agere: to drive, lead, act, or do. nice paper on software agents from jeffrey m. bradshaw “The idea of an agent originated with John McCarthy in the mid-1950’s, and the term was coined by Oliver G. Selfridge a few years later, when they were both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They had in view a system that, when given a goal, could carry out the details of the appropriate computer operations and could ask for and receive advice, offered in human terms, when it was stuck. An agent would be a ‘soft... [motz]

5:23:27 PM  #  

Text Vs. Binary?. I don't know if I agree with this screed, but it makes for interesting reading. Excerpt:


If, several years ago, I had to divide techies into two camps, I would do it along these lines: binary and text. The binary camp would be exemplified by Microsoft and Apple; the text camp would be Unix.

For instance, aside from AppleScript, VBScript, and batch files, most programming on Apple/MS was done using compiled binaries; those binaries stored things like preferences in binary files.

On the other hand, Unix programmers generally prefer to use human-readable shell scripts when possible.

That "text culture" spills over into things like the design of the Internet's components: email, USENET, the Web, etc.

This "culture" leads to all manner of problems: big human readable text files must be parsed, and mistakes are usually discovered at run-time, rather than at compile-time. To a computer, a text file is just a subtype of a binary file. The difference is that the specification of a text file is almost always less precise than that of a binary file. And, text files can use different character sets, languages, and the like; these problems are not found in binary files.

[Cincom Smalltalk Blog]

[actually it's more than binary vs text "code"]

Untyped bytestream as information tranport; conscious effort at erasing runtime type information (and obviously safety); arbitrary interpretation of bitpatterns; confusing bits and bytes with data; persistant refusal to employ sane abstraction layer between low level and high level constructs like bits vs character vs encoding vs glyphs vs fonts, etc; "fiat lex"; "text is text."; "C programs read a character at a time and do nothing." [pjw? need accurate quote]; "char is a small int."

5:11:56 PM  #  

TODO: find some decent books on CICS. Million programmers use it everyday and it handles more transactions than WWW.

1:20:48 PM  #