We've got a release! Time to party!

Update: The release was our new electronic marketplace for health insurance agencies. With all the champagne in my system I wasn't able to type more than two sentences into my cell phone editor. Yes, it's my dayjob. Yes, it's a Java project. Yes, we used Common Lisp to generate Java code for schema migration (thanx Vadim!). Yes, we finished on time and on budget. I was wearing my John McCarthy shirt to keep the gods happy.

All images now use <img ...> tags consistently. Some RSS/Atom subscribers couldn't parse images because of inconsistencies in the article sources. This should be fixed now.

Users of NetNewsWire Lite are out of luck at the moment, because their RSS-Reader insists on adding an ".xml" extension to the RSS feed URL. I hope to alias that soon.

I have made two inspiring papers available in the download section:

• The Early History of Smalltalk by Alan C. Kay. At the end of the paper he cites a series of articles published in BYTE magazine 1981 and that's when I realized that I own this issue of BYTE magazine! I still have no idea why they illustrated this issue with a hot air balloon labeled Smalltalk. [1] (Link via Glenn Ehrlich)
• Connection Machine Lisp: Fine-Grained Parallel Symbolic Processing by Guy L. Steele Jr. and W. Daniel Hillis. Beautiful Lisp code.

Notice the task cards! Extreme Programming.

Testposting using Fuller's Dymaxion Map.

While waiting for "emerge system" to finish on the new server, I browsed for some more Croquet demo material. Lisa Rein created a beautiful page about Alan Kay's presentation on Etech 2003. The page also shows some material from The Mother Of All Demos by Dough Engelbart.

"I once asked Ivan, 'How is it possible for you to have invented computer graphics, done the first object oriented software system and the first real time constraint solver all by yourself in one year?" And he said "I didn't know it was hard."
-- Alan Kay on Ivan Sutherland.

Using a series of demo films and several pieces of live software to illustrate his points, Kay made a convincing argument that there haven't been any major innovations in interface design or programming for the last 20 years.

• Configure the blosxom.cgi base URL to point to something like: "http://lispmeister.com/blog".
• Create a copy of the blosxom.cgi script in the document root.
• Name it index.cgi
• Add this to your httpd.conf or .htaccess file
  

  <Location /index.cgi>
  Options +ExecCGI -Includes
  SetHandler cgi-script
  </Location>
  <Location />
    Options +ExecCGI
    DirectoryIndex index.cgi
  </Location>
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteRule ^/blog/?(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom/$1 [PT]
  

Trust lowers the transaction costs between independent agents in a society. It's easy to enact legislation that destroys trust in a society. It's hard to nurture and build trust. Successful societies depend on trust between individuals, to foster a stable and productive environment. Trust is social capital.

After reading books like Trust, I always try to put them into a practical perspective:

A software development team of people who trust each other, is certainly much more productive, than a team of sociopaths micromanaged by a paranoid boss.

• Andrew Glassner's Other Notebook by Andrew Glassner. I browsed through it today and it's awesome. This is going to be a lot of fun!
• Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again by Andy Clark. A book about intelligence and context in a wired world.

• Calendrical Calculations by Edward M. Reingold and Nachum Dershowitz. Danny Hillis used the formulas and programs of this book to do the calculations for his 10.000 year clock, The Clock of the Long Now
• Simulation for the Social Scientist by Nigel Gilbert and Klaus G. Troitzsch. A practical textbook on the techniques of building computer simulations to assist understanding of social and economic issues and problems. The book and corresponding source code is also available online.
• LISP-STAT by Luke Tierney. Fun with Lisp and statistics! Though published in 1990, it's a blast to read this book and play with the example code.

Stefan Lehmke, author and maintainer of the supercool TeXPower presentation system, recommended the Mozart Programming System and the programming language Oz as an ideal platform for building agent based systems (like my conceptual workbench, which is of course pure Common Lisp).

The Mozart Programming System is an advanced development platform for intelligent, distributed applications. The system is the result of a decade of research in programming language design and implementation, constraint-based inference, distributed computing, and human-computer interfaces. As a result, Mozart is unequaled in expressive power and functionality. Mozart has an interactive incremental development environment and a production-quality implementation for Unix and Windows platforms.

Mozart is based on the Oz language, which supports declarative programming, object-oriented programming, constraint programming, and concurrency as part of a coherent whole. For distribution, Mozart provides a true network transparent implementation with support for network awareness, openness, and fault tolerance. Security is upcoming.

Digging deeper into what makes Croquet tick, I found David P. Reed's PhD thesis. Alan Kay pestered Reed for a long time, until he finally implemented this stuff in Croquet.

