's about a million times more English text in the world than Latin text (so far). In 1000 years, English will be much better understood than Latin and it's not even close. Write software in English.
In 1000 years, people speaking what they will call English won't be able to understand the English we are writing today, any more than you can understand the English of 1026 -- it was a different language then, now called Anglo-Saxon.
BUT the Latin of 3026 will be the same as the Latin of 2026, 1026, ... and 26.
> any more than you can understand the English of 1026
We can't understand the English of 1026 because almost nobody in the society of 1026 CE England was doing any writing at all in English. When a language is extensively written down, it tends to slow the evolution of the language considerably.
The Xanadu proposal dates from the mid-20th century so it includes a quaint assumption from that era: people expect to be paid for the work they do. What, people are supposed to spend hours typing at a computer for no payment in order to make some billionaire even richer? Who would do that? It's nuts.
Yes, if Xanadu had taken off people might have had to pay a little to view its content. Just like we used to pay for books, records, movies, magazines, etc etc etc. It wasn't so bad -- those things were mass entertainment, not just for the rich, and they were certainly not a death knell for communication. I don't know how you came up with $10 to view a web page. When Nelson proposed Xanadu, mass market paperback novels -- hundreds of pages -- cost 50 cents. Kids (like me) could easily afford them. They were cheap because there was a huge market -- so communication could flourish.
It's not clear to me we are living in the best of all possible worlds. If the micropayments thing had taken off, it might have provided a way for large numbers of people to make some money by writing, etc. In our world, most of the money is made by a few corporations, and an increasing proportion of what's on the net is slop made by ... nobody.
Excellent points. When Nelson was building Xanadu in the 60s-80s there was no expectation that the user would be the product. Which we have today, things like Google workspace, Office, YouTube, social media etc letting the user use software for "free" in the sense that their is no visible micro traction but an invisible harvesting of your habits and interests to sell to advertisers or whoever wants to buy it. Nelson simply didn't predict this.
Can you not think in first, second or third derivative actions with a system that bakes in micropayments at the deepest infrastructure level?
Should people be able to get paid for content they made? Sure. But we have that already - copyright. And it's also already so askew to the largest companies. The small folk are ALREADY squeezed out.
I could imagine trap Xanadu-pages that whose goal is to charge for garbage. Cents at a time, just under whatever limits you have on the micropayment lever. But a page could drain dollars. And there'd be millions of them. Traps everywhere.
Wait, so you can generate garbage content, link it everywhere? Yeah the LLM in a Xanadu system would create billion-page webs that *appear* useful, but whose only goal is 'drain your wallet'. And pages can be generated faster than you can block.
Xanadu also completely upends the idea of public domain - republish and start that money counter going! Republish republish republish. Or steal your content, republish, and rake in the microtransactions. Again, I can do it faster than you can catch me.
This whole Xanadu garbage is predicated upon the root idea that only monied people should have the right to read and access content. I am glad it is in the dumpster of dead technologies. Frankly, all libertarian extreme technologies need to be destroyed.
... Ted Nelson’s 1974 manifesto, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, extolling the vision of Project Xanadu hypertext.
Computer Lib/Dream Machines was not about project Xanadu, it merely mentions it on a few pages.
I recall Computer Lib/Dream Machines was the most influential thing Ted Nelson did, far more influential by than Xanadu. It was seen all over at the beginning of the personal computer era. Try to get a look at a copy if you can, it's fascinating.
This self-published book was very much of its time - it had the same oversize-on-newsprint format and DIY look as the Whole Earth Catalog, which was popular at the same time.
It was important because it pursuasively made the case that computing was about to become a medium for self-expresson - a "dream machine" - that was an unheard-of concept at the time. You can use a computer to produce graphics! To play games! How about that! He told about Sutherland's Sketchpad, Englebart's NLS, and the Arpanet at a time when these were completely invisible to almost everyone. Xanadu gets a few pages in the book but it is not at all a work of self-promotion - almost the whole book is about the work of others. It's a survey of the computing scene right before personal computers appeared.
This book was very timely and I think it provided a lot of inspiration for the personal computer movement. It made you want to try out computing! It has one page about microprocessors: "Here they come ... Microprocessors are what's happening" (the MITS Altair appeared the next year, in 1975).
I think Ted Nelson is one of those people whose main effects are through their influence on others, rather than through what they directly produce themselves.
I looked at the linked repo at https://github.com/machdyne/zeitlos/tree/main,
just skimmed a few of the Verilog HDL files and C program files. There is a ton of work here! The files are rich with block comments that explain design decisions, and what's going on.
Can you assume that pretty much any computer these days provides UEFI firmware that supports ThoreauBASIC, or might some computers provide only a cut-down UEFI that doesn't provide all the functions you need?
Is there some way to investigate the UEFI implementation on any computer? Can you get to the UEFI shell on any computer somehow or is the UEFI shell a separate application you have to download from somewhere and install?
I realize these questions are getting far afield from what you wanted to tell us about, but UEFI is still kind of a mystery despite being installed almost everywhere -- it's hard to find explanations about it.
Possibly pertinent: Principia Mathematica Maps and Table Site (PM-MATS):
https://principia.lib.uiowa.edu/about.html - more description in my top-level
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Is there any connection between this product and the Pascal programming language?
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