Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?

Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?

[forsyth]

>>hate to see gnome ported and get 20meg staticaly linked
>>simple CD player

there are two ways to look at this.  some say `and therefore shared libraries
are needed'; others wonder `and why exactly is the stuff underpinning a
simple CD player 20 meg in the first place?'.

i had recently wondered why, in the computing world, names that
really ought to refer to rather nimble little things -- elf, dwarf and gnome, for instance --
almost invariably refer to overly large, complex, overblown things
(that were large to begin with).  what must their designers' gardens look like?

[9fans] efficient programs as distinct from humble programmers

[Richard Uhtenwoldt]

in the late 70s, Edsger Dijkstra and Tony Hoare advocated the
"humble-programmer" philosophy, which says that humans tend to
overestimate their ability to handle complexity in software and
consequently one should strive (in addition to one's other objectives)
to pessimize the complexity (measured in lines of code) of the software
one relies on.  often, this is achieved by finding a novel way of
viewing or conceptualizing the problem (like per-process namespaces).
they pointed out the programmer who can meet a set of requirements with
fewer lines of code is the better programmer because a smaller program
will usually be easier for the user to control, more likely to behave
the way the programmer thinks it will behave and easier for future
programmers to modify to do something the original programmer did not
provide for.

in summary, a "humbly-written" program will not unnecessarily waste the
time and the attention of the programmer trying to modify it or the user
trying to control it.

large (ie, rich, generally useful) humbly-written programs are rare. the
Plan 9 papers make it clear that the core designers of Plan 9 are humble
programmers: 3 or 4 times, I saw words to the effect "we were able to
provide this functionality in only XX,000 lines of code" (and yet Plan 9
appears to provide a rich, generally useful software environment).

it is important to distinguish between the aforementioned conserving of
human attentional resources and conserving memory, disk, bandwidth and
cpu resources.  memory size, disk size, bandwidth and cpu speed
double every few years.  the speed at which a person can learn or the
number of things a person can keep track of does not grow like that.

that is why I do not like the term "code bloat".  most Linuxers who use
that term are deploring the wasting of cpu or memory resources.  it would
be more clear if those people refer to "inefficiency".

some people --like dhog@plan9.bell-labs.com in the following quote-- use
the term "code bloat" to mean what I would rather call "gratuitous
complexity":

> > hate to see gnome ported and get 20meg staticaly linked
> > simple CD player
>
> So basically you want shared libraries to mitigate the effects
> of code bloat?  Why not do away with the code bloat instead?
> This is Plan 9's approach.

this use of "code bloat" managed to confuse at least one person,
who thought it referred to wasting memory:

>huh !?!
>
>i thought statically linking each and every application in the system
>IS code bloat

(note that I have not taken a position on shared libraries.)
--
Richard Uhtenwoldt

Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?

[Michael Dingler]

> i had recently wondered why, in the computing world, names that
> really ought to refer to rather nimble little things -- elf, dwarf and gnome,
> for instance -- almost invariably refer to overly large, complex, overblown
> things (that were large to begin with).  what must their designers' gardens
> look like?

Oh, was this paragraph meant as a troll?
SCNR

And to be honest, dwarfs and gnomes were quite small in
most folkloristic traditions, but often misshapen. So
the relationship might still be there.

BTW, what naming tradition would be suitable for Plan 9?
There aren't that many puns on Ed Wood movies. General
alien stuff? Men's names ('sam'). Cartoon references?
("Acme"). Or starting everything with "P"?
(Can't wait for the Plan9 Email Explorer)

...Michael...
(rumpelstiltskin already in use?)

Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?

[Nigel Roles]

> alien stuff? Men's names ('sam'). Cartoon references?

I don't think 'sam' implies a restriction to men's names.

Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?

[James A. Robinson]

> There aren't that many puns on Ed Wood movies. General
> alien stuff? Men's names ('sam'). Cartoon references?
> ("Acme").

I always wondered if Acme was "as in Acme Tools, Inc. (c)" or as in
"point of perfection." =)  If someone ports gnome that person can call
it Battlefield Bell Labs.


Jim

Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?

[Steve Kotsopoulos]

"Nigel Roles" wrote:
> > alien stuff? Men's names ('sam'). Cartoon references?
>
> I don't think 'sam' implies a restriction to men's names.

sam is actually short for Samantha

Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?

[Nigel Roles]

Oh, I was leaving that as an exercise to the reader.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Kotsopoulos" <steve@nevex.com>
To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Sent: Monday, June 26, 2000 3:22 PM
Subject: Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?


> "Nigel Roles" wrote:
> > > alien stuff? Men's names ('sam'). Cartoon references?
> >
> > I don't think 'sam' implies a restriction to men's names.
>
> sam is actually short for Samantha

Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?

[Michael Dingler]

> > > alien stuff? Men's names ('sam'). Cartoon references?
> >
> > I don't think 'sam' implies a restriction to men's names.
>
> sam is actually short for Samantha

Hmm, I remember seeing the name "jim" mentioned in the
original paper, where did that came from then,
"jimpanzees"?

...Michael...

Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?

[Steve Simon]

Michael Dingler wrote:
>
> > > > alien stuff? Men's names ('sam'). Cartoon references?
> > >
> > > I don't think 'sam' implies a restriction to men's names.
> >
> > sam is actually short for Samantha
>
> Hmm, I remember seeing the name "jim" mentioned in the
> original paper, where did that came from then,
> "jimpanzees"?
>
> ...Michael...