A new approach to the synchronization of accesses to shared data objects is developed. Traditional approaches to the synchronization problem of shared data accessed by concurrently running computations have relied on mutual exclusion - the ability of one computation to stop the execution of other computations that might access or change shared data accessed by that computation. Our approach is quite different. We regard an object that is modifiable as a sequence of immutable versions; each version is the state of the object after an update is made to the object. Synchronization can then be treated as a mechanism for naming versions to be read and for defining where in the sequence of versions the version resulting from some update should be placed. In systems based on mutual exclusion, the timing of accesses selects the version accessed. In the system developed here, called NAMOS, versions have two component names consisting of the name of an object and a pseudo-time, the name of the system state to which the version belongs. By giving programs control over the pseudo-time in which an access is made, synchronization of accesses to multiple objects is simplified.

Dietmar Dath wrote Höhenrausch. Die Mathematik des XX. Jahrhunderts in zwanzig Gehirnen., a fascinating book about 20th century mathematicians. The following mathematicians are covered in this book: Cantor, Hilbert, Poincaré, Brouwer, Noether, Ramanujan, Gödel, Dirac, Turing, Kolmogorow, von Neumann, Dieudonné and Bourbaki, Grothendieck, Chaitin, Thom, Bowman Robinson, Mandelbrot, Witten, Wolfram, Dieringshofen. If it contained at least some of the mathematics created by the mathematicians portrayed, it could have been brilliant.

The book contains the above illustration created by Max Tegmark for his Theory of Everything paper.

Today I downloaded, compiled and installed Lisp-Stat on OSX Panther. Works out of the box, if you have the X11 developer libraries installed. There is a README.OSX file in the Macintosh folder of the FTP repository that explains how to install the Unix version on OSX. There is a nice tutorial titled A Surfer's Guide to Lisp-Stat available in Postscript format.

The image to the right is a sample scatter plot created by the following commands:

> (def hc (list .5 .46 .41 .44 .72 .83 .38 .60 .83 .34 .37 .87 
                .65 .48 .51 .47 .56 .51 .57 .36 .52 .58 .47 .65 
                .41 .39 .55 .64 .38 .50 .73 .57 .41 1.02 1.10 .43 
                .41 .41 .52 .70 .52 .51 .49 .61 .46 .55))
HC
> (def co (list 5.01 8.60 4.95 7.51 14.59 11.53 5.21 9.62 15.13
                3.95 4.12 19.00 11.20 3.45 4.10 4.74 5.36 5.69
                6.02 2.03 6.78 6.02 5.22 14.67 4.42 7.24 12.30
                7.98 4.10 12.10 14.97 5.04 3.38 23.53 22.92 3.81
                1.85 2.26 4.29 14.93 6.35 5.79 4.62 8.43 3.99 7.47))
CO
> (plot-points hc co)
#<Object: 2928d8, prototype = SCATTERPLOT-PROTO>

Diving into a sea of data structures, isn't that what hacking is all about?

Real Software Engineering is still in the future. There is nothing in current SE that is like the construction of the Empire State building in less than a year by less than 3000 people: they used powerful ideas and power tools that we don’t yet have in software development. If software does “engineering” at all, it is too often at the same level as the ancient Egyptians before the invention of the arch (literally before the making of arches: architecture), who made large structures with hundreds of thousands of slaves toiling for decades to pile stone upon stone: they used weak ideas and weak tools, pretty much like most software development today.

The real question is whether there exists a practice in between the two—stronger than just piling up messes—that can eventually lead us to real modern engineering processes for software.

One of the ways to characterize the current dilemma is that every project we do, even those with seemingly similar goals has a much larger learning curve than it should. This is partly because we don’t yet know what we really need to know about software. But as Butler Lampson has pointed out, this is also partly because Moore’s Law gives us a qualitatively different environment with new and larger requirements every few years, so that projects with similar goals are quite different.

Until real software engineering is developed, the next best practice is to develop with a dynamic system that has extreme late binding in all aspects. The first system to really do this in an important way was LISP, and many of its great ideas were used in the invention of Squeak’s ancestor Smalltalk—the first dynamic completely object-oriented development and operating environment—in the early 70s at Xerox PARC.

• Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham. He's the man, buy his book as a present to non-programmers. It might change the way they think about programming.
• Programmer's Apprentice by Charles Rich and Richard C. Waters. Published in 1990, it still seems to represent the current state of the art regarding automated assistance of programmers by an AI.
• Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven by Godspeed You Black Emperor. I've already listened to both CDs and they're mindblowing! David Lamkins recommended GYBE to me. I'm impressed by their programmatic constructivist approach towards guitars and amplifiers.