Seeing Like a Linguist

# Seeing Like a Linguist

Mariano Guerra - 🐦 [@warianoguerra](https://twitter.com/warianoguerra)

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# What am I Doing Here?

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Presenting a document

In a desktop web browser

Javascript translates markdown to an HTML page

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Created it in a console

Emulating a terminal

Running a shell

To run vi

And other command line applications

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# Why?

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???

This is the Turk, or mechanical Turk.

It was supposed to be a machine that could play chess.

In 1819, Babbage played the Turk twice and lost both matches.

While Babbage suspected it was an hoax, it got him thinking about "computers"

OOO

https://spectrum.ieee.org/untold-history-of-ai-charles-babbage-and-the-turk

One man who was given the opportunity to see the machine up close was Charles
Babbage, the famed British engineer and mathematician. In 1819, Babbage played
the Turk twice and lost both matches. According to Tom Standage, who has
written an extensive history of the Turk, Babbage suspected that the automaton
was not “intelligent" but merely an elaborate hoax, concealing a person who
was, somehow, controlling the Turk's moves from the inside.

While Babbage suspected such trickery, he didn't take the time to write an
exposé, as some of his contemporaries did. But his encounter with the Turk
seems to have percolated in his mind in the years following.

Very shortly after, he began work on a design for an automatic mechanical
calculator called the Difference Engine, which he wanted to use to generate
error-free tables of logarithms.

As Babbage's collaborator Sir David Brewster later wrote of the Turk: “Those
automatic toys which once amused the vulgar, are now employed in extending the
power and promoting the civilization of our species."

Babbage's encounter with the Turk at the very beginning of computing's history
serves as a reminder that hype and innovation sometimes go hand in hand.

---

???

In fact, the first real machine that could play chess, El Ajedrecista, was
created here in Spain in 1910 by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo, it could play a
restricted set but it could beat humans on that subset.

OOO

https://history-computer.com/leonardo-torres-chess-machine/

In the beginning of 1910, Leonardo Torres y Quevedo commenced his work to make
a chess-playing automaton, to prove his theory that machines could do many
things ‘popularly classed as thought.’ Torres designed the first automaton
machine that had the unique ability to play chess. This was the first automaton
of its kind in the world. Leonardo called it El Ajedrecista, a Spanish name
translated ‘The Chess Player’. Although it did not play the whole game (from
start to finish), El Ajedrecista could make several moves, calculate well, and
‘mate’ with its opponent.

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???

This is a Jacquard loom being driven by punched cards.

Jacquard was another person that got Babbage thinking.

He suggested that punch cards might be used to govern the operation of computing
devices

he did not transform this idea into a practical product

By the late nineteenth century, conductors on railway cards routinely used very
simple punch cards to record the destination of passengers on trains.

OOO

The Englishman Charles Babbage greatly admired Jacquard’s invention. He
suggested that punch cards might be used to govern the operation of computing
devices, although he did not transform this idea into a practical product. By
the late nineteenth century, conductors on railway cards routinely used very
simple punch cards to record the destination of passengers on trains.

https://www.si.edu/spotlight/punch-cards

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???

On the other side of the atlantic an engineer named Hollerith saw a railroad
punch card when he was thinking about solving the problem with the U.S. Census

The 1880 census took 7 years to tabulate. Policymakers worried that the 1890
census wouldn’t even be counted by 1900, making impossible to recalculate the
confressional seats, as required by the constitution.

Hollerith tabulating equipment was used in the 1890 U.S. Census

OOO

In the late 1880s, American engineer Herman Hollerith saw a railroad punch card
when he was trying to figure out new ways of compiling statistical information
for the U.S. Census.

The 1880 census took a full 7 years to tabulate. Policymakers worried that the
1890 census wouldn’t even be counted by 1900, making reapportionment of
congressional seats—as required by the Constitution—impossible.

