It's late, this comment is what made me not switch to another video and I absolutely don't regret it, very fun talk, the elocution is great and the small wheezes/laughs are endearing
First unix was in pdp11 assembler. Then they built C. Multics was in fact quite successful. Large amount of the US dept of defense ran off Multics systems for decades. Many conceps on modern systems came from multics (ring protection, privilege levels..)
IIRC part of the reason they made Simula is that they were having problems simulating ship-behavior in water where parameters of one ship would affect the other - so you might have a small sailing-ship with some properties from that huge tanker you were simulating last week
I've heard the same. Norway is big in shipping, so it makes sense. Simula (and classes) was conceived at Norwegian Computing Center, not the University, as Rendle said. A fun bit of history: Alan Kay was stuck trying to figure out Smalltalk when someone left a copy of the Simula manual at his desk. He read through it and Smalltalk became Smalltalk. OOP too, but as Alan Kay says, it's about messages, not about objects. Java's classy OOP is different, Smalltalk is almost FP in some sense.
8:40 Colossus was not turing complete, ENIAC was (expect, technically for the fact that it had limited memory), if Colossus counts as general porpuse then the german Zuse Z3 should be considered the first computer, as it was build earlier, however it was not really turing complete either.
Colossus was the first programmable digital electronic computer. ENIAC was the first *general-purpose* programmable etc. And the Manchester Baby (SSEM) was the first *stored-program* general-purpose etc. etc.
@@MarkRendle And the Z3 was a programmable digital electricmechanical computer and completed in 1941, 2 years ahead of the Colossus Mk1. Does it really have to be purely electical?
58:04 My brother did a PhD in Civil Engineering and defended his thesis last year. His main way of developing dyke simulations he built was in FORTRAN and in ran on a Super computer to crunch the numbers. Very cool but also pretty weird
Why would you ever invent NULL when it’s just as easy to make a Boolean field and set, for example, spouse? to TRUE or FALSE. Also, if they used 36 bits… People forget that RAM was *super expensive* until the 1980s. 36 bits wasn’t arbitrary; it’s was the exact number of bits they needed, where a power of 2 would either be too small (useless) or too large (wasteful).
What went wrong were not the parts from Self and Scheme, they are brilliant and solid, but mistakes made by Eich under pressure from Netscape. Including the horrible name. Beneath it is an elegant language called Mocha. That's why it has survived so long, despite its shortcomings. And despite having all sorts of bad ideas thrown at it, like OOP (living up to the name, I guess).
Good grief ANOTHER history of Javascript 😂 tell me you didn’t want to do this talk without telling me you didn’t want to do this talk. Copy pasta monsta
>>> And how can we prevent it from happening again... That quote is misleading. Sure there are things that it could have done better... I mean, a lot of things. But at the same time... it is what runs the world. Is a little bit like spreadsheets. You can love them or hate them, but they are key in lots of industries.
I could listen to Mark for hours and never get bored!
This talk was so good it's been featured in the latest Tech Talks Weekly issue 🎉
Congrats!
This man's an absolute pleasure to listen to!
😊
It's late, this comment is what made me not switch to another video and I absolutely don't regret it, very fun talk, the elocution is great and the small wheezes/laughs are endearing
Thank you SOOOOO much, Mark. I learn something every time I watch a talk of yours!!!
First unix was in pdp11 assembler. Then they built C. Multics was in fact quite successful. Large amount of the US dept of defense ran off Multics systems for decades. Many conceps on modern systems came from multics (ring protection, privilege levels..)
Before Eniac there was ABC (first fully electronic computer) and before Colossus there was Konrad Zuze's machine (first electromechanical computer)
IIRC part of the reason they made Simula is that they were having problems simulating ship-behavior in water where parameters of one ship would affect the other - so you might have a small sailing-ship with some properties from that huge tanker you were simulating last week
I've heard the same. Norway is big in shipping, so it makes sense. Simula (and classes) was conceived at Norwegian Computing Center, not the University, as Rendle said.
A fun bit of history: Alan Kay was stuck trying to figure out Smalltalk when someone left a copy of the Simula manual at his desk. He read through it and Smalltalk became Smalltalk. OOP too, but as Alan Kay says, it's about messages, not about objects. Java's classy OOP is different, Smalltalk is almost FP in some sense.
TIL the old weird flashy lights are the equivalent of modern RGB leds
We really need a snappier term for "the amount of atoms in the observable universe". It's long overdue.
10^80 atoms
8:40 Colossus was not turing complete, ENIAC was (expect, technically for the fact that it had limited memory), if Colossus counts as general porpuse then the german Zuse Z3 should be considered the first computer, as it was build earlier, however it was not really turing complete either.
Also (IIRC) ENIAC wasn't really Turing-complete until the later iteration
Colossus was the first programmable digital electronic computer. ENIAC was the first *general-purpose* programmable etc. And the Manchester Baby (SSEM) was the first *stored-program* general-purpose etc. etc.
@@MarkRendle And the Z3 was a programmable digital electricmechanical computer and completed in 1941, 2 years ahead of the Colossus Mk1. Does it really have to be purely electical?
This was awesome!
I laugh at the idea of monitors matching print sizes. Hey look at the A3 monitor I got. I think A2 is too big and A4 was so last decade.
49:40
Looks like a valid fizzbuzz regex to me.
It was the Poles, mathematicians not technicians, who built the bombe.
58:04 My brother did a PhD in Civil Engineering and defended his thesis last year. His main way of developing dyke simulations he built was in FORTRAN and in ran on a Super computer to crunch the numbers. Very cool but also pretty weird
Why would you ever invent NULL when it’s just as easy to make a Boolean field and set, for example, spouse? to TRUE or FALSE.
Also, if they used 36 bits… People forget that RAM was *super expensive* until the 1980s. 36 bits wasn’t arbitrary; it’s was the exact number of bits they needed, where a power of 2 would either be too small (useless) or too large (wasteful).
how js happened: let's take all the untested language design concepts in one place and make it a worldwide standard, what can go wrong?
What went wrong were not the parts from Self and Scheme, they are brilliant and solid, but mistakes made by Eich under pressure from Netscape. Including the horrible name. Beneath it is an elegant language called Mocha. That's why it has survived so long, despite its shortcomings. And despite having all sorts of bad ideas thrown at it, like OOP (living up to the name, I guess).
@@ximono they'd better simply took scheme. we could've had simple compilation target back then. and use any language one likes
@@guai9632 I agree! I'd keep the prototype influence from Self though.
So happy the guy from IT Crowd got out of the it support basement, even if his accent had to change.
Roy or Moss?
@@MarkRendle I was thinking Roy :D
On a serious note, I am a big fan!
Eli is that you in the audience there? 😄
I vote for the nullpointerexception to be renamed to ALGONE...
Are any Fortran jokes good jokes?
That truly awful pre Fortran-77 Fortran filled me with childhood nostalgia.... and abject horror.
No. Trust me, I looked.
Good grief ANOTHER history of Javascript 😂
tell me you didn’t want to do this talk without telling me you didn’t want to do this talk.
Copy pasta monsta
Java brought CamelCase instead of under_scores, and it is that look that JavaScript copied.
>>> And how can we prevent it from happening again...
That quote is misleading. Sure there are things that it could have done better... I mean, a lot of things.
But at the same time... it is what runs the world.
Is a little bit like spreadsheets. You can love them or hate them, but they are key in lots of industries.
I think that is part of the problem: JavaScript is suboptimal for this purpose because of its quirks and its current ecosystem.
It's just a joke... mostly. ;)
@@MarkRendle JavaScript or the title? :D