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author Henry S Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
date Sat, 02 Nov 2024 15:50:09 +0000
parents 28fdea8f3e67
children 7688b405c09f
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22:6f6fe15ed3ae 23:0a12a284beb7
1 Born December 1949.
2
3 After starting a degree at Oberlin in 1967, dropped out without
4 completing 3rd year.
5
6 Out to BC with Katy in the fall of 1969, back to Cambridge and
7 Philadelphia to see respective families.
8
9 Had to get out of the US (draft), so that winter took over the old job
10 of his brother Arnold in an NRC high-energy Physics lab, living with
11 Katy and Arnold in an old farmhouse in a posh neighbourhood in Ottawa.
12 Very snowy winter, record-breaking, 18 feet?, long driveway and a lot
13 of shovelling, piled up to the 2nd floor. Involve with Ottawa QUaker
14 Meeting, a youth group, and a Mennonite youth group. Stayed through
15 the several years. March 1971, employer partnering with the Univ. of
16 Chicago Physics dept and LRL in Berkeley, went there, installed a
17 PDP-9 / 15, in a 40-ft Fruehof trailer, moved from Ottawa to Fermi
18 Lab, where Brian's office was. Programmed in machine language (see
19 below). He could 'program like crazy' in the air-conditioned trailer,
20 high-volume music in head-phones, but couldn't write English. Lived
21 in a hotel in Hyde ? park. They owned an Austin Mini bought for $100
22 in summer of 1970, working at a Quaker peace conference on Rhinestone
23 island in lake near Ottawa.
24
25 Katy went out to Berkeley that spring, where the experiment was to
26 take place. Married in June of 1971 at Pendle Hill / Swarthmore, then
27 back to Berkeley. Lived in a back yard house at Telegraph and Shannon
28 (?). Legally a Canadian resident notionally in US on a business trip.
29 Experiment ran, wrapped and went back to Ottawa. He wanted to stay in
30 US, they ended up (autumn 1971? 1972?) living with his parents in
31 Cambridge, where WCS was by then head of the new Center for the Study
32 of World Religions at Harvard.
33
34 [Applied to Graduate School at MIT in EECS, started taking some
35 courses, but eventually MIT admin said be couldn't be admitted w/o a
36 UG degree.]
37
38 Interested in being a social inquiry major, in order to study the
39 politics of high technology, how we get to transferring to EECS from
40 that goal is not clear.
41
42 It was very quickly clear that the understanding of computing that the
43 social scientists were critiquing was not [Programming in machine
44 language] the computing that I know. So I need to get clear on what
45 computing really is, so that I can legitimately critique it. So I
46 thought I had to go into the heart of the beast, as it were.
47
48 Terry Winograd provided the friendship and both social and 'official'
49 support-structure to allow Brian to start to express himself out loud,
50 as it were.
51
52 Saying to Fodor, ref. Tom Swift and his procedural grandmother, that
53 "this is not how compilation worked", Fodor was blustery but
54 open-minded enough to say "this is your subject area, I'm sure you're
55 rightl tell me how it does work". He and Fodor were friends, but
56 later Fodor "curdled".
57
58 Dog hanging on to a scented cloth -- sitting at the console of a 360
59 and keying in instructinos and debugging by staring at the pattern of
60 lights that the console frooze in.
61
62 Articulating an understanding of computing that would do justice to his
63 intuitive understanding of computing as he had experienced it is the
64 theme of all his intellectual work.
65
66 "Course on compilers, I had written a compiler, I'd written a tiny OS
67 for a PDP-9 running a physics experiment". Pat Winston sat me down
68 and took me through the requirements for a CSEE degree, and decided
69 he'd satisfied them all. But he needed a Batchelor's thesis, so they
70 took a paper from a course he'd taken in the autumn, called "Comments
71 on Comments", and added some stuff, it got marked and accepted as his
72 thesis, so awarded the degree and could actually be enrolled as a
73 student under the supervision of Peter Szolovits.
74
75 [CSLI not particularly relevant]
76
77 [CPSR?]
78
79 ----------
80 Torn between religion and physics as an undergraduate.
81
82 MIT, 1974++ MSc thesis _Levels, Layers and Planes_, about
83 architectural properties of computer science
84 There are no particulars in physics [ref. deiexis discussion, where is
85 it]
86 WHat drove me out of social inquiry and back to department 6 was
87 needing to be back in the practice. That skill was not somthing that
88 people on the outside understood.
89
90 Lens on a conical base, watchmakers, with oil and iron filings, that
91 allowed you to manifest the data on digital mag tape. No disks on the
92 PDP-9. That concrete engagement with the computer affected my sense
93 of digitality.
94
95 I wanted there to be types, not tokens. Set theory has no constants
96 (e.g. pi, e, i), functions, derivatives, intergrals are types in a
97 way. Wanted a KR that didn't depend on token identity (no eq tests in
98 the interpreter).
99
100 LLP was an attempt to get the things, "kernel facts", of a KRL to be
101 types, not tokens (cf *car* and *cdr* vs. differentiation and
102 integration), the ontology of the computational.
103
104 [HST mentions intergral signs and script deltas] Brian says
105 "syncategoramaticity
106
107 Promote the eq tests into type tests (in the interpreter).
108
109 "You want to arrange the metaphysics so that _everything_ falls out"
110 G. Nunberg of BCS
111
112 My imagination was arrested by essentially foundational questions
113 about ... this stuff. Not interested in applications, AI as such,
114 etc.
115
116 Still wanted to know what computing was., remains true up to what's in
117 this book, CR.
118
119 Something else that makes me feel uncomfortable about CS from the
120 outset: Conversation with MM: for you MM science is a form of worship,
121 whereas science is a form of theology for me (BCS), so I look to CS
122 not just to manifest the glory of God, but also to explain it.
123
124 Science should do justice to that.
125
126 Being shy around Peter and Butler, something else made me skittish,
127 something I needed in order to be at peace: a warmth / humility. Why
128 I was at peace with [John] Haugeland. [HST: JH wasn't a
129 programmer. BCS: Yes, but he programmed [in] Postscript. BCS: We
130 disagreed about typography].
131
132 Had a sense with JH that even though he knew a lot more philosophy
133 than I did, that we were looking together at relative
134 clauses/propositional claims, not that he was scrutinising
135 me. [ref. Andee Rubin]
136
137 In the book I claim that deferential semantics is the heart of
138 intentionality. "There is more in heaven and on earth than is drempt
139 of in your philosophy". CS is fundamentally an intentional subject
140 matter, and that its intentional character has been hidden, and that
141 its use of semantics has usurped it for mechanistic purposes.
142
143 All semantical vocabulary has been redefined in mechanistic terms:
144 "the semantics of X" == "what will happen if X is processed"
145
146 Thereby all humility and deference is lost.
147
148 [What about Phi vs. Psi, 'full [?] procedural consequence']
149
150 If you are interested in _real_ semantics, ... what's a poor boy to
151 do?
152
153
154
155 ------------
156 Foundations of/Philosophy of Computation
157
158 Lisp was 'broken', 2-Lisp was a flawed attempt to fix it, 3-Lisp takes
159 us in to new territory.
160
161 Don't think you have to be a specialist to read this book.
162
163 Effective vs non-Effective is actually new: at the book boundaries,
164 project onto the effective [?]
165
166
167