Today we have special guests Tomer Lichtash and David Frankiel, a web developer and programmer behind the epic hacker folklore project The Story of Mel, a comprehensive guide to The Story of Mel.  

This story, which has survived through all the changes in the internet since its birth in 1983, and has morphed through all its iterations into something almost poetic in nature.  This allegory tells the story of the birth of of high-tech culture as we know it today, and creates some heated debate among our panelists as to the validity of its meanings.  Tomer and David tell some of the back story into their journey to discover if the story is a hoax, or if is truly real.

Okay. Hello everybody. And welcome to another episode of JavaScript Jabber on our panel. Today we have AJ O'Neill.

 

Hey, coming at you live from the purple room.

 

Yes, the good old purple room. And as our guests, we actually have two guests. Our first guest is Tomer Lichdash. Hi, Tomer.

 

Hi, Dan.

 

And our second guest is David. And I realized that I forgot to ask your last name. What is your last name? So David Frenker and Tomer Lichtash, and you're both coming from Israel, right?

 

Yes, indeed.

 

Well, so am I, you know, and I'm the host Dan Shapir and you know now that we've got the introductions out of the way You know what you do if you can give us a beef intro about yourself Who wants to start?

 

Okay, I'll take the challenge. So the challenge of introducing myself. So I'm a web developer for the past two decades. My background comes from many disciplines like writing, literature and more. And I've actually worked with you Dan weeks for several years. Anything else you want to know?

 

What are you doing these days, Tomel?

 

Well, these days I'm mainly working on the project we're about to talk about and looking for my path, my next challenge, as they say.

 

קול, ואיך את, דוד? So talking... Cool. So I ran into Tomer, what is it? I think it was a month or two ago at a meetup here in Israel. And we got to

 

Yep.

 

talking because as Tomer mentioned, we used to work together at Wix before both of us left there. And as we discussed now, I asked Tomer what he was involved with, and he told me about this story, the story of Mel and how he is involved with it and created a project around it. And this really picked my interest because I was actually, I happen to be familiar with the story of Mel, even though it's something that I haven't thought about in a very long time. And I thought it would be, it's such a great story that it would be worthwhile to bring you both on the show and talk about it, especially given as you've turned it into this entire whole project that we will obviously link to in the show notes. So briefly, can one of you tell us, like, what is the story of Mel, and why is it that you've got involved with it to such an extent?

 

Well, I'll say it like so. So basically the story of Mel is a post, an internet post that was published over the internet in 1983. If someone raises an eyebrow, so yes, there was an internet in 1983. It was in the form of discussion groups in a network that was called Newsnet. And the story, the post was published by Ed Nather. an astrophysicist in the Austin Texas University who wanted to reply to another post that he found. The other post claimed that real programmers don't use Pascal. Ed Nader, the author of The Story of Mel, found this argument pretty much distressing and devoted the entire post So he delved into another story that happened 30 years earlier. The story where he was hired by a company around the late 50s in California to write the first compiler for Fortran for a first generation computer. without transistors, okay, it was a very primitive computer. And then he met a guy called Mel. And Mel was like this very prolific engineer, application engineer, that was the title back then. And Mel wrote a game for that computer that was a Blackjack game. And that Blackjack game became so successful, and everyone really loved it. was promoted to be like the main demo of the company for that computer. Basically, Mel got a task, which was to port the game from the first generation computer to a second generation computer. And when he completed to do it and was very proud of himself, he got a request change. And the marketing team requested him to create a small cheat. So the customer, the client would always win the game. programmer in about 1959 found this request to be very distressful and refused to do it. Long story short, he left the company and Ed, the writer of the story of Mel, got Mel's code and was requested to do the same. And then he went through Mel's code and could not figure out how it worked because in the middle of the code, there was an infinite loop that did nothing, it no terminating condition, no test as Ed wrote. And it took him about two weeks to figure

 

Thanks for watching!

 

out how this hack worked. And the whole story,

 

Before you continue

 

yeah.

 

and give the solution because

 

No, no,

 

I

 

I

 

think

 

didn't want

 

it...

 

to give the solution. I just wanted to conclude, actually.

 

Okay, go for it.

