Loved the interview and love Brave. Keep up the good work!

There were no signs of your cold on the audio podcast version of the interview :)

One issue I’ve had with Greek philosophy is that although I know there’s interesting content within the stories, it all feels very distant, I can’t pronounce many of the names, a lot of the stories don’t feel super relevant, so there isn’t much that ‘sticks’ in my head.

It’s a bit like reading Shakespear, I rarely get into it, spending all my thought decrypting low level meaning/semantics, and I just never get to the interesting higher level story arcs, or when I do, my flow is too easily broken by some weird old English saying that I am unacquainted with. I guess it’s like any language, lots of practice necessary.

I’ll have to take another look at the Socratic method in more detail. If it’s a technique you are using, based on your interviews that I’ve listened to, then it’s clearly beneficial.

Sounds like there's a market for a derived work that uses contemporary rhetoric.

Yeah I think there might be.

One which I really enjoyed was:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycl...

I don’t know of many others like it.

I’d really like to ‘get into’ the classics, but it’s like I need to onboard by reading a bunch of contemporary motorcycle style versions first, so I have some familiarity with the concepts.

I read ZatAoMM as undergrad, it made a big impression. Forgot to get to it with Lex (his pre-show questions included "your top books").

That’s an interesting book to have on a computer science undergrad course. I guess many of the themes are very relevant, repairing, problem solving, the knowledge that different people approach technology in different ways, etc. Plus I can see it being a cool book to read at the same time as a other folks studying computers.

My high school AP credits let me waive a bunch of Freshman math and science so I took philosophy, theology, etc. courses at SCU. Pirsig was assigned in one of the philosophy classes.

I'm still gradually working on my undergrad. Most times when I'm out of work as a developer I return and complete some of my coursework. As time goes on, I'm finding a much stronger interest in the less-testable and more human oriented classes such as those you mention, but also History, language, and cultural geography. Meanwhile the CS courses are the ones that I'm struggling to be drawn towards; particularly as some of the former desirable compabies to work at face more and more human ethical dilemmas where the computer bit isn't the complicated bit. I suppose since it was my intense motivation to design and build websites that got me in various doors without a degree, as those things become more commodified, it would be expected to look elsewhere for that inspiration, but did you ever find that true for yourself?

Philosophy and theology on a comp sci course is pretty wild, and I guess a good place to meet folks from other departments?

As noted in the interview, I was a Physics major for the first three years. Also in the Honors Program, which helped get in some of the non-science classes.

I mentioned you in my latest javascript, technology and web development newsletter.

https://markjgsmith.substack.com/p/mark-smiths-newsletter-20...

I’d be honoured to have you as a reader, no pressure though, I bet you are super busy, and you probably get a zillion requests like this.

I think he was referencing just happening to have read it while simultaneously being an undergrad, not that he was assigned it required reading. Could be wrong though.

You’re right I might totally have misread that.

It got me thinking though, about the value of having some philosophy in comp sci courses.

Back when I was doing my masters (2002-2003) it was a different era for the web, there wasn’t much thought to ethics or philosophy, but I think it could be very relevant these days. It strikes me that it could be a particularly good time to read the ZAMM book.

I don’t know much about comp sci courses these days, maybe they do have such modules included.

Ya, that seems like a good idea. As of the last few years, philosophy courses at my school were not required, but you'd do them as part of your electives. I don't know how you'd actually formulate a comp sci specific ethics course, but it's an interesting thought experiment

About the only non-computery course we had was a business / management / entrepreneur type course. I don’t remember if it was something we chose to do, but it wasn’t part of the core set of courses that made up the degree.

I feel like we may have had completely different undergrad structures from reading your other comments in this thread. I took my CS degree in the CS department of a liberal arts Uni, and so had a bunch of optional arts credits to fulfill along with some amount of science and then a bunch of specific CS courses.

Having had a glipse of a CS degree that's part of another school's engineering department, I believe their structure is more rigid, and specifically detailed for 4 years.

I'm a little ways in so far, and I think—maybe unless you're a certain type of person—it's a book that you hopefully get lucky with in terms of when in your life you read it. It's a slow read, but the first few chapters have been nice so far, while some others I know have just not clicked with it.

