Philip Greenspun

I'm a programmer today because of my mother (Who volunteered in my Elementary school's computer lab) and because of the articles I read by Dave Winer, Joel Spolsky and Philip Greenspun in the late 90s and early 2000. If you have not poked around http://philip.greenspun.com it's worth the time to go digging a bit. There are some gems hidden there from ten years ago.

To me, one of the nice things about the semantics of real objects is that they are “real computers all the way down (RCATWD)” – this always retains the full ability to represent anything. I remember 15 years ago when Philip Greenspun (http://philip.greenspun.com) first introduced me to the idea that a Web service is like an object -- it may seem obvious today, but at the time it completely changed my Web view: The challenge is in realizing that the Web service itself is an object. The object has state, typically stored in a relational database management system. The object has methods (the URLs) and arguments to those methods (the inputs of the forms that target the URLs). The engineering challenges of Web development are (a) coming up with the correct data model for the object state, (b) coming up with a correct and maintainable organization of URLs, and (c) defining the semantics of each URL. By the time an individual page is constructed, the engineering challenge is over and it doesn't really matter whether you build that script in a simple language (e.g., Perl or Tcl) or a complex powerful language (e.g., Common Lisp or Java). http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-1.html Philip also discusses this idea in chapter 13 of his classic book, "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing" (http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/). But as Alan Kay points out, this RPC-type model still hasn't evolved to a point where you can pass around self-contained objects that…

Just for the record, Philip Greenspun is many things, but Harvard professor is not among them (he's simply using a blog service run by the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, which you can find out about by, as per the article, "hacking" his blog's URL: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ ). Anyway, while not a Harvard professor, "philg" is a very interesting guy who has done a bunch of worthwhile things (e.g. "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing", htttp://photo.net, Ars Digita, etc.) that should be of interest to Hacker News readers. He writes well--in books, essays and blog posts--and he writes provocatively, with a mix of snark and self-deprecating humor that many enjoy. In short, he's worth knowing about in my view (and I'm happy to know him). For links to his past and present projects: http://philip.greenspun.com For background info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun P.S. As many readers here already know, he's also the author of "Greenspun's tenth rule of programming" (which led to the term "Greenspunning"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspunning

The below post is a great explanation of how the airlines are essentially at the mercy of the pilot unions: https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

1. Do you really want a PhD? If you believe so, then read "Don't become a scientist! Philip Greenspun edition" at https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/05/dont-become-scientist-philip-gre… 2. Years ago Greenspun graphed level of education vs pay scale. Salaries maxed out at a masters but plunged to high-school levels beyond that. See the graph below "Not So Very Serious Stuff" at: https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/ In summary, best get a master's and pass on the Ph.D. Bonus: you'll gain an extra 3-7 years of your young life (doing what you want). Also look at "Grad school versus prison, quantified". Wish I'd known all this when I was younger. https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/12/09/grad-school-versus-prison…

I don't. I assume it's economics in the sense that consumers are probably inclined to pay less for shorter books, there are a lot of largely fixed costs associated with publishing a book, may even be some pedestrian things like reading a title on the spine in a bookstore. Basically you need some starting hardcover or trade paperback price and work back from there. Amazon has doubtless changed some of the economics especially for ebooks. But, historically, you needed a hardcover you could sell for $25. I've published a couple of fairly short books I didn't really care about charging for and they just wouldn't have been worth it for any publisher to feed into their funnel. Only somewhat on point but here's something from the late 90s. https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story.html

darkoob12>I have to upgrade my skills and possibly start publishing papers and get a PhD. < Have you seen this "oldie but goodie" from Philip Greenspun's website (esp. the graph beneath "Not So Very Serious Stuff"): https://www.philip.greenspun.com/careers/ If there is an "AI Winter" it is unlikely that a Ph.D., new or old, would keep you employable. Look to other more predictable but related fields: math esp. statistics and engineering. FWIW n the background is looming a great revolution in energy generation: fission is now possible.

Also, you seem to have applied yet another restriction to my account. I tried to post the following link: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2023/08/31/medical-school-2020-year-… This was the message I encountered: > You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks. I don't remember seeing that before when submitting things even faster.

This was cool back in the early days of the web. It was used by Philip Greenspun, who wrote the classic "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing": https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/

This is a really interesting area to explore - thanks for suggesting it! I think that there are quite a few authors who have shown that there is a market for the book as well as for an open source "edition" of the book. My favorite from the past was Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing [1] and perhaps more recent is the very complimentary NAND To Tetris [2] I would imagine that the hard part is dealing with the publisher and getting them on board with it as well. Added to my list! [1] https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ [2] https://www.nand2tetris.org/

I first learned making websites from Philip Greenspun's 1997 book (dead trees back then; available online now[0]). It was already a couple years after the original release (and I was a kid), but it's amazing how much of his opinions or advice (at least, as I remember it) still holds 25 years later: own your personal domain name, dangers of cookie tracking, structured approach to development and maintenance. He did make some mis-predictions (Linux turned out pretty good in the end), but I will probably re-read it some time soon, and I expect it to have aged well. [0]: http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/

Also worth reading: "Don't Become a Scientist!" by Jonathan Katz [1], "Women in Science" by Philip Greenspun [2], and "What Does Any of This Have To Do with Physics?" by Bob Henderson [3]. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20181018063835/http://katz.fastmail.us/sci… [2]: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science [3]: https://nautil.us/what-does-any-of-this-have-to-do-with-physics-5626/

A tangent comment, but his website is such a fun throwback. I remember finding the Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/) when it was first put up. What an amazing eye opener for me at the time to what the internet would/could be. Plus I loved his napkin-style diagrams and interspersed photos.