Hollerith tabulating equipment was used in the 1890 U.S. Census

https://www.si.edu/object/cdc-88157-punch-card:nmah_690489

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/herman-holleriths-tabulating-machine-2504989/

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???

A Patch in Punched Cards in the Harvard Mark I computer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_(computing)#History

https://www.si.edu/spotlight/punch-cards/punch-cards-data-processing

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Tabulating Machine Company

👇

International Business Machines

???

IBM cards had eighty columns of rectangular holes while those of Remington Rand
had ninety columns of circular holes. Tabulating machines were widely used in
both government and commerce, with cards designed to meet the needs of
customers. For example, checks issued by the U.S. government often came on
punch cards.

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> “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

> -- Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

???

When IBM and Remington Rand began selling electronic computers in the years
following World War II, punch cards became the preferred method of entering
data and programs onto them.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card_input/output#/media/File:IBM_650_at_Texas_A&M.jpg

---

???

From punched cards to do I/O it evolved to use teleprinters, which come from
Telegraphs and morse code.

To imagine why a teletype would be useful with a computer, recall those two
remotely linked typewriters from the last example and replace one of them with
an interactive computer system. Instead of communicating with a remote
teleprinter, you’re sending and receiving human-readable text to and from a
computer. The computer could be in the same room, in another part of a
building, or even halfway across the world when linked by a telephone network.

https://www.howtogeek.com/727213/what-are-teletypes-and-why-were-they-used-with-computers/

Because of its low price and ASCII-compatibility, the Model 33 was widely used
with early minicomputers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33

---

???

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson chose the "@" symbol on his Teletype Model 33 ASR

http://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/07/the-symbol-part-1-of-2/

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???

1889 Hammond typewriter

@: at the rate of

If looks like a keyboard?

https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/08/the-symbol-part-2-of-2/

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???

Shift Key

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_telegraph

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???

Upper Case, Lower Case

https://twitter.com/mrmrs_/status/866067646357352448

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# Carriage Return / Line Feed

UNIX: \n

Apple: \r

MS-DOS and Windows: \r\n

???

[Vim Book](http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/doc/book/vimbook-OPL.pdf)

Page 120:

Back in the early days, the old Teletype machines took two character times to
do a newline. If you sent a character to the machine while it was moving the
carriage back to the first position, it tried to print it on-the-fly, leaving a
smudge in the middle of the page.

The solution was to make the newline two characters: <Return> to move the
carriage to column 1, and <Line Feed> to move the paper up.

When computers came out, storage was expensive. Some people decided that they
did not need two characters for end-of-line.

The UNIX people decided they could use <Line Feed> only for end-of-line.

The Apple people standardized on <Return>.

The MS-DOS (and Microsoft Windows) folks decided to keep the old <Return> <Line Feed>.

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???

Someone siting at a Console, next to a terminal

NLS

OOO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_940

The SDS machines also included a paper tape punch and reader, line printer, and
a real-time clock. They bootstrapped from paper tape.

The influential Stanford Research Institute "oN-Line System" (NLS) was
demonstrated on the system. This machine was later used to run Community
Memory, the first bulletin board system.

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QED ("quick editor") is a line-oriented computer text editor designed for teleprinter usage

Thompson's versions of qed were notable as the first to implement regular expressions

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When Thompson was creating unix he created ed, a subset of qed

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George Coulouris created em (ed for mortals)

???

take advantage of video terminals

While visiting Berkeley he showed em to Bill Joy

OOO

George Coulouris of Queen Mary College, London, which had installed Unix in
1973, developed an improved version called em in 1975 that could take advantage
of video terminals.

While visiting Berkeley, Coulouris presented his program to Bill Joy, who
modified it to be less demanding on the processor; Joy's version became ex and
got included in the Berkeley Software Distribution.

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Bill Joy crated ex (extended ed)

Then a full-screen visual interface: vi

???

ex got a full-screen visual interface
becoming the vi text editor

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???

Why vi keys for navigation?

https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys

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???

https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys

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???

