You’ve met the Steam Lisp. Now meet vitrium flexile, the Roman Lisp: “… there was an artificer once who made a glass goblet that would not break. So he was admitted to Caesar’s presence to offer him his invention; then, on receiving the cup back from Caesar’s hands, he dashed it down on the floor. […]
Among the advertised features of Apple’s latest OS update, three in particular caught my attention: “auto-save”, which claims to wipe out the abomination of volatile-by-default documents; “versioning”, which claims to introduce document version-control into the Mac’s normal operations; and “resume”, which promises to re-load a user’s work-state whenever an application is re-started. On the surface, […]
Vladimir Sedach explains the purpose of the Lisp macro and comments on some of the reasons for its absence from “modern” programming systems: “I used to like arguing over the Internet about this subject. There are many good technical and management/organizational arguments you can make for and against macros. What I’ve come to realize is […]
Readers who enjoyed “The Five Types of Technological Standard” will like “Software Bugs and Scientific Progress” by John Regehr. The best conceivable advice to the computer industry would be: “Revisit assumptions.” But of course this is just the kind of advice least likely to be taken.
Technological standards may be usefully divided into five basic types: 4 – Standards arrived at by consensus. Examples: Common Lisp. 3 – Standards imposed by dictatorial fiat. Examples: Russian railroad gauge. 2 – Standards imposed through sudden, overwhelming, and indisputable technological supremacy over the previous state of the art. Examples: Arabic numerals. Sildenafil. 1 – […]
Is there a ballpoint pen in your pocket? How fast is it? What do you mean, you don’t know? You didn’t ask the salesman? There is indeed a maximum speed at which the little ball in the pen can roll and still leave a satisfactory trace of ink upon the page. Would you pay extra […]
Forget for a moment about the security of your computer. Instead ask yourself: how secure is your body? Don’t ask a computer security “professional.” Instead, ask an anatomist. Or better yet, a trauma surgeon. Or a prison medic. A weapon no deadlier than a pencil, driven through soft flesh into your abdominal cavity, brings a […]
My apologies to all readers who were inconvenienced by the multi-page layout. All of the Laws, slightly re-worded [1], are here once more. To view the original pages, click on the numerals. A sanely designed personal computer system: I – Obeys operator The operator shall retain full control of the machine at all times. In […]
The machine shall never tell a lie to the user/programmer. [1] It shall obey all orders given to it through the human interface devices, without attempting to pass judgement on their legality or morality. The machine shall not put the interests of any third party (including society in the abstract) above those of its user/programmer. […]
All of the information contained inside the machine’s storage array (see the Third Law), whether executable or not, shall be accessible at all times for inspection and modification by the user/programmer, in the form preferred for modification. The user/programmer shall have the ability to modify the functionality of any executable code within the system without […]
