Ted Nelson's Computer Paradigm Expressed as One-Liners (1999)

by maxwell • 13 years ago

72 18 13 years ago

I found this a good takeaway:

> What people call an “intuitive interface” is generally one which becomes obvious as soon as it is demonstrated. But before the demo there was no intuition of what it would be like. Therefore the real first sense of “intuitive” is retroactively obvious.

Programming languages often tout their “intuitive” this or that—syntax, semantics, whatever. It’s all crap written by a well-meaning designer who’s gotten so deep in their design that they can’t see how “obvious to me” does not mean “obvious to any equally intelligent person”.

Consider the kinds of interfaces which actually are intuitive, say, well-designed radio or temperature controls in a car. They afford experimentation, provide instant feedback, and need little to no labelling.

That’s how I think programming ought to be, at least at a beginner level. A text-based programming language is a great tool for power users, but it’s totally unapproachable for a new user because they don’t know the shibboleth. A blank slate is not friendly; in the rare event that the fledgling has a specific problem in mind already (“I want to make Mario!”) then they almost certainly don’t know even the most general form of what their solution would look like. Your beautiful, informative, 400-page manual does not make your language intuitive, just usable.

The end goal of my current language project—which is textual—is to serve as a basis for that kind of interface. If the system is designed from the beginning to support experimentation and play, and there is a 1:1 mapping to the “real thing” to avoid the disparity of “beginner mode” and “advanced mode”, then I think that would open up programming to a lot of people.

Essentially the opposite of COBOL: don’t try to make a system “easy for non-programmers”. Try to make a system that helps people become programmers so that they can realise their visions of games, applications, art pieces, and beyond.

networked• 13 years ago

Ted Nelson is very quotable and I would highly recommend reading at least the freely available excerpt [1] from his seminal 1974 book Computer Lib / Dream Machines to anyone who frequents HN. For those who don't know, his most famous invention is the term "hypertext" and he also appears to have invented, though is lest often acknowledged for, the history stack with its accompanying "back" button in Web browsers.

Nelson's writings have a different sensibility from the mainstream of both his fellow computing pioneers of the 1970s and the hackers of today. An example of his thinking from before even UNIX was a household name is that Nelson decried hierarchy as a form of organization for data (e.g., in a computer's file system), instead emphasizing association [2], which he thought closer to how humans actually organize knowledge. He also argued that instead of dialogue-based computer instruction that was taking off at the time the best method to use a computer for learning would be to "motivate the user and let him loose in a wonderful place", that place being a hypertext knowledge base (see [1], p. 313).

It is disappointing that in spite of Nelson's books being incredibly influential (to the point where they were reprinted by Microsoft Press because of the company's fondness for the author) most of his ideas never saw a complete implementation in a popular product. I'd love to read a doctoral thesis/book on the history of Project Xanadu -- a hypertext Web project started in 1960 that was supposed to have content transclusion and microtransactions (!) -- with an in-depth analysis of the factors that led it to where it is now (i.e., still unfinished today). (Gary Wolf's article "The Curse of Xanadu" [3] is the closest we have to that but it has multiple problems, to the point where Nelson has published a refutation [4].)

Today Ted Nelson's background in art (the man has, among other things, a claim to writing the world's first rock musical [5]) and fondness for pure performance (which is what I believe his recent video "I Think I Know Who Satoshi Is" [6] to be) may be a factor that limits the appeal of his message to most "techies" (his term), preventing them from more deeply investigating his message.

[1] http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-21-nelson.pdf

[2] Nelson's alternative to the file hierarchy was associative "metadata" a-la the MEMEX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MEMEX#Associative_trails). With WinFS canned I'm still waiting for someone to implement something even close to that.

[3] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html

[4] http://xanadu.com.au/ararat

[5] http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/dutton/2007/12/10/the-first-rock-...

