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Offray Luna

Algunas veces reingreso a la matriz para buscar las grietas / Sometimes I re-entry the matrix to search for the cracks

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Offray Luna

Feedback: we + tools (On ESUG 2016)

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Different ways to see a question/theme. The first image is from my PhD public repo (old one from 2011), the followings are tweets from the talks of Tudor Girba and Markus Denker. A question/theme looking proper places to develop.

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Offray Luna

Grafoscopio Tweets at ESUG16

1 min read

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Offray Luna

1 min read

An observation due to Arthur C. Clarke offers a way to understand this second trajectory: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The networked world evolves so rapidly through innovation, it seems like a frontier of endless magic.

Clarke’s observation has inspired a number of snowclones that shed further light on where we might be headed. The first, due to Bruce Sterling, is that any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from its own garbage. The second, due to futurist Karl Schroeder,1 is that any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from nature.

To these we can add one from social media theorist Seb Paquet, which captures the moral we drew from our Tale of Two Computers: any sufficiently advanced kind of work is indistinguishable from play.

 

 

 

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Offray Luna

indistinguibles

1 min read

An observation due to Arthur C. Clarke offers a way to understand this second trajectory: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The networked world evolves so rapidly through innovation, it seems like a frontier of endless magic.

Clarke’s observation has inspired a number of snowclones that shed further light on where we might be headed. The first, due to Bruce Sterling, is that any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from its own garbage. The second, due to futurist Karl Schroeder,1 is that any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from nature.

To these we can add one from social media theorist Seb Paquet, which captures the moral we drew from our Tale of Two Computers: any sufficiently advanced kind of work is indistinguishable from play.

 

 

 

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Offray Luna

Generative pluralism

1 min read

Thanks to a particularly fertile kind of generative pluralism that we know as network effects, soft technologies like language and money have historically caused the greatest broad increases in complexity and pluralism. When more people speak a language or accept a currency, the potential of that language or currency increases in a non-zero-sum way. Shared languages and currencies allow more people to harmoniously co-exist, despite conflicting values, by allowing disputes to be settled through words or trade4 rather than violence. We should therefore expect software eating the world to cause an explosion in the variety of possible lifestyles, and society as a whole becoming vastly more pluralistic.

And this is in fact what we are experiencing today.

The principle also resolves the apparent conflict between human agency and “what technology wants”: Far from limiting human agency, technological evolution in fact serves as the most complete expression of it.

 

 

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Offray Luna

Pharo MOOC notes

2 min read

This tried to be annotations using hypothesis on the Pharo MOOC I started today, but this didn't work (after trying to share hypothesis annotations publicly the MOOC platform asked for credentials), so I'll try an alternative approach by making annotations here as I advance through the lessons. This would be like notebook annotations you take when you listen your teacher or go to class.

I will put the title of the lesson with the respective note and also some other details to guide other learners. If a note is too long I will create an indepedent content. All content related to the Pharo MOOC will be tagged as to make it browsable from here.

1.3. Pharo Vision

While explaining the ecosystem metaphore, Steph talk about Universities, Research Groups and Companies. Would be good to enrich that ecosystem by adding non-institutional places, like hacker/maker spaces and hobbist practitioners and communities around the world (and a Roassal world visualization on where are they would be nice! :-) ).

On the "You can help and get impact" and "Pharo is an Enabler" slides, I have experience this by myself. Maybe linking some testimonies here, particularly from newbies like myself, could show how this empowerment works in practice (complementing Ben's quote on more advanced subjects).

Showing small and big companies in the "Industrial Members" slide is a testimony of this enabling tecnology for several sizes, dealing with the complex problems of the big ones, but also empowering the smaller in a diverse ecosystem.

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Offray Luna

All creativity is an extended form of a joke. Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.” Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in—the one that we think is reality.

Alan Kay, http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

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Offray Luna

the number-one thing you want to make the user interface be is a learning environment—something that’s explorable in various ways, something that is going to change over the lifetime of the user using this environment. New things are going to come on, and what does it mean for those new things to happen?

This means improvements not only in the applications but also in the user interface itself. Some of those ideas were quite manifest in the original Macintosh, but are much less manifest in the Macs of today—and of course never really made it to Microsoft. That just wasn’t their way of thinking about things, and I think a programming language is the same way. Even if the user is an absolute expert, able to remember almost everything, I’m always interested in the difference between what you might call stark meaning and adjustable meaning.

Alan Kay, http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

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Offray Luna

So the death of in a way came as soon as it got recognized by real programmers as being something useful; they made it into more of their own image, and it started losing its nice end-user features.

But that’s OK. This project that we started in 1995 was to make Squeak as an implementation vehicle for another end-user system for children. That was done quite well and is being used by many, many thousands of children around the world. The other way of looking at this is to realize that computers are made to be programmed by human beings. Let’s just roll our own. Let’s not complain about Java, or even about Smalltalk.

In fact, let’s not even worry about Java. Let’s not complain about Microsoft. Let’s not worry about them because we know how to program computers, too, and in fact we know how to do it in a meta-way. We can set up an alternative point of view, and we’re not the only ones who do this, as you’re well aware.

There are numerous examples on the Internet of people who have gone to one level or another by making their own point of view. Squeak is the most comprehensive because it spans the whole field. It doesn’t require any particular operating system to run because it’s self-sufficient and has a full set of tools and applications and so forth, but there are many interesting functional languages, particularly in Europe, that are of interest.

Alan Kay, http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

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Offray Luna

I think the style languages appeal to people who have a certain mathematical laziness to them. Laziness actually pays off later on, because if you wind up spending a little extra time seeing that “oh, yes, this language is going to allow me to do this really, really nicely, and in a more general way than I could do it over here,” usually that comes back to help you when you’ve had a new idea a year down the road. The agglutinative languages, on the other hand, tend to produce agglutinations and they are very, very difficult to untangle when you’ve had that new idea.

Alan Kay, http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

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