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1. Embed this notice
   clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 05-Aug-2024 02:28:00 JST clacke

   • Éamonn
   The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of the computing machine. Under Windows was DOS; under DOS, BASIC; and under them both the date of its origins recorded like a birth memory. Here was the very opposite of the authoritative, all-knowing system with its pretty screenful of icons. Here was the antidote to Microsoft's many protections. The mere impulse toward Linux had led me into an act of desktop archaeology. And down under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

   
   -- Ellen Ullman, "The dumbing-down of programming", part 1 of 2 salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_3…

   /via social.coop/@eob/1124701033935… @eob

   • Embed this notice
     Christmas Sun (sun@shitposter.world)'s status on Monday, 05-Aug-2024 02:27:58 JST Christmas Sun

     in reply to
     @clacke whenever I see a good article from Salon from the 1990s for just a second I mentally dissociate because I think of Salon today
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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 05-Aug-2024 09:33:51 JST clacke

     in reply to
     Part 2: salon.com/1998/05/13/feature_3…
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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 05-Aug-2024 09:34:02 JST clacke

     in reply to
     [ . . . ] In March, the New York Times reported that IBM had told the Federal Aviation Administration that, come the millennium, the existing system would stop functioning reliably. IBM's advice was to completely replace the system because, they said, there was "no one left who understands the inner workings of the host computer."

     No one left who understands. [ . . . ] A world floating atop a sea of programs we've come to rely on but no longer truly understand or control. Code and forget; code and forget: programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 05-Aug-2024 09:34:06 JST clacke

     in reply to
     Every visual programming tool, every wizard [ . . . ] [makes] the suggestion that the wizard is only taking care of things that are repetitive or boring. These are only tedious and mundane tasks, says the wizard, from which I will free you for better things. Why reinvent the wheel? Why should anyone ever again write code to put up a window or a menu? Use me and you will be more productive.

     
     26 years later, we are busy taking the collective forgetting to the next level and eliminate even the human-written wizard, replacing it with the matching of two statistical models; one of what the collective of other programmers have already written (and forgotten), and one of what we're in the middle of writing.

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 05-Aug-2024 09:35:10 JST clacke

     in reply to

     • Jez 🍞🌹
     @petrichor Aha! Thanks for the correction and clarification.
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     Jez 🍞🌹 (petrichor@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 05-Aug-2024 09:35:11 JST Jez 🍞🌹

     in reply to

     @clacke not exactly that, but more a piece parchment (usually) that has been scraped/washed clean and reused in whole, and where sometimes the previous writings can still be discerned (by eye, or by scientific analysis)

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 05-Aug-2024 09:35:12 JST clacke

     in reply to

     TIL a "palimpsest" is an old manuscript that has evolved over time, as people have scratched things out or added new things.

     EDIT: no, see correction: digipres.club/@petrichor/11290…

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     Jez 🍞🌹 (petrichor@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Aug-2024 00:34:34 JST Jez 🍞🌹

     in reply to

     @clacke No worries! In any case your point that they're cool and interesting things stands, and the analogy with software systems is thought-provoking

     clacke likes this.