I could be wrong but I beleive it went:

	ed - The first Unix editor
	jim - a Mouse _only_ editor on the blit, where everything
		started with a 'j', somthing to do with a jerq
		but I never did find out what that was.
	sam - the end of editor evolution - perfection :-)

-Steve

Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?

[Nigel Roles]

> started with a 'j', somthing to do with a jerq
> but I never did find out what that was.

This is perhaps a pejorative reference to a certain
expensive ICL bitmapped workstation.

Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?

[Tom Duff]

On Jun 28, 10:40am, Nigel Roles wrote:
> Subject: Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?
> > started with a 'j', somthing to do with a jerq
> > but I never did find out what that was.
>
> This is perhaps a pejorative reference to a certain
> expensive ICL bitmapped workstation.

I was there, so I know the story.
When the Lucasfilm computer division
was founded in 1980, we looked around
for machines to use in animators'
and artists' workstations, and seeing
no other reasonable alternatives (Sun
and SGI had not been founded yet) we
picked the Three Rivers Computer
Corporation's PERQ (ICL sold these
in Britain.)  These gadgets were
closely modeled on the Xerox ALTO.
They could address 2MB of memory, and
had an 800x1024x1 bit display -- unheard-of
in those days of PDP-11s and cursor-
addressed terminals.

My first job at Lucasfilm was to produce
a C compiler for this machine.  Until
the compiler was written, the machine
was really only good for running the
canned trade-show demo that came with
it.  This was the usual travesty of
industrial hyperbole, making bold
claims and predictions that the
actual hardware and software could
live up to only in a marketeers
imagination.

It was inevitable that someone would
hack the demo to tell the real truth,
that the machine crashed all the time,
that the microcode was full of bugs,
that there was no software at all,
in the funniest and most embarrassing
manner possible.  The revised demo
referred to the machine as the Jerq.

Some time in early 1981, Rob came to
visit, saw the updated demo, and on
his return to Bell Labs, stole the
name to christen the similar beast
that he and Bart Locanthi (and Dave
Ditzel?) were working on.

The J theme did run through all the
jerq software names.  The debugger was
called joff (the Jerq Obscure Feature
Finder), the editor was jim, the
bitmap editor was jraw (or was that
the schematic capture program?)

--
Tom Duff.  You can't go anywhere without roots.

[9fans] Blit jerq etc - postscript

[Steve Simon]

Tom Duff wrote:

[snip...]
> Some time in early 1981, Rob came to
> visit, saw the updated demo, and on
> his return to Bell Labs, stole the
> name to christen the similar beast
> that he and Bart Locanthi (and Dave
> Ditzel?) were working on.
>
> The J theme did run through all the
> jerq software names.  The debugger was
> called joff (the Jerq Obscure Feature
> Finder), the editor was jim, the
> bitmap editor was jraw (or was that
> the schematic capture program?)
>

I always wondered where it all came from...

Just in case someone is interested more, the BLIT
software has been released at
http://www.bell-labs.com/user/dwd/5620faq.html

I found this a very usefull lesson in how to implement
graphics and particularly the blitblit() function which
I needed for an embedded graphics system recently.

-Steve

Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?

[Douglas A. Gwyn]

Steve Simon wrote:
>         jim - a Mouse _only_ editor on the blit, where everything
>                 started with a 'j', somthing to do with a jerq
>                 but I never did find out what that was.

"Jerq" was a pun on "PERQ", which was a bitmap-oriented workstation.

Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?

[Douglas Fraser]

Tom Duff wrote:

<snip>

> Some time in early 1981, Rob came to
> visit, saw the updated demo, and on
> his return to Bell Labs, stole the
> name to christen the similar beast
> that he and Bart Locanthi (and Dave
> Ditzel?) were working on.
>
> The J theme did run through all the
> jerq software names.  The debugger was
> called joff (the Jerq Obscure Feature
> Finder), the editor was jim, the
> bitmap editor was jraw (or was that
> the schematic capture program?)
>
> --
> Tom Duff.  You can't go anywhere without roots.

Being a subsequent _long_ time
owner/user of a AT&T 5620
bit mapped terminal, I appreciate the
little history here.
I picked one up (way cheap) from a small
engineering firm
that had gone bankrupt. That and a
3b2/300 and three 3B1s.
No one knew what they were so no one
else bid on them.

I used the 5620 for eight years before
finally getting
a 720 ('son of 5620') and eventually a
730 with (gasp!)
an X terminal cartridge. Thematically,
the three were
very consistent. The 5620 went to the
curb after finding
that no one (me included) wanted it
anymore. The 3b2 died.
The three 3b1s (all running...) were
donated to a young
man in Pennsylvania for his computer
museum last spring.

The TEK 4014 emulation on the 5620 was a
hoot.

--
Doug

[9fans] 8088 compiling blit (was Re: Blit jerq etc - postscript)

[Russell Nelson]

Steve Simon <steve@savan.demon.co.uk> writes:

> Just in case someone is interested more, the BLIT
> software has been released at
> http://www.bell-labs.com/user/dwd/5620faq.html

If anybody's interested, GPL'ed source code for my[1] 8088 compiling
blit is at ftp://ftp.crynwr.com/pa/ .  Most of a monochrome windowing
system is there, all in 8088 assembly language.

Look for compile_blit in painti.asm in pasrc.zip.

[1] Patrick Naughton wrote substantial parts of Painter's Apprentice,
however the compiling blit is all mine.

--
-russ nelson <sig@russnelson.com>  http://russnelson.com
Crynwr sells support for free software  | PGPok |
521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | Is Unix compatible with
Potsdam, NY 13676-3213  | +1 315 268 9201 FAX   | Linux?