 

I just want to say that the whole story revolves, so to speak, around this hack and around the idea of what a real programmer is in the eyes of Ed, who was there in the first moments of the industry. And the entire story carries out more than just this story, it carries out the basic The way I see it, this story tells the story of the birth of high-tech culture as we know it today, because the idea of a hacker and the computer and a giant system around all this that tries to sell this product stayed from then until today. Now, if I may say another word about the story, the story, as I said, was published in 1993, but survived the different changes in infrastructure of the internet since then. A lot of happened to the story. This, for instance, the story was written as, you know, a full prose text, but along the way, typography standards, sparsing standards, the lines were cut and created sort of a visual effect of a poem. Now, during the nineties, the author Ed, uh, remarked that he liked the idea that the text was hacked by the net as he phrased it and the whole story just, you know, survived in its new form until today and it's around the internet in a including Wikipedia, but a lot of websites are republishing the story. So we decided to republish this story, but as you said, there is a lot more to our project. But this is to conclude.

 

One of the things that I really loved about the story, first of all, like you said, it touches on a whole bunch of things that are still very relevant for us today. Like you said, on the one hand, it's the birth of the tech industry, but on the end, people listening to this podcast who are generally web developers, JavaScript developers, might be asking themselves. We're going to pause for a minute and we'll edit this out. Somebody should mute because we have a lot of background noise. Somebody just yawned. So whomever that is, please mute yourself unless you're talking. Okay, we'll resume. So I was saying on the one hand this story is Is really is really old like you said it was written back in 83 About something that happened way back in the 50s But like you said tommy this really touches on the birth of the tech industry It has to do with with hacking it has to do with the relations between product and developers developers, but it also has to do, I think, with this whole concept of 10x developer and what it even means to be a programmer. Because one of the things that you didn't mention, as I recall, is that this story, the catalyst for the story being written is

 

Thanks for watching!

 

another post that was published more or less at

 

Mm-hmm.

 

the same time. You mentioned it about... programmers use Fortran or something like that. That was published

 

I'm going to go ahead and turn it off. I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.

 

more or less at that time because that time was also the birth time of various other higher level programming languages. You mentioned Pascal, which was becoming really popular back then, obviously later replaced with more modern programming languages like

 

Yeah.

 

Java and JavaScript. was seen as this example of a programming language that provided higher level constructs and stuff like procedural programming and functional programming and then object-oriented programming, all this stuff that didn't really exist in those older, more, let's call them basic or even primitive programming languages back in the day. of a reaction along the lines of you think that Pascal is advanced and that real programmers go down into the hardware and use stuff like Fortran or maybe even assembly language, but even that is high level compared to how we used to work back in the day.

 

Yeah, the original post, I hope that I mentioned it, but the original post was written by a guy called Ed Post. And to my opinion, it was published on Usenet prior to the publish of the story of Merlin. There, Ed Nader found it. It's custom to attribute the publication of this post, real programmers don't use Pascal, to a magazine called Datamation. But as I research shows that Ed probably stumbled upon this post over Usenet. And yes, it was a discussion that went on about, and the tension between, I wouldn't call it primitive, I would call it low-level thinking. The idea of a computer, which is like a mechanical, almost a mechanical extension of the application engineer. the end outcome of the code written to it. So the original post claimed that real programmers, which is another interesting term by the way, it's a term that was coined in the seventies in what we call the MIT hacker folklore culture. Real programmer is what we call today the 10X programmer, who knows the bits and bytes of the computer, knows the bits and bytes of the code that you write, who can manipulate the computer to create functions that were not originally designed for it. So the idea that real programmers don't use Pascal was, as Ed Nader found it, pretty macho. to another thing that was a catalyst. In those years there was a little book, a humoristic book that's called Real Men Don't Eat Kish, which also

 

Oh

 

refers,

 

yes they do.

 

that also refers by the way to another MIT Hacker Folklore term that's called the Kish Eaters. So Kish Eaters is like a person who doesn't understand anything about anything. all that together created this real macho tone over the idea of who is the real programmer and what is the real language and Ed Nader, as a person who witnessed the idea that the computer runs solely on electricity and like diodes as logical operators, found this pretty distressing decided to respond.