Dennis Ritchie (standing) with Ken Thompson at work in 1972.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/oct/16/john-naughton-dennis-ritchie-unix

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sed (substitution comand of ed s/a/b)

grep g/re/p (ed: globally search for a regular expression and print matching lines)

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???

Command Line interface

The SHELL: A Global Tool for Calling and Chaining Procedures in the System

https://people.csail.mit.edu/saltzer/Multics/Multics-Documents/MDN/MDN-4.pdf

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???

Teleprinters: noisy, slow, used lot of paper.

Teletypes, glass teleprinters, faster, quieter, save money on paper

80 coulmns

one of the first terminals to support ANSI escape codes for cursor control and
other tasks

became the de facto standard for hardware video terminals and later terminal
emulators

OOO

Teletypes did have some significant drawbacks as computer terminals. They were
very noisy due to the mechanical action of the impact printhead rapidly hitting
the paper. They were also slow, often limited to about 10 characters per
second. And finally, you had to use a lot of paper.

In the 1960s, companies such as IBM began experimenting with computer terminals
that used CRT displays instead of paper for output. These early “glass
teletypes” sought to provide faster interaction speeds and save money on paper
waste.

https://www.howtogeek.com/727213/what-are-teletypes-and-why-were-they-used-with-computers/

It was one of the first terminals to support ANSI escape codes for cursor
control and other tasks, and added a number of extended codes for special
features like controlling the status lights on the keyboard. This led to rapid
uptake of the ANSI standard, which became the de facto standard for hardware
video terminals and later terminal emulators.

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???

a terminal of the 21 century emulating a vt100 that simulates a teleprinter

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???

Image around 1959

https://topshouts.in/a-misinterpretation-from-ibm-consultants-and-the-rise-of-xerox/

Xerox buys SDS, gets into computers

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???

https://www.wired.com/story/the-1970s-conference-that-predicted-the-future-of-work/

Working remotely with a team back in Palo Alto, the presenters showed how a
computer could **edit documents**, **draw bar charts**, toggle between software
programs, and pull up **documents and drawings** from stored memory. They
**highlighted text on screen**, remotely collaborated with others on far-away
Altos, **completed expense forms electronically, forwarded them for processing,
typed in foreign characters, sent emails, and printed documents**.

That day Jobs and his engineers sat in awe as Goldberg and the Alto team demoed
the intricacies of the mouse-driven GUI, Smalltalk, as well as the Ethernet
technology they had developed to network their Altos together. Jobs was so
blown away by the details of the GUI, the rest passed over him like a fog. “It
was one of those apocalyptic moments,” Jobs said. “I remember within ten
minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every
computer would work this way someday. It was obvious.”

A second important fact about the 1979 demo to Steve, was that he missed most
of what we showed him. More than 15 years later he admits this in this
interview: How Steve Jobs got the ideas of GUI from XEROX where he says that we
showed him three things but he was so blinded by the first one (the GUI) that
he missed both networking and real object-oriented systems programming.

the PARC visit by apple, Jobs was show 3 things OOP, GUIs and Networks, only
saw one: GUIS -> macintosh

Later on NeXT did the 3, helped someone on CERN

---

???

1981

Office of the future: edit documents, drawings, draw charts, complete expenses, print
documents.

Desktop, files, folders

https://interface-experience.org/objects/xerox-star-8010-information-system/

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---

???

https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/world-wide-web-global-information-space

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???

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/first-website-ever-goes-back-online-on-the-open-webs-20th-birthday/

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???

Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign beginning in late 1992

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# "Netscape plus Java kills Windows"

???

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386327

"Netscape plus Java kills Windows" On May 23, 1995, at Sun’s public announcement of Java, Netscape announced its intent to license Sun’s Java technology for use in the browser.

Bill Joy -> Sun

Sun: "The Network is the Computer"

Java the language of the internet
.NET as response

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# XMLHttpRequest

JSON didn't exist yet

???