I've been reading it slowly for a little while, and quite like it. I think it's a book that really is not for everyone, or at least only for a certain time, but it's worthwhile.

I just want to say thank you for all your contributions to advancing web technologies.

Javascript is still the only meaningful "Full Stack" platform and responsible for Billions of dollars in online business and Trillions of dollars in business value.

Is JS really the fundamental, responsible part in all that business? Would it have been so much worse with a full page refresh per click?

What would handle the click on the client browser? How would you handle all the user events in the client browser? clicks, mouse overs, selections, etc.

The Javascript platform is used to capture user behavior in the most efficient manner. This is the fundamental basis for all the online business processes and resulting business value.

Before JS browsers handled clicks without any 3rd party code. They were much more predictable and easier to reason about as a user.

Those clicks usually translated to HTTP calls.

What is so fundamental about business processes that they can't do an extra page render and HTTP call? (I imagine there may be some, I just can't see how they are so fundamental and on the order of billions.)

Hotmail, Oddpost, Gmail, Gmaps, YouTube comments, etc etc.

Funny enough I hear Gmail's plain HTML version is preferable for some here on HN.

Regardless I don't see how JS is fundamental to any of those services, not even Maps. Instead I suspect HTML would have become more feature rich sooner than HTML5.

I also don't believe JS itself contributes significantly to the trillions of dollars involved in online business.

The top 5 biggest companies rely on javascript for huge portion of online business.

Microsoft - introduced AJAX to support their web enabled servers and online services. Have since morphed into Cloud based company.

Apple - lots of iOS apps are simple webviews that use javascript.

Amazon - online sales and cloud services using javascript.

Google - online ad services using javascript.

Facebook - online user behavior analytics using javascript.

Pretty much the entire online economy has huge dependency on javascript.

Granted. And PHP runs like 30% of public websites. I doubt it's the JS driving most of the value though. I suspect much of their success was/is still possible without requiring trusting novel, 3rd party code, to be run on demand.

Why introduce counterfactuals? Flash existed, it had a full JS-variant language. It was taking over restaurant and other sites due to the IE monopoly stagnating HTML/CSS/JS. We don't need to appeal to an imaginary Turing-incomplete no-JS world to argue that JS didn't contribute enough. Flash was clearly the answer! Right?

Even if you might be right, your combative style is very off-putting. You could choose not to reply at all, the comment wasn't directed at you and I personally would've liked to entertain the idea of a more server-side rendered present, but you're shutting down the discussion.

I didn't even shut you down. What are you talking about? This is HN and you're on the Internet. Toughen up.

Turing incompetentes can be a feature IMO.

Anyway, my point is that none of the interactivity as delivered by JS / ActiveX / Flash are themselves reason for all the money in online business. Before graphical browsers there were probably billions in transactions happening on computer networks. And likely would have grown to similar highs without the ability to run untrusted, 3rd party code on demand.

Second reply, sorry — I meant to agree that Turing incomplete languages for things like bounded runtime / all-paths constant time algs are an underutilized toolset. They're coming back on Blockchain, also for browser compositor-thread scripting.

But the pressure on the Web to be interactive enough vs. fat or old clients, never mind plugins, pushed not only JS but Java into the Netscape browser in 1995. I don't see how that could have gone another way in time to avoid MS doing the same.

The idea of a general Web scripting language was to make a relief valve where developers ran up against the limits of existing markup and less expressive languages the browser processed. Then standards bodies were supposed to study the top JS libs and absorb their Turing-incomplete bits into new HTML and CSS. This happened eventually, but not for so long that we had to invent XUL at Mozilla, Adobe did Flex, etc.

Go prove it. Meanwhile, back in reality, Flash was taking over and it did have better JS-variant, better graphics, etc. before we in the HTML5 WHATWG group got browsers upgraded. No-JS happy talk about better Turing-incomplete HTML is idle talk. Go on if you must, but I'll stop here.

"I do not entertain hypotheticals. The world as it is is vexing enough." - Col. Stonehill, "True Grit"

...or Java.