asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: even the infamous 'felix' only sold 300k.
asciilifeform: 'VisiCalc ran on a 24K-byte machine, 32K bytes with disk. '
asciilifeform: this 800k (or 1mil, or whichever) is an amazing number, because it isn't a pile of britney records. these were ~people~ buying.
asciilifeform: was in fact one of the few folx who made genuine advances for the micro. whose cake microshit proceeded to swallow.
asciilifeform: bricklin became, at least until rise of microshit and its cargocults -- a cult figure
asciilifeform: to get the word out to the primary consumers, who were financial people. [Editor’s note: A total of over 800,000 copies were sold by May of 1985, when Lotus purchased Software Arts and ceased marketing VisiCalc]'
asciilifeform: '...A few dealers knew what they were doing and got their salespeople excited about it. Because of VisiCalc, one of the Burlington, Massachusetts, dealers became the most successful Apple dealer in the country at that time. Two of its salesmen ended up as two of the founders of Lotus (the original team that brought out 1-2-3). We only sold about 1000 a month for the first few months because we had
asciilifeform: this is even though the latter is quite superior, at least in raw capacity, speed, to the former.
asciilifeform: consider, visicalc was hyperbestseller among 'people who do things'; while the bare micro, even with rom basic -- was not.
asciilifeform: can deal in 'human' concepts, that make sense on grid paper just the same as on the comp.
asciilifeform: not the least of reasons for this being that you don't need the deformed monkey any moar
asciilifeform: and in that sweet spot, beats the shit out of perl.
asciilifeform: but -- quite like the plastic scissors they issue to kindergarteners and asylum inmates, the thing ~does~ have a sweet spot in which it ~works.
asciilifeform: wouldn't be a microshit product if it did, now.
asciilifeform: i can easily picture mircea_popescu's excelists tho. the thing does ~not~ behave gracefully at the outer limits of what it does.
asciilifeform: 'it dept' of course wants full employment for perlists.
asciilifeform: it is more or less impossible in a spreadshit.
asciilifeform: specifically, the 'this produces no meaningful answer and i have nfi why' situation never happens.
asciilifeform: to revisit upstack : present-day asciilifeform does not agree with young-asciilifeform re 'excel is what poor illiterate folx who never learned Actual Programming, suffer with'. in an important sense it is superior to a good fraction of what passes for 'actual program'
asciilifeform: intelligent (in the glass bead sense) folx who are unbound from reality, tend to birth monsters.
asciilifeform: the excelolade of the people who asciilifeform worked with, who had to juggle physical objects every day, was reasonably sane.
asciilifeform: i'd guess that it happens most to folx who are ~wholly untethered to reality ( financial models, say, of elaborate scamola that sums to 0 at the end of the day, rather than , say, titrations )
asciilifeform: quite familiar with this particular wheelbarrow.
asciilifeform: this unfortunately is not so. did use.
asciilifeform: when you let ~one~ flunky write ~one~ perl script, on other hand..
asciilifeform: when whole thing is excel -- the 60 y.o. buffett at the top, theoretically understands the flow.☟︎
asciilifeform: i can see a legit pov for the 'no sql' folx. 'you will NOT introduce programmerolade into our process flow, creating work for maggots like yerself and marrying our corp to your lazy and entitled arse' approx.☟︎
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if they 'banned stupid' -- would have to ban self, as a class, the entire yacht set
asciilifeform: lobbes: if you take work as a programmer where they program ~meat~ -- don't be surprised
asciilifeform: btw most of the folx reading this now own a perfectly good example of a non von neumann comp and program for same -- FUCKGOATS
asciilifeform: on a comp this rigidity does not exist ! ( when it does -- it is because of a long line of boneheads who wanted to emulate steel-cutting in all things )
asciilifeform: machine shop has no 'putting on tool', cuts -- must be planned, and reduce to simple geometries; etc
asciilifeform: it is an artifact of painful rigidity. you cannot work steel the way one works plasticine, for elementary physical reasons.
asciilifeform: where you push a rod, and it pushes; pull - and it pulls.
asciilifeform: makes it behave like a sane physical system, whether clockwork or circuit:
asciilifeform: everyone laughs at excel, but microshit did not invent spreadshit. spreadshit was 'killer app', arguably, for the original micros, because it introduces a modicum of sanity to the otherwise idiotic von neumann comp
asciilifeform: ( in combination with 'it dun matter if you make it 5ns faster, packets from goldman sachs still take magical priority on the other end, For Reasons' )
asciilifeform: now i could easily picture 'crown tax is so high, only imbecile hapsburg can afford it, so no optimize'
asciilifeform: the people paying megabux for cage near nyse, nasdaq, either exist or are product of elaborate disinfo. if the former, it would make sense for them to carry out the -- comparatively inexpensive -- software optimization prior to buying $mil cage.
asciilifeform: ( it they do not exist, it is then a piece of evidence in favour of 'hft does not actually exist, you cannot actually make any money by undercutting by nanosecond ' )
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: whether or not the 'nanosecs matter and we write it in asm' hft traders are real -- or mythical -- i do not know. but if hft worked the way it is purported to work, they ought to exist.
asciilifeform: would be a mighty fine thing, indeed.
asciilifeform: trinque: i entirely agree re above -- there could be such a thing as 'reusable encyclopaedia of data structures'. problem is, it dun exist yet.
asciilifeform: which purports to choose a one-size-fits-all set of algos for a given data bag.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: problem is, 'database' as commonly seen in sqlworld is not 'collection of btrees, rtrees, etc.' in encyclopaedic algorithmic form, but a misbegotten attempt at ai.
