Philip Greenspun

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

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.

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-careers-in-science/

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

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