langreiter.com plain, simple: comments-2002-02-15

LANGREITER.COM plain, simple

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Freitag, 15. Februar 2002

New Mailing List: groups.yahoo.com/group/rtenterprise

Laut John Robb "dedicated to discussing the business aspects and technologies associated with moving the corporate world to a Web Services enabled, real-time information system. "

Klingt nach dem hehren Ziel aller ERP-Systeme (das diese vielleicht schon längst erreicht haben, was ich nicht wissen würde, weil ich kaum mit solcherlei in Kontakt [ge]komme[n bin]) ...

2002-02-15-rtEnterprise

Stephen Wolframs Epos wird nun also im Mai erscheinen. Definitiv? — www.wolframscience.com

2002-02-15-laterToo

www.enigon.com/temp/Desir/desir.html
www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html
www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

2002-02-15-misc

"A+ is best described as a reduced instruction set APL. It was designed and developed by Arthur Whitney around 10 years ago as a super-fast engine for manipulating timeseries data. It was subsequently developed as A+ by Morgan Stanley and has now been placed into the public domain [...].

"In spring of 2001 it was agreed to allocate funds to investigate an implementation of the core A+ interpreter under Windows 9x and 2000. This phase of the investigation is now complete, and the interpreter is available for download from these pages."

2002-02-15-aPlusWindows

Required Reading, deux fois:

Joel Spolsky: The Iceberg Secret, Revealed

"The project was almost 100% code complete. We were still waiting for the graphic designer to choose fonts and colors and draw the cool 3-D tabs. In the meantime, we just used plain fonts and black and white, there was a bunch of ugly wasted space on the screen, basically it didn't look very good at all. But 100% of the functionality was there and was doing some pretty amazing stuff. What happened during the demo? The clients spend the entire meeting griping about the graphical appearance of the screen. They weren't even talking about the UI. Just the graphical appearance. "It just doesn't look slick," complained their project manager. That's all they could think about. We couldn't get them to think about the actual functionality."

I remember myself, when I was very young, staring for days, again and again, at screenshots of NeXTSTEP in an old CHIP magazine. That was at a time when all you could buy at a reasonable price was running Windows 3.1 — and boy, this system looked so good. It radiated advancedness. The visual appearance of programs is the ONE point of contact with the world-at-large. It must never be underestimated, as hardly anyone will ever get into contact with the elegance of the source code. Thanks, Joel, for articulating that in such a fantastic manner.

Ebenso grandios:

Paul Graham: Taste for Makers

2002-02-15-reqReading

Wieder einmal begutachten, das aber später: www.quickbase.com

2002-02-15-haveALook

Later, baby ;-)

2002-02-15-aeosbox

funzel 8344 days AGO
Joel is so right sometimes.

chris 8346 days AGO
Indeed he is!

David Ness 8346 days AGO
Not only is Joel right on target, so is Paul Graham. Good pieces on design are rare---I suppose because it is a deep subject---and it is a real pleasure to have two of them show up around the same time, as they complement one another so well.

I'm going to have to reread the Graham piece, probably several times, but at first pass it seems to me he may have missed one principle: `Always design for the next wider context'. This was said, if I remember rightly, by the elder Saarinen, and seems to be worthy of addition to the 14 excellent principles that Graham presents.

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