Philip Guo

Guy Steele,[1] Java spec co-author, LL1 Mailing list (2003-08-21):

> And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?

* https://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg04045.html

A follow-up noted:

> Yes! Java broke C++'s monopoly, and now C# is breaking Java's, and this sequence of broken monopolies dispelled the belief that have to use "the standard language", and now I code in Python for a living.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele_Jr%2e

Steele is/was well-acquainted with the bad parts of Java—he helped design Scheme after all. But in the alternative timeline where Java was not created, Java (and other machine-independent runtimes) would have not have become popular, and everyone would still be statically compiling C++.

For your purposes, I think that your choice of PEM is probably the best. As you note, it is logically equivalent to the s-expression (it is typed, not a bag of bytes), and it has the advantage of being a well-known format.

If æsthetic concerns are a higher priority than interoperability (say, for a personal hobby project), then I do recommend folks adopt the format I gave an example of. It has some history behind it, dating back to the 1997–1999 timeframe and the IETF’s SPKI Working Group (e.g. https://theworld.com/~cme/examples.txt) which resulted in RFCs 2692 & 2693, as well as some great drafts (https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Sexp.txt & https://theworld.com/~cme/spki.txt) which never progressed because Reasons™.

I still think that the SPKI project got PKI right. Oh well, what might have been!

Not sure if this is what you had in mind but here are the links to the two papers that I was referencing.

[1] covers the first 40 years of databases. [2] fills in the gap of the last 20 years and gives their thoughts on the future.

My apologies, the first one was actually Stonebraker & Hellerstein and didn't involve Pavlo. They're both excellent papers though for anyone working with data.

Stonebraker, for those who don't know, is the creator of Postgres, a database you might have heard of.

1: Stonebraker & Hellerstein, "What Goes Around Comes Around", 2005, https://people.csail.mit.edu/tdanford/6830papers/stonebraker-what-goes-around.pdf

2: Stonebraker & Pavlo, "What Goes Around Comes Around... And Around...", 2024, https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2024/whatgoesaround-sigmodrec2024.pdf

The report, while a fun thought exercise for any aspiring academic, is not a novel insight, and is obviously untrue for most definitions of market efficiency.

If we are going to play the academic one-upmanship game, a more general result that "best" or "multiple" N-player Nash Equilibria for N > 2 is already NP-hard. The implication of an efficient market would be if every player had a polynomial-time algorithm to solve the NP-hard problem, ergo P=NP.

[1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/costis/simplified.pdf

[2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/in-game-theory-no-clear-path-to-equilibrium-20170718/

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1104.3760#:~:text=Unlike%20general%20Nash%20equilibrium%2C%20which,as%20finding%20a%20planted%20clique.

The Leap Motion Controller came out in 2014 already (11 years ago, wow!) and isn't very expensive. The SDK was lacking in the beginning if I recall correctly, but a webcam seems to be inferior. Technology isn't the limiting factor for a quite some time now. I'm sure many projects existed to translate gestures to MIDI, some less polished, some more polished[0][1].

Reminds me... I even used two PlayStation Eyes (EUR 5 each) with OpenCV and the EVM algorithm[2] on a ThinkPad X230 for a dance performance piece back in 2015. Movements rather than gestures and OSC instead of MIDI, but it worked great!

[0]: https://midipaw.com/

[1]: https://uwyn.com/geco/

[2]: https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/evm/

I get this drift!

And I think a bit of cheating is healthy.

The late Mihai Patrascu (brilliant CS researcher for those who don't know), outspoken as he was, said data faking skills were essential to keeping his sanity in some courses. [1]

Cheating just means you're not satisfying some random persons bureaucratic needs of assigning a number to your performance. But such a one-dimensional measure cannot really capture anyone's potential.

For some reason few people ponder why people cheat and if the reasons perhaps are valid. Go to that party, if it helps you develop yourself!

[1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/mip/acad.html