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from the life-would-be-tragic-if-it-weren't-funny dept.
Stephen Hawking, a widely known physicist, sometimes mistaken as cosmetician, died Wednesday after complications due to ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), a progressive neurodegenerative disease. He was 76.
Coverage at BBC (obituary), The Guardian, Reuters, NPR, and The Huffington Post.
janrinok writes:
It is with sadness that we hear the news this morning in the UK that Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76. Diagnosed with a type of motor neuron disease disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) in 1964, he was told that he would have only a few years to live. But he confounded many experts and led life to the fullest within his personal limitations.
While he undoubtedly suffered as a result of his physical disabilities, it was his mental powers that set him apart from most of the human race. His book - A Brief History of Time - sold over 16 million copies, but it is said that it was probably read by a much smaller number of people, and understood by even fewer.
I hope that others here will contribute their own memories of the man and his achievements as the following days progress.
Rest in Peace - Stephen Hawking.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday March 14 2018, @03:18PM (5 children)
Hey, I met Paul Erdos once. Visited the university where and when I was a grad student.
Also briefly talked with Bjarne Stroustrup during his visit to the uni, after he gave a presentation about C++. He was pleased and proud C++ was still popular despite competition from far better funded languages, specifically Java. He didn't think the issues I attempted to raise were important. Oh well. I still think they're all too dismissive, shouldn't accept that ASCII and UTF-8 are the ultimate in representation, or at least good enough that there's no reason to bother thinking about them any more. One example of what I'm getting at, is why, except for visual programming, is all programming done in monospace fonts? Trying to use a proportional font to read and write code is ridiculous, crazy, stupid, but should it be?
I don't know how close I ever got to Stephen Hawking. A mile or so at best, if he ever visited the universities close to me. Depends how often he visited the US and where he went. If he skipped flyover country, then very possibly the closest I ever got to him was when I visited London and was a teenager with no thought of that. Might well have been closer to the Queen. If there were any public appearances by anyone of note, I paid that no mind and missed them.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 14 2018, @04:44PM
Mehh - don't feel bad. I visited the UK multiple times, but have no idea whether Hawking was even on the island(s) at the time. I mean, I didn't send him a card, or call him - I couldn't expect him to be there waiting for my visit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 14 2018, @05:00PM (3 children)
Because that way it is easier to lay out your code (especially concerning vertical alignment).
Note that with WEB (Donald Knuth's literate programming system, not to be confused with the World Wide Web), programs were not printed in monospace fonts. But then, you had to run your code through a typesetting compiler.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday March 14 2018, @07:10PM (2 children)
Yes, of course, vertical alignment is the point of monospace. But should code readability depend so heavily on that property? Is it really necessary?
Took a quick look at Knuth's WEB, and yeah, that's the general direction I'd like to see programming go. But he, like everyone else, wants to fly higher with the crappy wings we have now, by using more powerful engines, rather than spend time on the "boring" task of maybe seeing that the wings could be better and trying to improve them. I think WEB would be easier to realize if the ASCII/UTF-8 foundation was improved.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday March 15 2018, @08:10AM (1 child)
You are aware that WEB was first published 1981? That's long before anyone even thought of Unicode or UTF8.
Other than that, I have no idea what you mean with "the ASCII/UTF-8 foundation" that should be improved.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday March 15 2018, @10:26AM
I mean that the ASCII control characters are terrible. To control horizontal positioning, there is only the tab and the blank space, Those depend upon the font being monospace to work at all, and even then, they do a bad job. Tab is horrible. The only positioning ASCII got right was starting a new line, and it even muffs that with the whole CR or LF or both usage. Extended control characters and ANSI escape sequences repeat the mistake of depending upon the use of a monospace font. So, out of the 33 control characters, today only 1 function, the new line, is really used. Tab is still used occasionally, but whenever it is, it causes problems. The ASCII control characters were a huge fail. Wasn't until HTML that positioning finally got away from dependence upon monospace. Unicode was a chance to reboot the control characters, but instead they were copied and hackishly amended.
One thing that should be in the control characters is "increase indentation" and "decrease indentation", with the exact positioning left to the display device and user, and in no way tied to the width of the characters. A common edit to source code is having to change the indentation of a bunch of lines because they've all been wrapped inside a newly added block of some sort. Our text editors do a lot of work to hack around that lack, and do a pretty good job of it, but a whole lot of leading spaces would all be unnecessary if only ASCII had such control characters. Also, it would make the use of proportional fonts practical. Another good use of the control characters would be analogs to HTML's table tags, TR and TD. That's one thing tab was meant for, and it sucks at it.
Instead we're stuck with such horrors as ctrl-g, which is supposed to play an audible beep, and ctrl-q and ctrl-s as a crude method to pause output so it can be read before being scrolled off the top of the text screen. Ctrl-s only sort of works if the terminal is slow enough and you don't need to pause the output at a precise location and can afford to be off by plus or minus several lines. Ever run a program over and over, fingers poised to hit ctrl-s immediately, until you manage to pause the output where you want it? I used to do that on 1980s computers such as the Apple II. But now we have pagers such as "less", and sufficient system memory to hold thousands of lines of output. Ctrl-c is another that's been superseded. Ctrl-h is yet another character based positioning abomination, to provide a typographic means to print text in bold and to compose additional characters, such as the Spanish n with a tilde. Now with UTF-8, composition is not only unnecessary, it's discouraged.