 

It kind of reminds me in a funny way about some of the arguments and discussions that we see on platforms like Twitter these days about whether or not

 

Mm-hmm.

 

HTML is a real programming language, whether or not CSS is a real programming language, to people who implement stuff in HTML and CSS, should they be considered programmers? And then we see similar discussions about what are web are web developers, real

 

I

 

developers.

 

get your mix in oranges and Tyrannosaurs here because a programming language has a definition in order to be a programming language. It needs to be Turing complete HTML and CSS are not Turing complete. They are not they're literally not programming languages in the same way that my shoes are not bicycles. My shoes have the capacity to get me from one place to another a bicycle has the capacity to get me from one place to another. and HTML has an ability to describe a declarative something that can be rendered, that can go through a process and get a result, but it is not a programming language.

 

Technically,

 

May I interject?

 

All right.

 

yeah for sure. That's what you're here for.

 

Oh, that's wonderful. I'm going to use this opportunity then. Ajay, I'll address you personally. Of course, your answer is formally correct, but I doubt that it has any relevance to the essence of those arguments, which are really silly arguments, but they're inevitable. And I think, I'm guessing that all of us have gone through that phase in our digital or programming lives at one point or another, very long time ago. But when people ask about something being a programming language or a programmer, they're asking about the state of mind, let's say the intellectual and analytical prowess that is required in order to be accomplished in the field. It's basically a question of whether or not you're eligible to join the club. And it's true that you can resort to formal definitions, but that completely misses the point as far as I can see, because it's a social argument. It's not a formal argument. It's not an argument that eventually leads to accreditation or anything like that.

 

Well then.

 

It's just a matter of whether or not you belong to the club.

 

I, but this is, but this is ridiculous. That's like saying, it, I could be a cyclist if I can run, you know, at least 10 miles an hour that that doesn't that there is

 

Well, that's

 

a definition

 

it.

 

to a thing. You can't just change the definitions. You can't just

 

you

 

change the goalpost and say, well, well, now a programmer is anyone that has an intellectual mindset of a certain way and,

 

First of

 

and

 

all,

 

you can be in the club.

 

I disagree because I actually, Ajay, I disagree with you on that and I'm closer to David on this because I do think that you can change the definitions because I think that these definitions are human constructs and as technology changes, we ourselves as humans adapt to it and do definitely change the meanings of words. So again, formally you're correct.

 

Yes, but they're wrong, right? Like if you if you call a turner a spatula, you are incorrect. A turner is a turner, a spatula is a spatula. They are separate things.

 

Then

 

OK.

 

let's put aside the term programming language for a minute and use a much less formal definition, for example, which is the definition of web dev or web developer. OK?

 

Yeah, you can be a web dev and do HTML because that is part of web development. That

 

Yes,

 

is fair.

 

but that is fair.

 

That is

 

But

 

correct. That is accurate.

 

then I see arguments like, if I can build a website using Wix or using Squarespace, am I a web developer? And I've seen arguments that say yes, and I've seen arguments that say no. And then obviously, it becomes a question of where you draw the line. Like, can

 

Well,

 

you all?

 

it's it's you know, do you this is kind of the difference

 

But but

 

of

 

but.

 

being a mechanic and a salesman of car

 

But at

 

of used cars.

 

the end of the day, the point that I'm trying to get across, and I think that that's also the point that David was kind of saying, is that at the end of the day, what I see is that very often this form of terminology is used for the purpose of gatekeeping. Like, we belong to a certain club, you don't, so that makes us better than you, or you get out of here. who were using Pascal to program were programmers. So in order to exclude

 

I don't

 

the...

 

even know what Pascal is, but I assume it's turning complete.

 

Ha!

 

Yeah,

 

Hahaha

 

so just to give a brief back, to give

 

So...

 

a very

 

So...

 

brief background on that, Pascal was a programming language created by Nicholas Worth back in the 80s, I think. I need to check on Wikipedia, maybe even the late 70s. It was originally created for the purpose of being a teaching programming language. It was heavily based and inspired by the Algol programming language,

 

The old

 

which

 

Python.

