This was one of the best articles I've read lately, it's not filled with empty prose as is the style today, it's just filled with the history of a man who was one of several who founded the internet and no more.
I agree with him that we need to keep iterating the foundations of the internet and keep it open and protect against the corporate takeover. I'm not sure how best to do that so I guess all I can do is work on my small areas of influence at work and in my personal projects.
I do subscribe and enjoy it. On the other hand, I definitely don't read it cover to cover. I imagine they're the most comprehensive magazine in the world in covering political and business affairs in places that I imagine a lot of people would have trouble finding on a map. And there's a limit to how much time I'm going to spend reading about those sorts of topics that just aren't all that interesting (or important) to me.
Writing concise prose is harder than the stream-of-consciousness style; while the former may start off as the latter, it takes a lot of editing to hone it into a sharp implement.
> Writing concise prose is harder than the stream-of-consciousness style...
Totally true, but I think that's not what's happening. Yesterday an HN post was made about this https://lithub.com/the-wolves-of-stanislav-an-improbably-tru... It's carefully written to be like that, it's verbose by design, and I started skimming then closed it. I don't know why these timewaster articles are produced either, but it's not accident or laziness. Plenty irritating though.
If I've read you correctly, you've dismissed a generally well regarded literary writer as an author of a "timewaster article".
You may be correct, but considering the author's long career and standing, you should consider the possibility that the issue here is your personal taste rather than the merits of the writer.
Perhaps there's a generation that has seen little else, and takes this to be the best or only way to write? Are we teaching people to write this way, with examinations having a time limit and where, in practice, the score correlates strongly with length? (Though that has been the case for a long time.) Is concise writing taken to be difficult-textbook style, and undesirable anywhere else?
Print media editors necessarily have to constrain length, and authors learned to write accordingly. Nowadays, a lot of writing is unconstrained either by physical limits or editors.
The specific example you give appears to be intentionally literary in intent, and so conciseness is not necessarily a prime virtue. When authors were paid by the word, prolixity was effectively encouraged, and this is obvious in some of Poe's work.
It's more than expressing a thought with more words than necessary: so many articles start with something along the likes of
"it was a sunny May afternoon in the office of Dr. Whoever, where the cobblestones in the entrance glinted the fading sunlight. When Dr. Whoever was a boy, his father would take him out fishing..." ... and rambles on with meaningless details, containing perhaps a handful of passages in the article that are actually relevant to what the title promised me.
Perhaps a clearer example is when you find a recipe online. You will find pages of how the recipe has been in the family for ages, and how the author's family is delighted with it, and the innumerous and unproven health benefits it has, and how it's so easy to make, etc. The actual recipe is half a page.
Conciseness isn't necessarily a technological limitation. During the Victorian Era "triple-decker novels" were the in-thing.
Then there's the old aphorism: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
We want to claim that style obfuscates content. However, simplicity can also be a style that obfuscates content by its nature, just as much as any other, maybe sometimes more than any other.
Maybe the problem is we want to implicitly assume that communication styles are simply accretions around the true message which exists in non-physical being, and if we could just 'read minds', everything would be perfect, and as with Gnosticism, the 'Truth' gets weighed down with the sin of physicality (wrapped up in words in this case). So we try to be verbal ascetics, throwing our sentences, rather than our bodies, in the ovens to strip flesh. When in reality the words do not convey like boxcars carrying grain, but are the thing in themselves and solely such. So maybe this ends up back at a kind of radical materialism, a world were nothing is backed by the pure truth of God (or, in this case, 'pure information').
@mellosouls, @foldr: of course it's taste, let's agree on that. But I reckon my opinion counts, and sure, the author could have done lots of 'better' (= more readable to me) stuff. But when the articles are about wolves, get to the bloody point please; I'm working, my time is limited.
Also sloppy literary self indulgences: "And whether they were there or not, I choose to believe in the wolves"
In other contexts such as actual physical survival, reality matters 100% and ignoring it can get you killed.
I think that it was more a thing in earlier years. When you had more time than you had stuff to read, long, meandering articles were wonderful. But that is, um, not the condition of most people on HN.
I doubt SEO which, in addition to metadata and so forth, is mostly about using terminology that people search for.
A lot of people naturally ramble and there are also certainly quality magazines that go for a longer more literary style (e.g. The New Yorker) that you apparently don't care for.
The Economist, while it likes its clever turns of phrase, especially in headlines, is both well-written/edited and direct.
How in the world is this not recognized earlier? He got awarded in 2003, but that is still way too late.
I think we should have a list in which all stories of underdeserved computer scientists should be displayed. Alan Turing's example is a well-known one. I still can't believe how he was treated. But apparently he isn't the only example of being underdeserved.
A significantly underrated progenitor. Not always recognised, and certainly not reflected adequately in the official historia recited often by Americans.
While I don't disagree, there is always a tendency to elevate a few people even when inventions are the collective works of many. Pouzin's contributions were important and he did coin the datagram term. At the same time, he built on earlier packet switching work by Paul Baran at RAND and Donald Davies at the UK National Physical Laboratory.
I've always wondered: who actually wrote the software for IMPs and such? Who debugged the lower-level (but still essential) operational issues? Was it the people we've heard of, or others whose contributions we've forgotten? I'm guessing the latter, but it's hard to be sure this much later.
Yes, Donald Davies goes on the same plinth. Baran was taught in our networks lectures in the early eighties. I worked with other NPL staff on OSI systems in the later eighties, nice people.
The term 'fifth man', especially in a British publication, tends to suggest cold-war spying (Anthony Blunt was number 4. As it happens, he also received royal honors, in a time when his unmasking was a closely held secret within British intelligence.)
> That program, which he described as a “shell” around the computer’s whirring innards, gave inspiration—and a name—to an entire class of software tools, called command-line shells, that still lurk below the surface of modern operating systems.
There is the website http://www.pouzinsociety.org that covers new network architectures, also John Day quoted in the article has written a good book about networking history and future paths in “patterns in network architecture”
unsurprisingly, he suffered politcal headwinds from the connection-oriented telco people. i wonder how visible that religious war is through the mists of time.
how much duplication of effort and fighting at cross purposes .. I guess up until the failure of ATM and eventual submission to voice over ip.
pretty sad how much effort was expended on things like gossip, and how many standards were warped in an attempt at reconciliation.
I agree with him that we need to keep iterating the foundations of the internet and keep it open and protect against the corporate takeover. I'm not sure how best to do that so I guess all I can do is work on my small areas of influence at work and in my personal projects.