Sometimes I feel that the www web is a failure. It's original purpose was to share information with hyperlinked documents. Originally people seemed to think that hypertext would change the structure of knowledge itself, or at least, the way that we consume it. But a document that links to another is not really that special. In fact its a bit distracting really; it seems to affect our level of concentration on one topic.
After the initial hype about hypertext then came the all the palaver about “dynamic, responsive” websites. Then they decided that they were going to turn the browser into an operating system.
I am utterly frustrated with the software I have to deal with. Windows is beyond comprehension! UNIX is no better. DOS is no better. There is no reason for an OS. It is a non-thing. Maybe it was needed at one time. Chuck Moore, the inventor of Forth
Chuck Moore didn’t (or doesn't?) believe that we even need an operating system (and I am inclined to agree with him), but we have a situation today were we have operating systems layered apon other operating systems. This is sort of outrageous.
You cannot be serious! John McEnros, tennis player, said to umpire, 1981
(The quote above actually has its own wikipedia page ). It might be worse than that, because we have these huge operating systems that maybe no-one understands, and then we have the browser running on top of that, and then we have some javascript “framework” (the word sends shivers down my spine) running on top of that. In that context, I believe that the move towards “apps” is a good thing, because hopefully it takes one layer (the browser) out of the equation, although a lot of companies seem to cheet and just run their “web-app” within a browser component within the app, so its actually one more layer, not one less.
Somewhere on Jeff Atwood's blog Coding Horror I read that he thinks or thought the opposite. It doesn’t matter because Mr Atwood has created (with others) possibly the most constructive and useful system on the web namely Stack Overflow I have been using stack overflow for over a decade and have never once had to ask a question on it, because the answers always seem to be there.
But back to operating systems, iconoclasts and simplicity: my theorem is as follows:
Simplicity is more fertile than complexity. Me, a sort of nobody hobby programmer
At some stage, Linus Torvalds read the source code to minix (I think it was actually printed on paper) and because of its simplicity (and smallness of size), he was able to understand it. Not only understand it but become inspired by it. He was inspired to write Linux which is now a huge endevour which possibly no-one actually understands in its entirety. I am typing this on Linux right now, so I shouldn’t be too critical, but I am pretty sure that the Linux kernel is not going to inspire me to do anything like write another operating system.
That's only one example. But I will take it as proof. Now the original point of this blog post was just to talk randomly about people and websites that I have found simple enough to be interesting. So here goes: The original wiki www.c2.com by Ward Cunningham is strange but interesting. It has a very retro aesthetic. They say that Ward invented the “wiki” but that seems like inventing the steering wheel.
Douglas Crockford worked on the json text data format as well as javascript and lots of other things no doubt. He is mentioned in a blog post by Bob Nystrom who knows a thing or two about parsers and interpreters and compilers. I had stumbled across Mr Crockford's work earlier because he put the grammar to JSON on the back of a business card, which I like the idea of.
It seems like a massive committee designed XML and then some big companies tried to promote it. But everyone just said “We're not going to use that” rubbish" and they all used json instead. This blog post could easily become The history of ridiculous ideas in computing . Its a pretty long list in my opinion.
Here's my list of terrible ideas that should go in the museum of human folly: XML, xhmtl, XSLT style sheets (I think I read a whole book about these once), “semantic html” , operating systems, “windowing” systems, file hierarchies, browsers that do everything, wysiwyg word processors, the “Are you really” sure?" dialog boxes (see windowing systems above), scroll bars on windows (ditto), trying to put “Klingon” into the unicode chart, and so on.
Here's a few good ideas to balance that out: the postscript language, Forth, Lisp, the “logo” turtle drawing language, BNF grammars, Unix pipes and text filters, breaking code up into small manageable chunks (procedures, functions, classes, programs) to do battle with the darkness of chaos, virtual machines, using dots in a name-space hierarchy, using language (not clicks) to communicate with a computer (and hopefully people), and so on.
That's all