 

is Soda. It was a compiled programming language. was statically typed. But interestingly, a lot of us got our first, let's call it, intro into real programming using a version of Pascal, which was called Turbo Pascal, which was created by, or I always mispronounce his name, Andrew, the creator of C Sharp, Anders Heilsberg. So he created a version of Pascal called Turbo Pascal and a compiler and an IDE that could run on the old PCs and got us all past basic to actually write code that could compile and run as machine code with good performance and use Pascal for that purpose. So it's obviously a real programming language, but the people back then, especially the Fortran developers, you know, they had an issue with people who were working at such, let's call it a high level kind of soft and comfortable environment calling themselves programmers. So they came up with the term real programmers as a macho term, like Tomer said. And the whole purpose was gatekeeping. So I think it was really interesting to see this whole, the story of Mel forth as a way to turn this whole thing on its head. Like you think you're real programmers, well you guys are nothing compared to Mel.

 

I also want to add like a side note that there is an ongoing discussion whether CSS is purely complete or not and that CSS is an evolving protocol. So claiming that it is a programming language or not a programming language doesn't really have a solid stand today. Maybe you know 10 years ago when HTML was used to describe a document or 20 years ago, But things do

 

You

 

change

 

know it's

 

rapidly.

 

not a programming language. This is not actual. You know that it's not a programming language.

 

Why would you say

 

But

 

it?

 

AJ.

 

If it were Turing-complete, we would know. It's not a debate. It either is or it isn't. You either can write full expressive programs with conditionals and loops, or you can't. It's not a

 

But

 

maybe.

 

AJ, that's just the point, AJ. The point is that a lot of people are arguing about this. And if it's really a simple formal question, then you could just write it off as a massive display of collective stupidity, where people are arguing about something that can be easily settled if

 

Thanks for watching.

 

they would

 

Bye.

 

just sit down and read the manual. But I don't think this approach is constructive. I think that this approach kind of ties in into what we're trying to do in the project of Mellon. to figure out what we're doing. And that is the question feels correct. It feels like there is something to discuss there. And the formal definitions don't even come close to resolve it or to even or

 

I...

 

to shed any light on it. And what we're trying to understand is what is it in the essence of programming that people feel so passionate about. And obviously, this thing is divorced from the formal definition and much closer to the state processes that take place when you crack a problem.

 

But this is silly. I mean, it's something is either something or it isn't. This

 

No-

 

is not something where, oh, I feel a certain way there for it. No, it either is or it isn't. This is not something

 

No.

 

that needs a state of mind or

 

So,

 

gatekeeping

 

you know AJ,

 

No,

 

or...

 

you know,

 

I think

 

I'm

 

that

 

curious.

 

you're saying something else. You're saying that there is a formal question that is easily answerable. And of course, we all agree on that. And there is a separate discussion going on using the same terminology, but evidently not using the same deep structures underneath the terminology.

 

Well then this

 

And

 

is just

 

it's

 

ignorance.

 

challenged to.

 

This is just ignorance.

 

No.

 

It's absolutely ignorance. If people don't understand what the words mean, that is literally by dictionary definition, ignorance.

 

I'll try one last time, Ajay.

 

Okay.

 

Obviously, the words as defined by the dictionary do not match the content of the discussion. However, there is a discussion, and it is passionate, and sometimes it's held by people who are not on the face of it entirely stupid. So

 

Thanks for watching!

 

what is going on in their minds? What are they really asking?

 

Stupid

 

Forget

 

is

 

the...

 

different

 

Forget

 

than

 

the person

 

ignorant.

 

in your mind. So one way is to just say you don't understand the words, and once you did understand the words, everything would be settled. And another way is to try to relate to the strong sensation that there is some essence of programming. And of course, I have been feeling it and I've been in the field because of that ever since I wrote my first program even before the Aetura Pascal, which was one of my favorite environments. So this is an undeniable sensation, which could perhaps turn out to be a mirage. It could turn out to camouflage that complete vacuous content that means nothing. But it's still much more interesting than just trying to match it with a formal definition. This is

 

I'll

 

And

 

my

 

give

 

last attempt

 

AJ

 

at this.

 

if

 

I think that's the problem

 

I...

