| I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment expressed by the introduction to this article. We really do seem to have got stuck in a deep rut, where we can make progress laterally but can't seem to come up with anything truly novel to move the state of the art dramatically forward. I have some issues with the style of the rest of the article, though. It consists of a lot of very interesting and thesis-supporting facts, but they are couched in a lot of arbitrary statements ("only 8 software innovations...") of dubious facts that don't seem very well supported on their own. I mean, yes, you say there are eight and then list eight, but I am not left convinced that those are the ONLY eight. You say that all languages (aside from a bit of backpedaling in the footnotes) are descended from FORTRAN, which is a pretty bold claim to make, but the justification you provide seems to reduce "descended from" to a mostly meaningless "probably borrowed some ideas from" that is hard to base any value judgement on. Surely not all ideas in FORTRAN were misguided! The whole rest of the article continues in this pattern, distracting from basically good points with brash and sometimes bizarre (from my perspective, at least) statements that seem to belie a wide but very spotty understanding of computing history. Granted, it's been chaotic and not terribly well-documented, but that ought to give one second thoughts about writing with such a definitive and dismissive tone. I want to repeat that I agree with the general premise, and I think that it's unfortunate that I came away from the article feeling like I disagreed with it due to the problems noted above. I had to re-read the intro to remember the intent. Hopefully this criticism is accepted in the constructive sense in which I offer it, as I think that there's some great insight there that could be more effectively conveyed. |