[got "more than a little" off-topic] New paradigms [was: request: python style decorators / aspect orientation]

[david]

Georg Wrede wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>> Georg Wrede wrote:
>>>
>>> My exact feelings when OOP was all the rage. People dancing on 
>>> rooftops hailing the Object. And all it was, was simply structs, and 
>>> functions that pretended to be inside their scope. And folks saying 
>>> "saving the objects" when they should have said "writing the data in 
>>> some of the fields of some of the struct instances to disk".
>>
>> No no no.  You mean "object PERSISTENCE". Sounds a lot fancier. (But 
>> also just means "saving some objects", which means just "writing some 
>> data from some struts to disk")   :-)
> 
> LOL! Right.
> 
>>> For a long time I thought I was stupid because "I didn't get it". 
>>> Turned out there wasn't anything to "get". Or rather, the thing to 
>>> get was the previous sentence.
>>
>> Maybe it seems like a big deal if you grew up programming Cobol or 
>> something.  I never did really get the OO craze either.  I remember at 
>> one point thinking "I must be missing something big here" so I bought 
>> and read Timothy Budd's book "Object Oriented Programming".  I got 
>> some exposure to SmallTalk from that, which was nice, but other than 
>> that it was pretty much a disappointment.
> 
> Of course many a consultant, guest lecturer, and downright charlatan 
> made a living on it. And they just pretended to be explaining the thing, 
> while making sure that folks didn't really see how simple and mundane 
> the whole thing was. Grand visions of the future where everything is an 
> Object, and where those Objects simply and easily float across computers 
> and the net (entirely disregarding different OSs or CPU architectures, 
> of course!), gather information and come back giving you info and 
> flowers from Jane.
> 
> The worst thing was that many books on OO did the same. But I guess 
> that's life. You can't sell millions of a book that confesses up front 
> that this is something explained in 5 pages, and that there's nothing 
> more to it. The more people go into FUW (fear, uncertainty and worship), 
> the more money for you.
> 
> My bet is that we'll see this all over again. Within a couple of years a 
> new paradigm is going to go through the community like a forest fire, 
> until again folks get disillusioned and "get" it. Too bad.
> 
> Oh, and incidentally, why does quantum computing come to my mind? For 
> example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubits has a nice picture and some 
> esoteric rambling. I'm not saying it's not for real, but I'd sure be 
> amazed if ten years from now we have any real-world practical stuff 
> coming out of it. I once read an article on how you could use a glass of 
> milk and its quantum states to compute (I forget what, but it was pretty 
> damn near the Meaning of Life) amazing and otherwise impossible stuff.
> 
> Maybe I should start selling a black box called OD (it's a secret what 
> it stands for, but for you guys, if you don't tell, it stands for the 
> Oracle of Delphi). Basically it's just the radioactive grain from a 
> regular household fire alarm and a coil of copper wire and a magnet. But 
> that's a secret, and the whole thing is cast in epoxy to hide it. Then 
> there's an earplug socket which you connect to Line In on your computer, 
> and with this amazing software driver (/dev/od) you now get a stream of 
> fresh entangled qubits.
> 
> Dunno what to do with them? Well, for $10k a head, send your programmers 
> to a ski resort in the arctic Finland, and we'll enlighten them. We also 
> have them sleep with an OD box next to their head, and the combination 
> of aurora borealis radiation and the OD box will help them assimilate 
> our ahead-of-civilization programming paradigms. And when they come 
> back, we'll monitor your company's progress (for an amazingly reasonable 
> $100k/week) for the next six months. If no progress is evident, then 
> we'll take your middle management for the same treatment (at 
> $200k/head). We guarantee results, or your money back. (Except that by 
> the time you get disillusioned you can't afford to sue us anymore. And 
> if you don't get disillusioned we'll keep at it till you're dry.) Oh, L. 
> Ron Hubbard was our first customer, and he sure died rich and with a 
> smile on his face.
> 
> ---
> 
> Man, I'm in the wrong business. I should drop D and start making those 
> OD boxes.
> 
> ps, a hint to those of you who plan on boringly staying with D. Maybe 
> you can get rich without leaving D.  Check out the word "Qudit" on the 
> same page.
> 
> ---
> 
> Oh, my! Now that I think about this, I have to confess I've already done 
> it for real. In the nineties I was working in a consultancy, and we were 
> running out of money. After some serious brainstorming we got the fast 
> buck idea that we'll gather gullible cubicle programmers from large 
> companies and drag them to Lapland for an Extreme Java seminar. I 
> organised the thing, got a few lecturers and off we went. The seminar 
> was basically about pouring a list of "believe it or not" stuff on them, 
> giving them nightly assignments so they don't have time to drink beer or 
> sleep, and then giving them a nice certificate of participation to hang 
> on their cubicle wall.
> 
> Amazing stuff like "you can write an entire web server in Java on a 
> single page", "with multithreading you can have several threads visit 
> the same object at the same time", and the like. By the time they got 
> home they were so confused and in awe, that the first week at work they 
> walked around like zombies mumbling incomprehensible stuff to the 
> cleaning woman and cafeteria waiters.
> 
> The word got around. Six months later we were booked solid. Our 
> consultancy had a reputation of being a bunch of larger than life gurus 
> on Advanced Topics. We put a clear plastic box three feet across right 
> in the middle of the entrance hall to our office. There was a hidden 
> blower inside, and pillow feathers floating and dancing around in it. No 
> customer ever dared to ask what this contraption was.
> 
> Gee, I guess writing my memoirs would be even more fun than the D book.

<rant>
Picking up the topic of quantum computing, I broaden it to
quantum mechanics - et voilà!
It's just that from time to time I come across an article
that states something (about e.g. the future in general,
philosophy, psychology, ...), and when it comes to the point
where it says that in the end we don't really know,
finishes with "uncertainty, just like in quantum mechanics!".
And when you don't know better, you believe that (whatever it is
that you try to connect with it) and are impressed!
(At least some of my friends I asked about it.)
Some people just tend to learn a few terms only to impress
laymen - and when you're an "insider", it's *so* obvious...


Georg Wrede wrote:
 > Today we KNOW it started at zero size. Yeah, and we used to KNOW
 > the earth was flat and the sun orbited us. I'll laugh my head off
 > when they "discover" that the universe has always been and not just
 > created at time T=0.

Actually, I was lucky enough to listen to a talk by Prof. Joseph 
Weizenbaum yesterday evening, and he mentioned about the same
- the sun rotating around the earth vs. earth around sun, and that we 
just pick the most simple that is still true and *dismiss* the other 
possible solutions/realities. His initial question to this was:
"Who believes the earth rotates around the sun and *not* the other way 
around?" - it's all just a matter of point of view,
but the equations are _so_ much easier...

That said, quantum computers still make for a _very_ interesting
field of research. Ever wondered how you could cut down the search
time for a special dataset in a random database?
Grover's algorithm changes the average N/2 tries down to O(sqrt(N)),
and for the special case of 4 elements (which was actually done as an
experiment by one of my profs), the classic 2.25 tries (worst case 3)
become 1 (!). It's definitely _very_ interesting (at least for me),
but so totally in its infancy that we're still _far far_ away
from any applications other than toy problems (like determining
the prime factors of 15).

david