 

is that it's interesting.

 

No, but

 

It's

 

I'll

 

too

 

give...

 

interesting.

 

AJ, the thing is that, again, you've got the... I'll give a different example trying to convey, I think, what our intentions about this or our thought about this. You know, most organizations these days in the tech industry have the entry-level positions called junior software engineers. and then they advance to a role of a senior software engineer. Yet if I look at the formal definition of it, most of them are not engineers. And yet that's...

 

I agree with that. This is job title inflation. And I think it's been part of startup culture. You can't give somebody enough pay, so you give them a really cool title that they don't deserve that doesn't match what they do.

 

But then a certain bar is set. And the consequence is that if you decide that you don't define somebody as an engineer, or put another way, if you do define them as an engineer, if they, for example, develop using JavaScript, but don't define them as an engineer if they create or develop using CSS, that directly impacts their ability to make a good income or advance within the organization. And not necessarily for the

 

Those

 

correct

 

are separate

 

reasons.

 

roles. Those are separate roles. That's like saying if we define someone as an executive assistant versus define them as an event planner that they might not be able to advance their different roles. They're

 

Are they

 

not the

 

really

 

same

 

different?

 

thing.

 

Ro, are they different? Do you really differentiate between somebody who does mostly CSS and then a bit of JavaScript versus somebody that happens to do mostly JavaScript and then a bit of CSS?

 

Absolutely! One of them

 

I

 

is

 

strongly

 

implementing

 

disagree.

 

design, and the other one is writing programming logic potentially.

 

I strongly disagree. But if you write CSS and ignore the whole aspect of the environment that you're writing in, that may be what you're saying is correct. But that the idea that Dan presents doesn't imply that it says that you're writing CSS and doing a little bit of JavaScript and you are aware of the environment you are developing in. So saying that you're writing CSS or HTML or JavaScript is a very outdated idea.

 

I I'm sorry. I just I just don't buy it. I think this is adding unnecessary confusion for the point of what you said earlier interest and being interesting or being cool. I mean you didn't say

 

Bye.

 

being cool, but that's what I would throw this into is if something is cool. People want it. It's interesting. It's cool. People want it. Therefore, you know that they want to shift the goalpost so that what's cool can be

 

Thanks for watching!

 

where the goalpost is rather than what it is and you may be right people. the time, and they often change to mean the opposite of what they meant, such as awesome, and terrible, and awful. All these words are kind of synonyms, but they mean completely different things. So I agree that it could change. In programmer, originally, if I'm not mistaken, I could be wrong because I actually don't know the history that well, but programmer was the person who changed the cables between the different ports in order to create the program. that and programmer became a turn, but that was Turing complete. Programmer became a term for using punch cards, but that was Turing complete. And then programming became a term for using Fortran, but that was Turing complete. And then programming became a term for using higher level languages, which were Turing complete. And there was something that you were programming the computer the whole time in a Turing complete way. You were writing programs, but the methodology by which you did it, and I could see, you know, You use punch cards. You don't use plugs. You're not a real programmer. You use for trend. You don't use punch cards or whatever it is. I get I get that on a level of people are looking at the medium rather than then the abstract the concept of program.

 

You know, I have to share with you a small anecdote that I found during the research, which doesn't concern the story of Mel, but that's concerned the evolving ideas and the words that represent them. In the late 19th century, there was a group that was called Harvard Computers. You know, and those computers were a group of women who worked in the field of astronomy, and their job title in Harvard was a computer. And these computers, they were in charge of calculating the mathematical ideas given to them, validating and developing very complex mathematical problems in order to aim telescopes and find certain celestial targets. Now, these computers, ensure that they were not credited for their celestial findings, but the idea that computers were people, were a group of women that did some calculating and the idea of computer as we find it today and in between the entire evolution of the word programmer, which by the way came from application seems to be evolving very fast. And to differentiate between HTML, CSS and JavaScript seems to me like a petty argument, because

 

I

 

you can't really understand one without understanding it in another. You can write in Hebrew or you can write in English without being Shakespeare. That's right. But if you are writing in English and you are writing literature and you don't know about called a writer.

