This is a sadly shallow article; where I think it fails is in recognising (and responding to) the core of the criticism levelled at Arc. Instead there is some pithy comparison to 70s cars.
The 911 is timeless for a number of reasons: Porsche have spent years keeping the brand and style consistent. It was expensive and exclusive, which made it desirable.
But that care was very hard to drive. If you don't know what you're doing then you will not get anything like the true performance it can give.
It was also very expensive, so only those with the adequate resources could afford one. These were not always people who could get the true performance out of the car.
The Cad, on the other hand, is a fantastic car in its own right. Widely available, easy to get its maximum performance, perfect for almost any job. OK, so it doesn't look as sexy, and for seriously hardcore tasks it doesn't perform as well as the Porsche. But if I had to pick a car that was most likely to be reliable today then the Cad is an obvious choice.
Even more damning; Caddillac, like Porsche and the 911, were still making that brand of car up till ~2006. You wouldn't recognise it though because the shape and performance has evolved to meet modern needs.
It's sad to see his list of languages; whilst I would agree C is a ridiculously good language, smalltalk and lisp? They've always struck me as pretty specialist. Conversely a lot of production code still uses Cobol and Pascal. And what about Fortran? Or Delphi (wasn't Skype written in Delphi originally?).
I know we're hackers, and so it's hip to drive Prosche's. But it is sometimes sad to see how we forget about a massive section of our industry who also do cool things, but tend not to have blogs...
> C is a ridiculously good language, smalltalk and lisp? They've always struck me as pretty specialist.
It's funny because my impression is completely the opposite: C is a very specialist language suitable for a narrow domain of low-level code. For everything else, it's just begging for rampant bugs and security issues.
On the other hand, Lisp and Smalltalk (well, maybe just Lisp--I am not really familiar with Smalltalk) are very general-purpose languages. You could reasonably use them for all sorts of tasks. And you would avoid whole classes of bugs common in C.
Just because many people didn't use them doesn't mean the languages weren't well-suited. Sure, they were never populist langauges, but that's ultimately of little consequence. Especially for "hackers".
By specialist I mean "big learning curve". I tried learning Lisp once and felt that it was an obviously powerful language, but there were easier languages to learn that would do as good a job for general purpose needs.
Well, I can't speak much for Common Lisp, but you couldn't be much more wrong for Scheme--Scheme is easily one of the easiest language to learn, full stop. The intro CS course at my university used to be taught in Scheme and people with literally no programming experience could get the hang of most of the language in the first couple of weeks.
The only reason some people view it as difficult is that it is very different from the C-like languages they're already familiar with. Once you've learned one of those, the others are, of course, very easy to pick up. Not because the languages themselves are simple but because they're similar. Scheme, by comparison, has a very different--and much more regular--syntax and very different ways of doing things.
Besides, C is relatively difficult to learn: there are a whole bunch of low-level concepts (pointer arithmetic), a large amount of syntax and a ton of edge cases and undefined behavior. Not to mention the preprocessor. It takes much more effort to get even a basic result with C than it does with another language like Scheme.
What is difficult about programming in Lisps is the same thing that is difficult about driving 911's - doing so in the manner that experts do requires a radically different mindset. If you've seen 911's slinging oversteer around a road course and schemers...well writing scheme - it's apparent that neither thinks about driving or programming like the people against whom they are competing.
"Please don’t assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list."
"Porsche have spent years keeping the brand and style consistent. It was expensive and exclusive, which made it desirable."
True. Would add that the seeds were planted for me to want one of these many years ago.
"But that care (sic) was very hard to drive."
Also true even with the current model. I also owned a mini cooper s a few years ago and that was much easier and actually much more fun to drive.
"These were not always people who could get the true performance out of the car."
Having a car that goes from zero to 60 so quickly and corners so well doesn't have much utility unless you happen to live near a race track or in the country where there are winding roads and limited police presence. Acceleration of 0 to 60 in, say, 4 seconds when you take away the amount of time to get up to the point on the power curve where the fun starts give you about 1.5 seconds of thrill. Before you know it you are at 70mph on a 40mph road and have to slow down.
"But if I had to pick a car that was most likely to be reliable today then the Cad is an obvious choice."
Especially if you have to cart around adults. The two rear seats in the 911 won't hold an adult.
What's interesting about your comment is that since I have no idea about Arc I would automatically assume that PG is right in what he says. Even though knowing about the 911 I can see your argument and know you have a point.
Add: I love the 911 but sometimes I wonder how much of that love is manufactured in my head. Actually I think a large portion of it is but I'm still happy. It's like trying to analyze why breasts are nice to look at. They just are.
Ive owned a 911; it's a brilliant car and one of my favourites that I've owned. :) And I agree with everything you've said.
One of my current cars is an MGF; I love it. It's unreliable, isn't very good at acceleration, can be a bitch to drive... but I still love it :)
Conversely; I have an old Peugot 106 which sits on the drive and never ever fails to start when I need it. It looks ugly as sin and can handle like a bull, but it does the job (getting from A to B) without fail due to superb engineering and subtle simplicity.
But maybe I'm getting carried away with the car metaphors...
> the country where there are winding roads and limited police presence
These areas usually aren't that far away, just ask your local motorcyclists where the fun roads are if you don't know the local spots.