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest

The concept behind the XMLHttpRequest object was originally created by the
developers of Outlook Web Access (by Microsoft) for Microsoft Exchange Server
2000

The Mozilla project developed and implemented an interface called
nsIXMLHttpRequest into the Gecko layout engine

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# Google Chrome

A better web experience kills Microsoft

???

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# And Here We Are

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# Does it Make Sense?

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> “The records must be put in such shape that a machine could read them.

> This is most readily done by punching holes in cards.”

> --  Herman Hollerith, Inventor of the Hollerith Machine, April 1889

???

Clearly Seein Like a Computer

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# Why Do We Code This Way?

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> Nice dev tooling won't push the envelope for cloud app development when the
core problem is programming models that leave developers unequipped to manage
concurrency, state, fault tolerance, and scalability.

> There's more to Developer Experience than tooling.

> -- [@reubenbond](https://twitter.com/reubenbond/status/1524093567710351361)

???

Check Orleans

Let's make Orleans on the BEAM finally happen

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Glamorous Toolkit

The Moldable Development Environment

- Multi-language notebook

- Fancy code editor

- Software analysis platform

- Visualization engine

- Knowledge management system

All programmable

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# Unison: A new approach to

- Distributed programming

- Refactoring

- Durable storage

- Storing code

- Dependencies

???

Supports algebraic effects ('abilities'), replace monads

Programs are not text

Content-Addressed Code

Names are metadata

Codebase is append only

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# Distributed programming

- No more writing encoders and decoders at every network boundary

- Say where you want computations to run and it happens

- Dependencies are deployed on the fly

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# Refactoring

Your codebase is always live and typechecks, even in the middle of a refactoring.

Unison has structured refactoring sessions, not a big misleading list of type errors.

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# Durable storage

No more writing translation code between your values and the storage layer.

Directly store values and unpersist them later without fear of dependency conflicts or version mismatches.

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# Storing code

Other tools try to recover structure from text; Unison stores code in a database.

This eliminates builds, provides for instant nonbreaking renames, type-based search, and lots more.

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# Dependencies

Many dependency conflicts arise from definitions competing for the same names.

Since Unison references code by hash instead of by name, an entire class of
conflicts can be eliminated.

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# There a free conference, go!

[unison-lang.org/unison-forall-2022/](https://www.unison-lang.org/unison-forall-2022/)

- [Spark-like distributed datasets in under 100 lines of Unison](https://www.unison-lang.org/articles/distributed-datasets/)
- [First class documentation with live examples](https://www.unison-lang.org/blog/march_2020-update/)
- [Every service could be a library](https://twitter.com/pchiusano/status/1530036232515948554?t=r7BPtfDScj6aN7g_RgFHkA&s=09)
- [unison.cloud](https://www.unison.cloud/)

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# Darklang

Dark is a new way of building serverless backends.

Just code your backend, with no infra, framework or deployment nightmares.

[darklang.com](https://darklang.com/)

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# Hazel

Hazel is a live functional programming environment that is able to typecheck,
manipulate, and even run incomplete programs, i.e. programs with holes.

There are no meaningless editor states.

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# Racket, the Language-Oriented Programming Language

[racket-lang.org](https://racket-lang.org/)

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"An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one."

-- [Design Principles Behind Smalltalk](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.html) - Daniel H. H. Ingalls

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**MirageOS** is a library operating system that constructs unikernels for secure,
high-performance network applications across a variety of cloud computing and
mobile platforms.

"tree shake the operating system"

[mirageos.org](https://mirageos.org/)

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# T2 Tile

The T2 Tile project is an attempt to build the world's first indefinitely
scalable computational stack

[t2tile.com](https://t2tile.com)

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- [Have you ever programmed on your phone?](https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1531390382298304512?t=LFiK4GWlm80SPD2YZmhATQ&s=09)

- Made your devices collaborate?

- Are we going to emulate a VT100 in VR too?

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# Thanks

Mariano Guerra - 🐦 [@warianoguerra](https://twitter.com/warianoguerra)

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