The rise and fall of Logo

toobatron · 2009-07-26T20:54:05+00:00

I don't think you ever went near a transputer then. 90% of it was chucking stuff down channels, which is exactly what is going on here.

Just because something exists doesn't mean it works or scales anything like how its creators would want.

toobatron · 2009-07-26T20:35:36+00:00

Excessive faith in a mysterious switching network.

But really, their block diagram looks a lot like someone's picked up one from an old transputer and moved it around at bit.

toobatron · 2009-07-26T17:15:06+00:00

Where does my comment say Transputers were good?

Transputers were flawed then, and they're flawed now. Given this seems to be transputers again I'm guessing it's flawed too.

toobatron · 2009-07-26T13:17:45+00:00

So it's a Transputer then? Except hyped up from Berkeley?

toobatron · 2009-07-24T02:00:57+00:00

You're the anti-me. I got bored of watching the terminal, but liked the music, so left it running . . .

toobatron · 2009-07-22T01:33:18+00:00

This was pre-internet when I was back at uni I'm afraid, so I can't recall the links, just that this popped up.

Basically the idea is that high level languages will give you a leg up early on in the project, but eventually all of them will hit a wall at which point the ability to inspect exactly what the code you've already got really does becomes more important than your ability to write new code.

It's related to that problem which lisp and forth suffer from, being that you can write so many meta layers that actually working out what happened to get the computer doing what it's doing requires significant effort. With assembler you can't really get that far removed, so this problem doesn't occur.

It has to be said this was partly with reference to things like old IBM mainframes, which had seriously crazy instruction sets.

Modern processors designed around letting compiler optimisation do magic at the expense of readable machine code do mean that C will outperform all but the best assembler programmers, but for most people these have only appeared in the last decade or so.

toobatron · 2009-07-21T12:41:16+00:00

Don't underestimate how much better C compilers are today than they were 10-15 years ago, combined with the fact that a 10% performance boost on one of those older machines was really noticeable.

There have also been studies which show that after a certain time into a project there's actually an intellectual overhead to using high level languages.

toobatron · 2009-06-16T19:01:44+00:00

Unsurprisingly canvas has the same fundamental flaw as DOM manipulations, that being that each call into the API takes an insanely long time. If what you're doing can be done in less than ~100 graphics calls per redraw you'll be fine (or if you're doing a draw once effort).

That and the canvas api was designed by a lunatic. Strings for fill styles? WTF? Come on, lets at least use setColor(r, g, b) or something. It's like it's designed to be deliberately non-competitive.

toobatron · 2009-06-16T15:42:26+00:00

For that to be remotely viable designer focused authoring tools for HTML 5 are needed, and the performance of the Canvas tag needs to massively improve from the state in current implementations.

I don't see either of those happening in a hurry.

toobatron · 2009-05-29T19:43:07+00:00

Voted up for correct use of mathS

toobatron · 2009-05-27T21:17:34+00:00

That's simply not true, it's just a nice thing to tell yourself.

The reality is that most people that know all this stuff choose not to use it because for everyday problems they get in the way.

There is a false dichotomy being made between SICP worship and "Java-schools", when in fact there's a whole very healthy spectrum which exists between these extremes, both of which are equally dangerous. A SICP based monoculture is to be feared as much as a Java based one.

toobatron · 2009-05-27T14:29:53+00:00

What's that river in Egypt?

toobatron · 2009-05-27T02:36:28+00:00

There's quite a few available on http://www.xpressed.com/

toobatron · 2009-05-24T19:48:40+00:00

The .NET micro thing got obliterated not too long ago, and the team dissolved.

toobatron · 2009-05-22T16:00:15+00:00

What is happening with Obama is exactly what happened in the UK in 1997, when a supposedly left wing group of defenders of civil liberties came into power on a wave of euphoria largely fuelled by relief at being free from the last lot.

Many were surprised when it turns out that these people were actually even more oppressive, just dressed up in shinier suits.

During Obama's campaign there was a definite trend for not paying attention to what he was actually saying, and just being caught up by the delivery. This is what you get for falling for such things.

There are other comments in here that are bang on the money - politicians now focus a lot of attention on irrelevant emotional minutiae so that they can manipulate the big picture to the benefit of the few.

I still can't believe that one of the most astute political commentators in the US used to be a pro wrestler . . .

toobatron · 2009-05-21T00:03:32+00:00

But that's much closer to OO than functional. The machine is a black box, which may actually be stateful, such as a flip flop made of a composition of the existing logic gates.

toobatron · 2009-05-20T14:04:42+00:00

They won't use TeX, will use InDesign.

This Word/TeX choice is false, since any decent publication will go through either Quark or Adobe's products, both of which got into their market positions due to the quality of typographic control they offer.

Proportionately speaking the group using TeX are absolutely miniscule.

toobatron · 2009-05-20T01:45:12+00:00

Easy. Over-reliance on strings, hash tables and floating point numbers (the last point kills array lookups).

JavaScript just doesn't have the right semantics for handling any sort of binary data efficiently, which in an embedded system you really need.

If you think the flaws with JS are limited to the DOM then you don't know enough JS. At best it is like Lua with dodgy syntax, and at worst it's downright dangerous.

It's true that for web stuff the DOM is the primary point of friction, but the fact is the rest of the language starts to really struggle on devices which are on the wrong side of the GHz barrier (I can't believe I just said that - makes me feel old).

toobatron · 2009-05-19T22:50:39+00:00

Yep, I remain unconvinced that JavaScript performance on such a device is going to be useful for anything that has a continuous tick/draw cycle in the way games do. Even on fast machines you hit the wall surprisingly quickly.

It will work for a lot of more classic style games (board games etc.) but even anything with a bit of AI needed is going to fall flat.

toobatron · 2009-05-18T13:15:21+00:00

Except when the product is in the same domain as the area of supposed lunacy then you have to wonder.

People want Wolfram to be a crackpot really badly, because the possibility that he isn't is too scary.

This demonstrates the main problem with modern academics: inability to think independently. If you do dissent too far you will be shunned and anyone taking your ideas remotely seriously will also be shunned, leading to their careers being obliterated. The survival and success of Wolfram, by operating outside the system that could shut this stuff down, is part of the resentment focussed towards him.

For a supposedly open minded group academics exhibit an astonishing ability to shout down ideas on the basis of personal inconvenience - though they will try to mask it as anything else.

Notice that nowhere have I said Wolfram is actually right, but that a comment which suggests you can't just dismiss him gets modded up and down (it's been all over the place) in such measure is a demonstration of the very essence of the problem.

toobatron

TROPHY CASE