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emDJTGTrEm0

leoc• 13 years ago

His /Geeks Bearing Gifts/ http://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-nelson/geeks-bearing-gifts/pape... http://hyperland.com/ccynPage.htm is well worth the money too.

bachback4• 13 years ago

I very much agree. I find it amazing that he does not get more credit. What is very unfortunate is that Ted never took the time to learn more about programming languages. For example file systems are there for a reason and only now, with all the computing power, can we partly realize alternative structures.

bachback4• 13 years ago

P.S.: TN is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Perhaps not top10, but definitely top50, after Einstein, Freud, Chomsky, etc. He talked about personal computing before personal computers. He invented (i.e. thought of) Hypertext, before people did have access to computers. Building things is important, no doubt. But thinking about them is also important. Note the three thinkers I mentioned also never built anything. They wrote books/articles. For instance Nelson largely influenced IBM in building the PC. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kasu0BhRFGo. He also influenced Steve Jobs, I believe quite heavily. At least Woz mentions the influence of Nelson and I think many ideas of Jobs actually came from Nelson in some sense.

btilly• 13 years ago

The saying, the perfect is the enemy of the good sums up a lot of Ted Nelson's life.

He has a lot of ideas. They inspire people. He's been working on them for ages. (Xanadu was started in 1960.) But he never is satisfied, he's always changing it, he never releases (OK, an incomplete form of Xanadu was released in 1998...), and the key parts that people care about have been released elsewhere in a form that he doesn't like.

hga• 13 years ago

A bit worse than that; from a friend who looked at it:

They didn't do the basic end to end work, so creating a client to display a Xanadu document was almost impossibly onerous. You had to grok and use around 6 different things, and, well, however nice the backend might be, it just wasn't practical.

Also an example of the perils of stealth mode, I found the above believable simply because they'd been in stealth mode for decades.

reeses4• 13 years ago

I compare Ted Nelson to Alan Kay in the continuum of visionaries. They both have and have had far-seeing, inspirational, empowering visions of applied computer technology. They are both, of course, incredibly quotable, even outside IT.

Ted Nelson futzed around and, mostly after the fact, other people discovered that the web was kinda sorta really close to Xanadu, but that it would be really awesome if it had been designed with that vision in mind.

Whereas Alan Kay followed through on predicting the future by inventing it.

I'm still astonished that, even with the backing of Autodesk, we don't even have transclusion as part of the web.

hardwaresofton2• 13 years ago

Feels like this article could be summed up with "everything you know about computers is wrong and poorly designed"

reeses4• 13 years ago

That's just about right, though.

The Unix model is a mess, the WOSA is a mess, personal computing hardware is a stack of hacks, programming environments are a poorly integrated mess, software 'engineering' is still back in the age of siege engineering rather than modern engineering discipline, and emacs still takes ages to boot.

Computers are marvelous productivity and life-enhancement tools, but following the easy path has led to stagnation in the mainstream.

hardwaresofton2• 13 years ago

upvoted for "emacs still takes ages to boot" -- hit me right where it counts.

I wonder though, is reckless advancement better than taking time to do it right? A lot of people are finding success with the fail-and-iterate model -- isn't that essentially what we've identified as a problem now?

ceautery• 13 years ago

"Oh, SURE the Macintosh interface is Intuitive! I've always thought deep in my heart that command-z should undo things." -- Margy Levine

Genius.

ccera2• 13 years ago

TL;DR: Grumpy, bitter man is grumpy and bitter.

I suppose Nelson deserves some credit for being a visionary, but there are two definitions for visionary in the dictionary: (1) A person with unusual powers of foresight; (2) A person given to fanciful speculations and enthusiasms with little regard for what is actually possible.

Nelson is obviously much more the second than the first.

He's no more visionary than at least a thousand other people who ACTUALLY DID STUFF.

Some really smart individuals, like Nelson, get lost in their own private jungles. Here's an example of what I mean. Nelson inserted a note in this document in 2012 wherein he points to the rise of XPointer and XPath as validating something he said back in 1999. XPointer and XPath?! XPointer and XPath have had barely any impact on anything that's happened in computing since 1999.

Nelson is apparently in such a deep fog of irrelevance that he somehow perceives XPointer and XPath as being important in some way? It's bizarre. I think it illustrates why he never managed to accomplish anything or make any actual contributions beyond his "visionary" grenade-throwing.

bachback4• 13 years ago

Yes! You're almost half right! But more seriously TN is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. see my note above.

ccera2• 13 years ago

I am thoroughly familiar with Nelson. I've read probably a majority of everything he's ever written. He's a smart man and a visionary. As I stated.

Doesn't change the fact that he hasn't been very successful at turning his ideas into anything actually useful to people, and doesn't change the fact that he shits all over the amazing accomplishments of thousands of other people who have.

Ted Nelson's Computer Paradigm Expressed as One-Liners (1999)

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