If all the readers don’t just know this, I am old and full of useless knowledge. A good read to understand Ellison’s persona in the 90s is here: https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/53011.htm Particularly flinging $100 bills at peasants and how RDBMS set pricing for their products. If you do have an implicit awareness of Oracle and their tactics, you will find this an amusing piece of nostalgia when people were starting to understand just how to build efficient and nice web sites in the 1997 time frame.

Philip Greenspun has a great review of Netscape LiveWire from the time. https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/livewire.html You can see that the current JavaScript tooling complains are nothing new under the sun: So what used to be a few keystrokes in Emacs or Netscape Gold now requires three steps: edit the .html file recompile the .web file restart the LiveWire app from the appmgr

I would also highly recommend Greenspun's Software Engineering for Internet Application ("SEIA") [0] and in particular the metadata section of that book [1] wherein he goes over defining an ontology of a system, implementing a metadata model in SQL and then generating code based on that metadata model. [0] https://philip.greenspun.com/seia/ [1] https://philip.greenspun.com/seia/metadata

A classic -- The PhD Octopus(http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/octopus.html) -- 6 points|DaniFong|11 years ago|3 comments --The PhD Octopus (1903)(https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/octopus.html) -- 126 points|maverick_iceman|3 years ago|46 comments -- It might be interesting to post this every 3 years as a way to measure attitudes towards graduate degrees

Reminds me of the classic "EE versus CS" by Philip Greenspun: https://philip.greenspun.com/humor/eecs-difference-explained

They were born to the wrong parents. http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ is a great read about the specific advantages that a trivial percentage of Americans enjoy

This was the idea behind murdererfs, right? It worked pretty well to power mp3.com for a few years. The great https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/databases-choosing talks a bit about the issue: The great thing about the file system is its invisibility. You probably didn't purchase it separately, you might not be aware of its existence, you won't have to run an ad in the newspaper for a file system administrator with 5+ years of experience, and it will pretty much work as advertised. All you need to do with a file system is back it up to tape every day or two. He goes on to say that the main thing RDBMSes add to your web-serving life is ACID transactions, which I think is pretty much true. Sadly modern filesystems still don't support ACID transactions, though often they do manage to export sufficient functionality for user-level code like Postgres and SQLite to do so.

FWIW Malcolm Gladwell's business bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success has a chapter devoted to explaining the superior safety record of American major airlines compared to foreign carriers: "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes". Gladwell comes to the conclusion that foreigners are unsafe because they are ... foreign. They have a strange and defective culture that prevents the first officer (copilot) from speaking up and pointing out problems to the captain. If only everyone were American, the world would be a better and safer place. This article explores an alternative explanation: foreign airlines do comparatively poorly because their first officers have almost no pilot-in-command experience. https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety

They guy may have been a low performer or not. But the whole system is very very broken. "My take-away from the careers aspect of the book is that if you (1) love competition, (2) have a huge appetite for risk, (3) don’t mind working long hours for a minimum of 27 years until getting that first grant, and (4) are mostly indifferent to money, pursuing a physics PhD and an academic job might be a reasonable plan. You’ll get to work with a lot of smart people, for sure, but, as the book notes, quite of few of them may be planning to stab you in the back when it comes time to assign credit for a Nobel-worthy discovery. It is not like most other fields of human endeavor where there is room for everyone to excel in his or her own way." https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/06/14/losing-the-nobel-prize-on…

Two words: unions and seniority. Here's a good intro: http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines It's also worth noting that this is largely a US-only phenomenon. It has led to a lot of junior US pilots heading overseas to fly with other carriers, most notably in the Gulf, although that party is slowly starting to wind down.

Phil Greenspun wrote about "software engineering professionalism", and it's still the best thing I've ever read on the subject: http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/writeup I would say "Surgeon 3" exemplifies the world-class professional, quite literally.

"SAP is the best thing that ever happened to computer people. It appeals to businesses that are too stupid to understand and model their own processes but too rich to simply continue relying on secretaries and file cabinets." -- Philip Greenspun: http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/future

I took this course in 2012: http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/three-day-rdbms/ Probably the best course I've ever taken, on any subject -- though this one happens to be on relational databases! The model of: 15 minutes lecture, 15 minutes in-class exercises, and 15-minutes review of student (and, if needed, "correct" solutions) worked really well. Might be able to incorporate some ideas into what you do.

The most memorable thing about Scsh for me is its acknowledgments rant, which starts: "Who should I thank? My so-called "colleagues," who laugh at me behind my back, all the while becoming famous on my work? My worthless graduate students, whose computer skills appear to be limited to downloading bitmaps off of netnews? My parents, who are still waiting for me to quit "fooling around with computers," go to med school, and become a radiologist? My department chairman, a manager who gives one new insight into and sympathy for disgruntled postal workers?" and concludes: "Oh yes, the acknowledgements. I think not. I did it. I did it all, by myself." http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/acknowledgments.html

This shouldn't be down voted, you are correct about the airline part. For details see the excellent explanation by Philip Greenspun, an engineer who switched careers to become an airline pilot. http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

If I could fly capsule-hotel class I'd love to try it. I think it'd be less awkward and uncomfortable. But it's not going to happen because airlines need to get passengers on and off quickly. http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines is a compelling explanation of why the pilot's unions have the industry by the throat. I can't imagine investing in a business where every labor negotiation is an unconditional surrender because saying no means you have to shut down indefinitely.

Still a good read: http://philip.greenspun.com/business/internet-software-patents "I was asked 'Why didn't you patent this yourself, if you developed it first?' My reply was 'It only took me an hour to build; if I went down to the patent office after every hour of programming, I wouldn't get very much done.'"