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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

You want to throw out the OS and programming languages? You think that text is a poor interface for specifying machine behavior? Then show me. Show me something real. Perhaps not text (since text is a dirty word, right?) but something I can install on my machine.

If you're going to pull an Emperor's New Clothes, then it's not enough to loudly (and snarkily) proclaim that the emperor has no clothes on - you need to produce a naked emperor.

Heck, it should be easy, right? If you think that the conventions of the last 50 years are all shit, then how hard could it be to come up with some new ones? If you want to shake the pillars of computer programming, you need to be able to do more than say "everything is crap," and if you can't, then you sound like nothing more than surly, precocious, ignorant teenager.

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These arguments probably trace back to the pitfalls of Von Neumann architecture, and the hardcoded expectations of memory and such. It would require experts in very disparate fields (mechanical / electrical engineering, computer engineering, software development, theoretical mathematics, and others) to develop a viable replacement.

I do postulate that we are already kind of warping that model, though. SMP and NUMA force you to question the assumptions and that lead to a lot of the modern changes of tone (functional programming becoming big because asyncs and lambdas are really useful, for example).

I'm sad that you got downvoted, though I have a feeling its simply your choice of language, as your points are spot on. This is a wonderfully curated list of where computers have come from. But to go further and claim that we're all somehow fools for not exploring new ideas without offering any overview of what a new idea might look like is disingenuous.

Plenty of artists can dream up interfaces like in Minority Report, Tron, or Hackers, but to actually build something that achieves a human goal is much, much more difficult.

For what it's worth, I think the Self object environment, Squeak smalltalk and Flow programming are beginning to approach the paradigm shift the author hopes for. But in the meantime, I'm communicating with all of you in words, so I might as well communicate with my computer in them as well.

Honestly I feel like this type of viewpoint is one that almost every programmer gets to after about 10 years doing real work. The difference is tact. Some hack out some experiments in new programming paradigms and some post detailed ideas or concepts of how things can be improved, and others just try to gain street cred by just saying everything is obviously shit and we are all fools for not "fixing" things.

Well said, sir. Worth noting that this overview of where we've come from and how not far we've come was posted by a fellow is both clearly a genius, and who has his most popular github project written in x64 assembly. So I'd argue that even he sees the merit in the past when attempting to blaze a trail into the future.

For one thing, as long as our computers are binary, they are going to require instructions in a very specific way and anything we put over the top of them will expose that architecture to some degree or another.

My entire article is about things that happened between 1955 and 1969. The part where I state my thesis literally concludes "With a solid historical perspective we can dare to do better." I'm not sure how much more obvious I could make it that I "see the merit in the past when attempting to blaze a trail into the future".

It's the _present_ whose merit I find lacking.

Or it could be that the prevalence of this attitude prevents nascent alternatives from receiving adequate support.

Text took thousands of years to develop.

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