nielsabel

> before PC culture silences him

Damn you, Wintel!

These might give an interesting perspective: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-white-flight-of-... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-man-daryl-davis-be...

But still, nobody has told me yet what was so rude about my post. How do you expect me to fix my behavior if you don't explain me what was wrong about it? “You're rude.” “well, how exactly?”

Again, what was so horribly offensive and insulting about my post? I don't see it. Sure, I wasn't sugar coating. But all I'm getting here is: “You're not polite, because <insert inapt analogy>”.

Oh, I guess you must be right then …

So far, I only heard complaints about me being not polite enough and not about the actual content of what I said. Why do we always have to put our words into sugar coated ass kissery? Just so that nobody's feelings get hurt? I mean, what I'm trying to point out here is that shouldn't matter how I say what I say.

And, really, what is so vile and offensive about my post? Please, tell me, because I don't see it (really, I'm not being sarcastic here). Was anyone seriously hurt just by reading my post? I find that hard to believe.

You're confusing being a good writer with being polite.

> This aggressive rant crosses the line on HN. If you can't contain your anger

I'm not angry at all, really. Merely stating my perspective.

> enough to post substantively and with respect for opposing views, you're not welcome to post here.

It seems to me that my view is the opposing one. Balancing the different views, in my opinion, is the job of the (critical) reader. How is the reader supposed to do this if all opposing views are “not welcome” (and my guess is ultimately banned). Again, I am merely stating my perspective.

And why the hell do I have to respect anyone('s opinion)? I don't go around randomly respecting people. Respect has to be earned.

> It's not in your interest to do this anyhow, since it undercuts everything you're saying.

I think I'll decide what's in my interest. And, really, that's the whole point here: you should judge what I say, not how I say it.

> we need to get more women in kindergarden interested in math.

Why? What's the (supposed) benefit?

I'd rather see general improvement on math lessons in school. Most of these lessons are boring, given by boring teacher. I'd be happy if people went out of school simply not hating math (they don't have to like) it. I find this to be much worthwile instead of pushing girls into math even though they might not be inherently interested in it.

The problems in STEM (and science in general) won't be solved by quantity but by quality. (They definitely won't be solved by gender.)

“Andy Warhol. Phoney, radical Andy Warhol. Burgeois capitalist.” [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/Bw0Rmt2S0uQ?t=10m27s

> I reckon the German education system must be great because the average person over there seems to have very good English.

Hahahaha … no!

Thanks. This was a fun discussion.

I think you pretty much nailed it here.

> If you're talking about it as it is today, it's a mixture of great and horrible

Most PC run Wintel and nowadays even more people use/care about ARM/Android/iOS. That's reality and I don't debate that. I'm only/mostly interested in reserarch/CompSci as a discipline.

> But the influence is not as wide as gets claimed by its proponents.

To me, the problem always seemed to be less of how wide these ideas spread but how well they and their origins were understood. OOP made a lot more sense to me, when I found out what Alan Kay had in mind (Sketchpad, Arpanet, biology, etc.).

> Some of the ideas in Smalltalk are synergistic and don't work well taken piecemeal.

Exactly. I think of Smalltalk as more of a system and not just a language. In my opinion, C++, Java, et al. fail (or aren't as good as they could be), because they only take just one idea from Smalltalk (e.g. classes; or the GUI, in case of the Apple Macintosh or Niklaus Wirth's Lilith), when the good things about Smalltalk were due to the interplay of multiple ideas.

> Smalltalk is worth using today, but it has actual faults that shouldn't be whitewashed

I see Smalltalk (and its usefulness) more as a research system than a production system. I'm mostly interested in research and moving Computer "Science" as a discipline forward. I'm sick of people trying to sell me their 5% performance improvement as "new"/"research". Problem is, things haven't fundamentally changed since 1965 (the von Neumann bottleneck is still present, both physically and mentally). Smalltalk could have been the greatest piece garbage in computing history and I'd still respect it (somewhat), because at least it tried to do things fundamentally different.

> I find the cult of Smalltalk distasteful because it prioritizes in-group mythbuilding over the truth.

To be honest, you've got that problem everywhere. Heck, look at Apple, Linux, BSD, Unix/Plan9 …

Btw: I'm currently reading "Smalltalk-80: The Language and its implementation". What's your opinion on that book? And thanks for the other two book recommendations.

That's not what I was arguing. I was arguing that a better idea does not (necessarily) get adopted, even if it is superior. Sure, Smalltalk might not compete today, but I'd say it was superior /then/ (and still didn't see wide adoption!). That's why I don't have any hope that a superior idea will get adopted in the /future/, whatever it may look like (and this is my main issue here).

I'm especially not thrilled about the underpinnings of current systems. You have to put in a huge amount of effort (millions of lines of code) for very little effect (web browsers, modern operating systems, etc). Just because something is the best that doesn't mean it is actually good. /I/ think, we could do a whole lot better. Just recently, I had a similar debate. Money quote: "nothing beats a nice C implementation".

What I'm always curious about: does this /Idea/ really not work or did simply put not enough effort in it (compare what amount of money, time, and man power is spent on modern systems compared to Smalltalk or any less popular system; I'd say it isn't a fair comparison wrt the former leading to better results).

> If Smalltalk GUI building is so great, how come nobody uses it today? Because it's maddeningly inferior to everything we have today.

I'd argue that the CompSci community DOESN'T choose the best thing that comes along, but merely the first one that fits the bill. It's a mixture of darwinian processes and market force.

If you take the example of Smalltalk vs UNIX vs DOS in the 80s then you get exactly that. People chose DOS+IBM PC because it was a shitload cheaper than a Xerox Star. They'd also choose UNIX (for mainframes) over Smalltalk because it was already there, everyone knew how to use it, and nobody wants to ever break backwards compatibility (so you're stuck).

(EDIT: also, compare to the WWW. Is it really so much superior than what we had before?)

Sure, SOME things have improved, but overall it's a complete shit show and I don't think that the things that have improved are THAT much better (while everything else is downright garbage).