DLW's thesis that Symbolics lost as part of the general losing of custom hardware (including all the parallel computer companies) is basically correct. Lucid on Suns was as fast as ZetaLisp on Symbolicses.

But not so fast that that alone made me switch. What made me switch was that Lisp machines (both Symbolics and LMI) were so gratuitously, baroquely complex. The manuals filled a whole shelf. Each component of the software was written as if it had to have every possible feature. The hackers who wrote it were the smartest and most energetic around. But there was no Steve Jobs to tell them "No, this is too complex." So the guy in charge of writing the pretty-printer, for example, would decide. "This is going to be the most powerful pretty-printer ever written. It's going to be able to do everything!"

I learned how to program a Symbolics myself, from reading the manuals. I sometimes suspected that I was the only person who'd ever done this-- that everyone else who knew how to use the damn things had either learned how from the guys who invented them, or had learned from someone else who had. The libraries were so hairy that I generally found it was faster to write something myself than find and understand the documentation for the built-in way of doing it.

Unfortunately this complexity persists in Common Lisp, which was pretty much copied directly from ZetaLisp. In fact, both of the worst flaws in CL are due to its origins on Lisp machines: both its complexity and the way it's cut off from the OS.

Here is the complete thing: http://elzr.com/posts/wolfram-feynman (including the original letter that Feynman was replying to)

At the risk of sounding like an old prude, I'm not crazy about dragging somebody out by name and then everybody gathering around and critiquing his life. Seems a little perverse to me. Perhaps asking about his work, the general lifestyle, or his theories might be a little more fertile ground? Instead of asking opinions about the man himself. I mean really, who the heck really knows Wolfram here? He's just some guy we read about in the media.

Having said that, I'm glad to offer positive feedback about what I know about him. I can certainly admit that I envy his lifestyle of setting up a company and then pursuing science with the resources available. I'm a big fan of NKS and the computational universe. But heck if I can understand it all. I admire it the way I would a great painting -- it's obviously the work of a master, and whether it's expressionist or impressionistic I have no idea. He's a interesting and unusual person. It'd be cool to have a beer with him and discuss The Matrix.

The Best Solution for what? Client side mashups? Greenfield development? Mixed-platform interop? Speed and threading? Flexibility with changing requirements?

Not trying to be a jerk, it's just a complicated question. I guess you mean greenfield web applications? Even then I'd have to ask things like how heavy you were client-side, what languages you knew -- most importantly, where's all the data? If you're delivering data basically from the server to the client and back, does most of the processing take place on the client or the server? Some MVC paradigms are crazy to push into Javascript. Some are crazy to use for simple projects.

Lately for Web 2.0 Applications, I'm using a framework that has a lightweight MVC (very lightweight!) in Javascript and pulls information using JSON from various sources. But I wrote it myself, so I'm biased.

MVC is a paradigm that can be applied a lot of ways, in a lot of situations. Most frameworks emphasize the controller, when the model is really what you're after. Your controller classes can "dumb down" in many scenarios to be so lightweight as to not require a separate class. Hard to do that with a pre-canned framework. I guess I would be extremely careful in confusing the framework with the architectural conceit it uses -- two different concepts.

Pretty misleading title - the issue wasn't a C# memory leak, it was that these developers didn't remove old objects from an event subscriber list...

Tayyabs == awesome

Sounds good to me. Would be great to meet some like minded hackers.

Sad. I want you back as a user tx. My goal is obviously to make the product so much a part of your email life that it is painful to uninstall. I bet you are like me and use email all day long. I hate Outlook without Xobni. I would hope Xobni would have its place above temperature monitors, weather bugs, download managers, etc on your machine too.

Our separate proces is super small and simply allows us to do automatic updates, nothing else.

In 1997, getting my first HTML lessons using an illustrated guide.

The moment when I typed something in notepad and it opened in IE I was running all over the house screaming "IT WORKED!."

cool with me

Funny, but I uninstalled Xobni precisely because it decided to run its own little daemon at all times. Initially I liked the product a lot and several guys at work installed it because of me not shutting up on "look! all attachments from you in the corner, see?!"

What he's talking about is a valid concern. I too, having implemented an RSS reader with background polling process, had to deal with users complaining about "big" number in Task Manager.

However, what I learned later on, was that it isn't the number in task manager that people dislike, it is the assumption that we, engineers, make about how they use their computers. Our applications (my RSS reader or Xobni's analytics) may be useful, but not useful enough to be running at all times. An average user probably does about a hundred things he considers useful with his PC on a typical day, and if each and single one of those things starts its own little "monitor", things may get nasty.

It should not be so hard to keep in mind that our code is not the only thing on a computer, and using our software is not users' full time job.

Ever saw a 3 year old laptop that belongs to a "typical" user? Task manger has a scrollbar four (!) pages tall. That's how many processes he's running. Sure, every single one of them is written by a guy who knows the difference between private working set and shared memory, and every single one is somewhat useful (anti-virus, volume controls, sound enhancers, CD silencers, download managers, RSS daemon, weather bugs, temperature monitors, etc). But in the end, you DO end up with sluggish performance and ridiculous startup times. And Vista only amplifies the pain.

Therefore, unless you are a driver or a shell of some sort, DO NOT run any code in the background. Ever.

This is why I am not a Xobni user anymore. Kudos to them for a great idea and usable implementation.

I don't think the most tangible benefit of MVC is reuse, but rather code organization. In MVC, if you're looking for something, you know where to find it. That saves a lot of time. It's easy to write an application, but harder to maintain it.

Also, imagine an application with a Web view displaying a data set returned from a controller. Now the client/user wants an OS-native version of the app. That's simple, just build a native (OS-specific) window view and call the same controller for the data set (model). Or maybe an API is needed for external consumption. In that case a web service "view" can be built to return the same data set from the same controller. We're just swapping views here--it's plug-and-play.

It's a clear separation of responsibilities. I believe that used to be called "modular" programming. ;)

Not from the 80s, but Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".

I grew up in a lawyer family and I have only recently begun recovering from it.

Lawyers have a tendency to go into "lawyer mode", where they start acting like total dickheads who are impossible to talk to.

Scole is just a journalist, he pontificates about technology, but he's not a techie.

"The Joy of Sex" HA!