The PC’s Days of Future Pasting
So I’ve been watching this black and white APL Demonstration from 1975 while preparing my weekly post on Tech & Startups Events in Frankfurt RheinMain.
The presentation shows a real mechanical REPL (Read Eval Print Loop), an interactive line-based programming against A Programming Language and it got me hooked.
The sound of a mechanical Typewriter while every single character hits the paper, the beauty of the gorgeous font that is still far more attractive than all the to be praised Ligatures & Coding movement 42 years later.
The typing experience is a writer’s experience. A writer is a master in telling stories to reach hearts and minds of people, not the machine counterpart. The machine is just a companion on a journey. Character by character as the ink hits the paper, line by line, as the carriage moves all the way to the right edge of the paper just to move back to the start as it turns up the paper giving the master the signal now is the time for the next line. Until the sheet of paper is painted fully and needs to be replaced giving the master a briefly longer pause of thought. Playful creativity leading to chapters after chapters and resulting in a book to be read by people.
At some point in our culture Harvard professor Kenneth E. Iverson’s achievement of a notation for people to read by inventing APL in 1957 got nullified by the success of Personal Computers. Our willingness to compromise beauty for efficiency has led to the culturally accepted assumption that learning code as a mean to master programming a machine is “the Truth”, disconnecting the programmer from the user and the nerd from the society.
Here’s how another fellow describes his amazement watching the demo as he describes on reddit:
What got me was the now-extinct command line technique of overwriting charters to create a symbol outside the range of the character set being used. I’m referring to the way he typed the “domino” character by doing box-backspace-divide.
Before you think that this is a pretty dumb idea, you have to realise that allowing characters to be overwritten just once, effectively squares the number of characters available, albeit that most of them would not look that pretty. So if this guy’s machine was working on something like ASCII, with just 256 different chars available, allowing doubled characters extends the range to 65535 possible characters.
So not altogether crazy!
A design decision that while accepts the limits of material and space, gives the programmer the permission to go back and overwrite a character in order to create a far greater range of expression, accretive to the belief that the creator cares more about the human than the machine.
The moore’s law moving the PCs speed forward and giving us twice more efficiency every two years worked as a charme for a long time like the carriage hitting the right edge of the paper and going all the way back preparing for the next round.
It seems that this time, the sheet is all painted and needs to to be replaced by a new blank sheet of paper, as the struggles of the PC Industry and the dissatisfaction of Mac Users rise, hinting that the trade-off between efficiency and beauty isn’t doing it for the business anymore.
Change is coming as people are looking for the future in the past. There is something scaringly appealing in saying
Make programming great again!
A romantic love for sounds and notation while fully aware that writing code the 1975 APL way won’t cut it for the challenges of 2017.
But this is the time we are living in and until we go back and overwrite the days of future pasting of the last thirty years all over the place in our society there is not much way to move forward.
Nevermind my loud thinking, let’s go back to fact-checking.