I happen to live in one of those areas and drive some really fun roads on my weekly trip to and from SF, but I'm not that far from a bunch of people who live in a very different environment and almost don't seem to know our roads exist.
I agree that the choice of cars for this article is unfortunate. When I saw the two pictures, before reading the article, I thought it was going to be about two timeless designs that took very different approaches.
I think if you're in a certain population you'll see the Porsche as better designed, but you likely would have thought the same thing in 1973. But I think Paul might be surprised at how many people today would choose the '73 Caddy over the '73 911.
I'd wager to guess that most would chose the Porsche. I know I did. You can see mine, which happens to be a 1973 911E as Paul chose for his article, here: http://www.octanenation.com/custom/1973-porsche-911/254/
OctaneNation is my startup.
Further evidence that the 911 is desirable: http://www.hagerty.com/valuationtools/HVT/VehicleSearch/Repo...
Mine sold for around $10.5k in 1973, and Haggerty says the average value now is $54k. Using an inflation calculator says $10.5k is equivalent to $53k today... Interesting.
The same Hagerty valuation tool shows the Cadillac is worth around $8k.
I'm unclear as to what your point is in response to mine? I thought both are timeless designs, for different reasons. Your response doesn't seem to dispute this at all...
In 2002 the main accusation was that Arc was only vaporware, or a mix of or ideas and features in pg head, perhaps with a first secret internal prototype implementation.
Making a language that good programmers would freely choose to use is a great design goal.
In my first paid job I wrote loads of Cobol, even though I was already proficient in more expressive languages. I can't think of any scenario where I would freely choose to use it.
Today I sometimes write SAS code. This can be so painful I solve the problem in Python first, at home, in my own time, then port the solution to SAS. Python (and its ecosystem) is so nice to use, and productive, I'd rather use it and not get paid, than get paid to use something else.
Any language that passes that test is doing pretty well.
I wasn't at all. I had to read the next paragraphs to figure out that the Porsche was intended to be the "better design".
I suspect that this might be due to me being European though. Classical American car designs, like that Cadillac, are very rare here and (possibly as a result of that,) considered quite classy. For one, I'd rather have the Cadillac parked on my driveway than the Porsche.
Please don't make us "Europeans" look bad. The part of Europe I come from those kind of American cars are only considered "classy" by white thrash. Or people own them "ironically".
Then again, it's also been a few decades since owning a Porsche was a sign of good taste...
France here, and the Porsche seems to be a sort of toy, something like a Renault twingo[1], and don't ask me which one I prefer. :)
On the other side, the Cadillac has nice berline curve and make me think of our Citroen C6[2].
So, as we can see, design cars are culture local.
Can we say the same thing for UI design ? Maybe the ideal design for an american differs that the ideal design for an european or an asiatic person ?
I have always thought that only the job, the grade, and the period-to-computers-exposure change the way users interact with their machines. Obviously the problem is bigger.
I am convinced that this essay touch right in the hearth something fundamental about cultural differences and their influences in design choices. In the same way that the GP languages for real people are not Lisp and Smalltalk but Java/C#, Python and Ruby. If Lisp is a widely used language, so are Ocaml and Erlang, but the let's face it: they're not.
So in conclusion, I think I will definitely not design the same UI for an US pg than for an EU pg, it need being study in details but there is differences in the mind and in the tastes, so that one have to adapt to the UI of the others.
"and immediately I was able to see that the Porsche"
That also happens with, say, movies. A really good movie about something that you normally wouldn't care about (in my case, say Sports) will be enjoyable by people who typically aren't interested in the subject many times.
I happen to love 911s in an unhealthy way, but some of the earlier models were very "solid" and engineered very well. Especially some of the earlier engines, they were bullet proof. So for reliability and simplicity, the 911 would be a solid choice even today.
The cadillac evokes a sailing sloop. The porsche evokes a stallion. Cadillac has long deliberately referenced maritime traditions for style elements. They're just stylistically different and I don't see how one can easily see superiority in either.
The 911 is timeless for a number of reasons: Porsche have spent years keeping the brand and style consistent. It was expensive and exclusive, which made it desirable.
But that care was very hard to drive. If you don't know what you're doing then you will not get anything like the true performance it can give.
It was also very expensive, so only those with the adequate resources could afford one. These were not always people who could get the true performance out of the car.
The Cad, on the other hand, is a fantastic car in its own right. Widely available, easy to get its maximum performance, perfect for almost any job. OK, so it doesn't look as sexy, and for seriously hardcore tasks it doesn't perform as well as the Porsche. But if I had to pick a car that was most likely to be reliable today then the Cad is an obvious choice.
Even more damning; Caddillac, like Porsche and the 911, were still making that brand of car up till ~2006. You wouldn't recognise it though because the shape and performance has evolved to meet modern needs.
It's sad to see his list of languages; whilst I would agree C is a ridiculously good language, smalltalk and lisp? They've always struck me as pretty specialist. Conversely a lot of production code still uses Cobol and Pascal. And what about Fortran? Or Delphi (wasn't Skype written in Delphi originally?).
I know we're hackers, and so it's hip to drive Prosche's. But it is sometimes sad to see how we forget about a massive section of our industry who also do cool things, but tend not to have blogs...