Jan
26
Переизобретение велосипедов
- Из книжки «Coders at work», интервью с Дугласом Крокфордом.
- Crockford: Progress isn’t always forward. Sometimes we’re leaping forward and sometimes we’re leaping backwards. When we leaped to the PC, we lost a whole lot of stuff. In the timesharing era, we had social systems online. A timesharing system was a marketplace. It was a community and everybody who was a part of that system could exchange email, they could exchange files, they could chat, they could play games.
- They were doing all this stuff and all that got lost when we went to PCs. It took another 20 years or so to get that back.
- We also took a huge step backwards in terms of security. Timesharing systems were starting to understand how to defend the system and the users of the system from each other. When we went to PCs, you owned your machine and everything running in that machine had the same privileges, the same rights to do whatever it had to do, and it turned out that not all the software running in your machine is acting in your interest.
- We’re still struggling with that. We’ve seen lots of improvements going into the PC operating systems, but we’re still not at the point where some of the more forward-looking timesharing systems were way, way back.
- Seibel: Which ones are you thinking of?
- Crockford: MULTICS was doing some really interesting stuff in cooperative processes, and having multiple address spaces which were able to communicate with each other but couldn’t get into each other’s stuff. That’s the basic baseline you need in order to start doing cooperative computing. And we’re now trying to figure out how to get that into the browser. It’s a long time between MULTICS and here. We’re starting now
- to catch up to insights that were being acted on way back then.
- Seibel: I’ve noticed a similar thing with languages—PCs were programmed in assembly because even C was too high-level and only now are we getting back to languages with some of the power of languages like Smalltalk and Lisp that existed when PCs came out. I wonder if programmers are as aware of the relatively short history of our field as they could be, or do we keep reinventing the wheel?
- Crockford: I think we’re tragically unaware of our history, and I’m often really disappointed to see that people who are now practicing this craft having no intellectual curiosity about where this stuff came from and just assume that some committee got it right and presented them with a set of tools or languages, and all they have to do is use it properly.
