Thomas Lord <[email protected]> says: > It should have been easier to fix Nelson, back then.
See, I /was/ incoherent. Or at least unpersuasive. The last thing I would want to do is "fix" Nelson. He was wrong about the screwdriver, but he wasn't the one with razor blades in his ceiling tiles. My point in bringing up the specific example is that the struggle we are now facing has a very long history within our community. But let me now back away from the screwdriver and try to generalize. There is a dialectic between hacking and software engineering. It is, in my view, very closely analogous to the dialectic between youth and maturity, respectively. Most people, when they hear "youth and maturity," think it's obvious which side is in the right. What does "maturity" mean, if not being in the right in that struggle? Oh, sure, we should be tolerant/indulgent/nurturing toward youth, but we know better than they do. But to me it's a dialectic. Both are /necessary/. Both are /indispensable/. Here's another metaphor. In my car, as in all recent cars, there are a bunch of computers. Some of those computers control the fuel injection, the brakes, the air bags. I want those computers programmed by R6RS fans. I'm never going to buy one of those third-party ROMs to make the car go faster than the manufacturer intended. On the other hand, there's also a user-interface computer, that, among other things, decides when to turn on the air conditioner. I hate how it's programmed! And I'm really frustrated at my inability to fix it. I want /that/ computer to have a Scheme REPL! Okay, it's only a metaphor. But, 100 years from now, I think it'll be clear to any historians of technology who might look into the question that Nelson, and Greenblatt, and Knight, and (a few years later) RMS, contributed more to society than Noftsker, who was really a Multician at heart, even though he happened to work for us. Our side made plenty of mistakes. (I still have, somewhere, Greenblatt's paper arguing against swapping from memory out to disk -- when the memory filled up, you just shouldn't let any more processes run.) But, by being willing to try a dozen things and make 11 mistakes, our side invented interactive debugging, interactive editing, online chat... well, you get the idea. That other side never made any mistakes, because they were grownups and abhorred mistakes. Other people should of course speak for themselves, but I bet that I'm not the only one for whom R6RS represents a repudiation of Lisp's roots in hacking. [Truth in metaphoring: I came to see this as a dialectic relatively late in life, when at age 50 I became an adoptive parent. Before that, even as a high school teacher, I was 100% on the side of the kids. So maybe you mature people shouldn't trust me.] > The stuff largely missnig from Levy is the intimacies > between the industrial-military-security complex and > the lab and that campus (and those hackers). Okay, the rest of this email has nothing to do with Scheme or with the Steering Committee issues, so people in a hurry can stop reading now. During the Vietnam war, MIT's Instrumentation Lab did research on, among many other weapons projects, stabilizers for the helicopters used to drop the napalm on children, old people, and other noncombatants. In 1969 there was a huge campaign among radicals in the Boston area to organize a march with the intention of shutting down the I-Lab. In those days, something like 95% of all computer science research on Earth was funded by ARPA. The management of Project MAC, the research group that included the AI Lab as one component, got into a huge panic around the (totally unfounded) idea that those hairy unthinking radicals wouldn't be able to distinguish between direct war research and merely war-funded research, and so after shutting down the I-Lab, we were going to come burn down Project MAC too. On the 8th floor of Tech Square, where the suits lived, Project MAC director J.C.R. Licklider had a loudspeaker facing outward installed in the transom over his office door, so he could barricade himself inside and negotiate with the radicals in safety. But the 9th floor, the top floor of the building, was where the actual computers were located, and also where we hackers hung out. So terrified were the managers of the radicals that they modified the building elevators not to go to the 9th floor. All but one stairwell was blocked off; at the top of that stairwell was an armed guard with a list, provided by the managers of the 9th floor groups, of employees. There was a TV camera outside the door so they could check your photo ID before admitting you. And at the bottom of the list was written, "Do not admit Brian Harvey." It made me so proud! The only person to be so honored. And the funny thing was, pretty much nobody on the 9th floor cared much about the war one way or the other, but a lot of them got upset about /that/, so Noftsker actually managed to raise a little bit of radical political consciousness among hackers, the opposite of what he intended. I didn't find out about this by being turned back at the door; as you might guess, I had other things to do that day. :-) But when I heard the story, I logged in on the AI lab system remotely and put in the system message file a great quotation I found in the Little Red Book (yes, I had one, although I didn't carry it around with me) to the effect of "even though they have all the fancy technology, we're going to win, because they're afraid of us, and we're not afraid of them." I thought it was apt. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
