[Sussex] NOW: So, who are the all-time greats? WAS Hello all

[Geoff Teale]

OK OK...

> - Alan Turing
> - Joseph Van Neumman

Firstly... who is this Joseph Van Neumman bloke?
Secondly... Surely John Von Neumann deserves a mention? :P




Yes, but also:

* Grace Hopper.
* Marvin Minski
* The entite team from BBN in the 1960's/1970's.
* The orignal students who did the early interface development for the
internet protocols and developed the RFC system.

> - Dennis Ritchie
> - Ken Thompson

'nuff said, but many others from Bell Labs at that time (not least
Kerningham) also had signifcant impact.  UNIX and RatFor provided the
world with the basis for the operating systems we have used every since
- they changed the approach (though ITS programmers bemoan it UNIX made
the world of computing a much more productive place).

> - Don Knuth
'Good mathemtician, good acedemic, his books taught a lot of people -
one of the greats?  Maybe not.. for his achievements in computing
(although TeX was a ground breaker in publishing).


> - Tony Hoare

Good to see an obscure brit on the list :)
Quicksort is a biggey but otherwise his _only_ succesful venture was an
Algol compiler.  Again I find myself split - he did so many things that
almost came good but not quite... a classic british semi-success I guess
;)

> - Edsger Dijkstra

Agreed - one of the great thinkers - one of the men who had the ideas
that Knuth explained!  If only he'd beeen more succesful in his quest to
abolish the goto statement in 3GL's - I guess Bill Gates and the
almighty dollar won that one (although with .NET we may finally see the
end of it - my employers will be gutted - GOTO must be the second most
popular command in our software *yuk*).

> - Mitch Kapor

I guess he single handedly created the "office applications" market on
the PC / DOS platforms .. but he was just working from VisiCalc on Apple
II.  The authors of VisiCalc (Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston) should be
here instead - no question!

> - John Perry Barlow
His contributions to soceity are outside of the sphere of computing. 
The EFF is an important organisation.. the Grateful Dead have a place in
the world.  His input is maybe along the lines of an RMS (without the
deeply important hacking ).


> - Richard Stallman
err... Emacs, is pretty good, the GPL is very important, the FSF - well
I'm a member so I guess you know how I feel.  He can actually claim to
be an important and talented programmer as well as a political leader. 
He _is_ the pivot in history that bought all of this together - so YES,
he deserves a place on the list - but somehow I can't bring myself to
put him up there with Turing and Von Nuemann - to me the Scientific and
Mathematic advancements seem more important.  The social and political
stuff is just the crud of a capitalist society that we have had to learn
to circumvent.  Don't get me wrong - freedom in software (and most areas
of life) is something I have a passion for, but the _reason_ I am
passionate about software is because of the likes of Minsky and
Dijkstra.

> - Linus Torvalds

To be honest, not really.  Right place, right time, the impact of LINUX
would have been there for anyone if they delivered the kernel for the
GNU system with the right license at that time.  If Tannenbaum had
released MINIX under the GPL we'd all be sitting here on a MINIX user
group right now.  Is he a great programmer - it's not for me to say, but
he certainly is not an innovative programmer.  LINUX is not an earth
changing piece of code for technical reasons, it's earth changing
because it is the kernel of the most popular Open Source System, and
this is because it was the first Kernel available under the GPL.  


> - Larry Lessig

A lawyer - my wife thinks this is a good idea.  He and Barlow should
maybe go on a list of people making an impact in society.  He impact on
the world is so divorced from the likes of Turin that their pressence on
the same list is a little odd to say the least.

> On the basis of Open Publication, I have eliminated Gordon Moore, Bill
> Gates, Scott McNeally, Andy Grove, Paul Allen and Steve Jobs.

OK, point taken on the Openess.  But I'll evaluate this people anyway -
mostly because I enjoy slagging people off :)

Steve Jobs?  Steve Jobs, MY ARSE!  You must mean Steve Wozniak ..
jeeeeeeez...

Bill Gates?? Despite his own marketing, his personal impact as a
progammer is negligable - the endurance of BASIC as a language may be
his doing, but by pushing BASIC as anything other than a beginners
language may be enough to confine him to the fires of hell for
eternity.  In fairness he is one of the shrewdest businessmen ever to
walk the earth - unfortunately the way he achieved it was by taking an
early lead (either by luck or by screwing over his friends (depending
which story you believe )) and then breaking the law to maintain that
position even though he consistently failed to bring the innovations to
the market that the public wanted:

	Consistent, stable environments (DOS v. UNIX)
	GUI/WIMP systems		(DOS v. Lisa/Mac/PARC)
	TCP/IP				(DOS/Windows v. Everything else)
	The World Wide Web		(Microsoft v. Netscape)
	Write once, run anywhere	(Microsoft v. Sun Java)

..... and thats just the major ones - in each case Microsoft's leader
said that nobody would want these technologies.  Who buy's it when Bill
sells the world the idea that he is some kind of IT visionary - I read
the Economist's annual publication "The world in..." for this year, and
this year as every year Bill is allowed a whole page to spout of his
ideas of what the world will be doing with technology.  I have a copy of
this from 2000 here.  It claims that 2001 would be the year of the
Application Service Provider and that by 2003 businesses would nolonger
keep rooms full of servers - rather they'd spend all their budget on big
networks connections and applications provided other the internet by
Microsoft and it's partners...  Office as a rentable service anyone???  

Funny.. I remember Microsoft promoting this stuff at the time.. hand up
anyone who knows a company that runs it's operation that way?

Maybe that would be because the whole point of the idea was to get
people to rent software!  This way didn't work (because people rightly
saw that handing other all your information to another company and being
charged a heap of money for the pleasure was stupid - not to mention a
great way of getting locked in).  OK says Bill, can't squeeze the extra
cash out of them that way, then we'll just force them to rent the
software no matter how they use it - hence the current EULA.

Oh, and before anyone mentions .NET again and what a good an innovative
product it is, and how clever Bill was to come up with his .NET strategy
- well, yes it may be very nice, but:

* Web Services were in development at W3C and other places well   before
Microsoft took notice.  Indeed the Perl community were pretty much the
first people to realise that there was a better way to do RPC on the
internet and start working towards that.

* Microsoft claim they started SOAP. Yes and No.  Microsoft merely
high-jacked the commitee and somehow got HEC/WPI (Header Envelope
Corresponding / Web Procedure Invocation) renamed as SOAP (which bears
no relation to the XML technology Microsoftsuggested which was also
called SOAP).

* The model for bytecode abstraction is shamelessly a rip-off of Java
(common arguement I know, but it doesn't stop it being true).

*Any actual innovation in .NET (ie. the CLR - if you believe that
forcing a psuedo syntax of any language onto the object model of C# is
anything more than a marketing scam) is the work of one Anders
Hejlsberg.  Anders was also the man on invented the Integrated
Development Environment, the Author of Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and just
about every Borland produced in the 1990's.  He was the recipent of Dr
Dobbs's "Excellence in Programming" award in My 2001 and definitely
deserves a place in the list _way_ _way_ above Mr Gates.


> Comments / alternatives / explanations sought about who the older ones
> are???

-- 
Geoff Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation