no_defun_allowed

no_defun_allowed wrote (edited )

I had a quote by Erik Naggum but then I remembered it's Alan Kay's 80th birthday, so I should celebrate by flaming using something he said.

[JavaScript] is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn’t think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years.

2

no_defun_allowed wrote

few deep ones i suppose, but trying to relate patterns or paradigms to irl stuff usually goes badly so make sure they're solid too

Computer science is a terrible name for this business. First of all, it’s not a science. It might be engineering or it might be art, but we’ll actually see that computer so-called science actually has a lot in common with magic... So it’s not a science. It’s also not really very much about computers. And it’s not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not really about microscopes and petri dishes. And it’s not about computers in the same sense that geometry is not really about using surveying instruments.

2