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History of LISP (software collection committee) edited by Paul McJones. Abstract:

The goal of this project is to locate source code, design documents, and other materials concerning the original LISP I/1.5 system, and as many of its follow-ons as possible. LISP was one of the earliest high-level programming languages and introduced many ideas such as garbage collection, recursive functions, symbolic expressions, and dynamic type-checking. This is a pilot project of the Computer History Museum's Software Collection Committee to develop expertise in the collection, preservation, and presentation of historic software. Comments, suggestions, and donations of additional materials are greatly appreciated.

I ran across this page by accident while googling for 'lisp assembler lap' because I'd recently learned LAP was the standard acronym for lisp assembly program (ie a lisp based assember), which also described what I was currently trying to do. It's funny how often a new idea is just the Nth repetition of many old ideas. :-)

Anyway, this page links a wealth of interesting material on early Lisp implementations. (Unfortunately a number of the PDF documents don't open on my current machine, so I can't read several of the items I find most interesting, including everything L. Peter Deutsch authored.)

I'm having quite good fun rewriting ecto from the ground up for version 3. The original code base was very old in coder's terms. It was a straight AppleScript to Cocoa conversion without any real thought about design. After all, back then (I think 4 or 5 years ago) I knew little about Cocoa or Obj-C. But now that I've learned so much about programming for MacOSX in Cocoa, I am building the new ecto up component for component in Lego fashion, staying true to the Model-View-Controller paradigm. Pretty much the same way I went with 1001 and endo. Right now, I'm developing it for 10.4, greedily using any newly introduced frameworks and functions, as so many have been added by Apple for this system version. Having a clean block-designed code base also means easier maintenance and easier feature upgrades.

Last night I was up all night. I made bug-fixes to endo while the TV was showing three World Cup Soccer games in succession. Nuts, but quite productive.

Speaking of nuts, can someone explain why Boris is comparing me to a Korean girl?

Technorati Tags: 1001, cocoa, code, ecto, endo, mvc, soccer, world cup

Wonder of wonders. One of the interesting features of SANs in general, and iSCSI in particular, is the ability to boot directly from the exposed logical units (i.e. disks in SAN terminology). You don't need local storage. Why would that be useful? It's good because you don't need local harddisks anymore. You can keep and manae the data in the SAN cloud; backup, for one thing, becomes easier this way.

Boot from SAN was working for a while in Fibre Channel environments, but it was largely absent in the iSCSI territory in the past. Well, not anymore:

http://www.infostor.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=ARTCL&SubSection=Display&PUBLICATION_ID=23&ARTICLE_ID=251922 

 Microsoft enables 'boot from SAN'
Microsoft announced today that it has worked with IBM to develop support for software-based remote SAN boot of Windows using the Microsoft iSCSI software initiator and standard network interface cards (NICs). Microsoft plans to publish the technical details of the implementation to help its partners develop iSCSI software-enabled boot.

However, note that this is not something that would would be able to try at home. It still requires special hardware changes.

'This is not a solution that can be put together by end users themselves, but by server vendors or independent software vendors,' explains Dr. Claude Lorenson, group product manager for Microsoft's Storage Division.

Humans have been formulating computational logic for execution on digital microprocessors (aka software development) for just a few years, and some people think that this profession is already a full-fledged engineering discipline.

I think this is not the case yet (by far).

Thinking otherwise actually impede the growth of this line of work into higher level of consciousness that allow us to get out of the same expired and twisted mindsets similar to waterfall-like development processes.

A trait of the infant state of our profession is the frequency of incomplete design work as a significant cause for software development projects failures, incomplete work in a central activity and outcome: design.

A mayor factor for such mediocrity comes from a misunderstanding of the role of abstraction in design work, which leads to incomplete design decisions hence incomplete designs that are supposed to be carried out without any mayor design changes.

A role of abstraction is to manage complexity, focusing on a selected set of design attributes at a given time, ignoring —just for that moment— other equally important attributes; waiting for their turn in the co-evolution process of design.

A professional software designer takes complete design decisions. A design decision is completed when the designer walks the abstraction stack all the way down and returns up to the starting level with a set of implications for that particular decision, turning it to a fully informed and conscious design decision.

The fatal state of affairs for software development projects casting crappy software is when designers do not come back and consider the attributes they left behind in their mental stimulation so-called 'abstracting' or 'modeling'.

So, we all can see that abstraction is not a mean for incomplete or insufficient work; abstraction means putting things aside for the moment, for complexity management purposes, not for leaving aspects of your work in a hang state.

During the development of a software product we all make numerous design decisions. Some decisions are done in early stages of development, while analyzing the requirements and gathering the overall architecture of the product. Other design decisions are done during the lower-level design. Finally, even during the implementation of the a single component, we are often in position to weight several design options against each other.

In the following discussion we will examine one of the common design aspects, which is the source of numerous design dilemmas: should we design the product such that it will be ready for a future change (in the requirements, in technology etc.), or should we settle for a straight forward implementation? When is our product “sufficiently-designed” and when is it “over-designed”? In other words, how can we find the golden path when it comes to designing a software system to be ready for future changes?

Read the article...

Design and programming activity as a profession is better performed with mathematics and applied logic concepts as first-class tools in the hands (heads) of practitioners.

There are a significant number of factors to take care of in order to improve design and programming skills that last. Two of those are: essential mathematics and, first-order logic (also known as first-order predicate calculus). If you are serious about a design and programming career, you know that already.

This is another trait of the current youthful state of mainstream software development industry where many, many people delude themselves into thinking that formalism means tons and tons of paperwork or (not kidding) a dress code wearing mandatory suit and tie. Then, some of them will say: 'we are formal here'.

Regardless of what people are wearing, good and needed formalism in our industry is the kind of formalism related to useful software specifications, that is to say, class interface design and programming by contract.

In other words: 'Talent Mandatory, Suit Optional' as stated in Quinn Emanuel’s philosophy towards law.

Bertrand Meyer in his book, Object-Oriented Software Construction-2nd Edition, page 400, in a section entitled 'The expressive power of assertions' said:

'Including a full specification language into the language of this book would have completely changed its nature. The language is meant to be simple, easy to learn, applicable to all areas of software construction, and implementable efficiently (with a final run-time performance similar to that of Fortran and C, and a fast compilation process).

Instead, the assertion mechanism is an engineering tradeoff: it includes enough formal elements to have a substantial effect on software quality; but stops at the point of diminishing return — the threshold beyond which the benefits of more formality might start being offset by the decrease of learnability, simplicity and efficiency.

Determining that threshold is clearly a matter of personal judgment. I have been surprised that, for the software community at large, the threshold has not moved since the first edition of this book. Our field needs more formality, but the profession has not realized it yet.'

Assertion-first design, also known as test-driven development represents a powerful and reasonable tool at the hands of more and more designers and programmers, hoping the level of mathematic formalism in software development increase in a positive way.

An absolutely essential factor in running a software company effectively is the vision from a real, actual professional programmer, period.

Indeed, the technical profile of Mr. William Henry Gates III has been an important factor at Microsoft. Of course, MBAs have their role at any company but please MBAs, consider this: do not try to run a company which does something you think understand but actually don't.

My First BillG Review

Geeks Rule and MBAs Drool

Why eBay Bought Skype

• Waterfall Software - Typeset
  

  

  Typeset lets you preview, search, and organize your font collection so that you can always find the right style for a project on your Mac.

  Tags: type, fonts, typography, software, macintosh, mac

• Waterfall Software - Wallet
  

  

  store and organize passwords, serial numbers, credit cards

  Tags: software, macintosh, mac, wallet