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[imho, the following needs at least one more edit. but i've gotta work now...]
i enjoy watching old television programs through a contemporary lense. on the one hand, you get to see technical tricks being executed for the first (and really, best) time (three camera setup on i love lucy), or some medium executed to absolute perfection (the last "classic" stop motion animation movies like king kong x (dunnot remember the exact one))
on the other hand, the cultural variety of these shows is narrowly uninteresting. if the main character (always male) is going to be facing a trial, he'll get the girl (always female) by the end. if there is no trial by fire, then everyone is happily married in their nuclear family with 2.4 kids and the family dog.
[please save your straw man comments for the end, i'm not trying to show something about television.]
all the drooling over the special effects doesn't make up for having to sit through the overtly christian message. and if your movie diet consisted of summer blockbusters, it would be easy to claim nothing has changed.
but something has changed. the tools for filmaking are in the hands of many more people. presumably hollywood still exists, but you also have bollywood, bbc, and any number of independent filmakers.
and each person or culture that gets these tools uses them through thier own lense. almost inadvertently, they demonstrate just how narrow the previous "successful" use of the medium was. without a new lense, you "cannot not get there from here."
it took the filmaking industry half a century to evolve to this point, but the original institutions of filmaking were not leading the evolution. it was all happening at the edges.
thinking about all of this, i ask my self where we are in the software industry. early computer operating systems and languages are designed for an extremely narrow range of technical proficiency. they are unforgiving and precise.
newer efforts have broader appeal, but in a lot of ways still pay homage to these original environments. they are in the same family.
as i am thinking about the evolution of my own industry, i'm wondering: are we still in software infancy? some awkward adolenscent years? or have we reached some kind of multicultural (multi-paradigm?) software nirvana?Current Mood:  tired Current Music: random techno |
looking for a little light reading material, i pulled my barely worn copy of cweb by donald knuth off my shelf last night. cweb was an attempt to combine the TeX markup language with the c programming language. the intention was that a good program would read like a good book: the author could take you along on the journey to discovering what worked best.
the book is both a quick introduction to the idea (there is actually a name for the programming technique, but it escapes me now) and the aforementioned journey through the process of writing cweb. which is to say that the book is largly a print out of the source code to cweb.
as both a TeX and a c junkie, i really wanted cweb to work for me. for a variety of reasons it never did, and i'm hardly alone in that experience.
reading the book with new eyes last night, i thought of a book idea of my own: "evolutionary dead ends in software development." the idea of showcasing technology that went nowhere is nothing new. i don't know of any books that focus specifically on software, but i haven't bothered to look yet.
i like the idea because it would be easy to draw the wrong conclusion as to why cweb didn't work. but if you learned the right lesson, you would minimally have a better understanding of technology that does work. maximally you could get much better at predicting future innovations.
i'm not quite in a position to write a book of this sort yet. i love the history of computers and software, and my library is full of books on programming in archaic languages and architectures. but i've never undertaken to tie all the pieces together. some things that seem thoroughly dead just evolved, while others were crowded out by more successful competitors. it is not always obvious which one is which.
i'll throw this one in the article pile instead. if i can't write the whole book, i should take a swing at a couple chapters.Current Mood:  awake, surprisingly Current Music: random techno |
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