 

way before

 

I

 

you

 

program

 

continue

 

in JavaScript every day. I

 

by

 

don't

 

the

 

touch

 

way

 

JavaScript. I mean, I'll touch HTML CSS.

 

Yeah, well, we'll get to that in a second, but I just want to mention in the context of what you, the example that you gave, Tomer, that there was, not so long ago, there was the movie Hidden Figures about the role that

 

Excellent movie.

 

black women played in NASA and the flight to the moon. And one of the

 

Mm-hmm.

 

things that is shown there is exactly that evolution that you that at the beginning of the movie they were literally working as computers, performing their calculations

 

Yes.

 

using pen and paper, and then during the movie,

 

then.

 

amongst other things, they actually became actual, they started actually writing software

 

They

 

for

 

started

 

the first computers

 

writing software

 

that they got

 

for it.

 

at NASA so that instead of being replaced, they kind of added value to themselves and to the whole project. really

 

Mm-hmm.

 

interesting story in exactly the same context. I just want to say one thing before we move on and talk a bit some more, I think, about the story of Mel itself. AJ is that, and it also, I think, came up in that discussion

 

And it

 

that

 

also

 

I kind

 

I

 

of

 

think

 

missed

 

came up in

 

that

 

that

 

you

 

discussion

 

had with Matt

 

that I

 

Pocock

 

kind of missed

 

about

 

that you had with Matt Fokoff about...

 

TypeScript, in that I think you are kind of slightly different than the norm of, I wouldn't say, say definitely not all JavaScript developers, but most JavaScript developers in that you develop using JavaScript, but mostly not for the browser, or hardly ever for the browser, if I remember correctly.

 

But my code runs in the browser just fine. It's browser agnostic. What I write is libraries and you can use those libraries. And I mean, I write applications as well. But a lot of the code that I write, I write in the more, let's say,

 

Oh yeah,

 

component fashion.

 

for sure,

 

And

 

JavaScript.

 

so it'll work in the browser just fine.

 

Oh, for sure,

 

It's

 

JavaScript

 

that if you're

 

is

 

looking

 

JavaScript.

 

at the browser

 

you

 

as a way to paint a UI, then no, I don't write it for the browser. But if you look at the browser as a virtual machine for running a logical process, code for the browser as well.

 

Well, at the end of the day, and I think we also talked about this in the past in the context, let's say, of discussion about functional programming, is that at the end of the day, all of us programmers care about the side effects at the end of the day.

 

Yeah.

 

If our code writes but doesn't have any impact on the external world, then it's nothing. And in the context of web development, at the end of the day, that means showing some

 

knowing some do I, some

 

using

 

do

 

a web

 

I.

 

browser. And that,

 

Yes.

 

at the end of the day, means

 

And that's...

 

doing some of the

 

or

 

work

 

mobile app.

 

or mobile app. But mobile apps have their own libraries. But again, for the purpose of this discussion, it means that at the end of the day, in the context of a web application, somebody has to deal with HTML and CSS. And I consider that to be a part of the

 

Bye.

 

program. part of programming. But let's move on, if we can, with this discussion.

 

Sure.

 

So getting back to the story of Mel,

 

Thanks for watching!

 

so there was this really cool story on Usenet that I highly recommend for everybody to read. How did it kind of sort of become this passion thing for you guys? What has it evolved into? about.

 

So,

 

Can I start, Thomas?

 

sure, go ahead.

 

It's mostly going to be you. I'm just like the hook into this. Among the two of us, I came across the story first, I would say about 30 years ago back in Tel Aviv University, back when it was still on Usenet and the internet was only, you know, academia and government only or US government only. And whatever the reason, the story stuck with me. I was enchanted immediately and I read many amusing things over time, but that happened to stick. And when I entered the industry, I discovered that the story was sort of a litmus test. I didn't use it as a test, but it turned out to be one. You just present it to your peers in the group, and those who liked it turned out to be real computer guys. Of course, I'm air quoting the word real, but it does have a concrete emotional sense. And it never failed. You go to a place. you circulate the story around, some people just don't find it interesting. Most people don't understand it. And those who like it and continue mentioning it over time are just a certain breed of programmers. I'm not even going to attempt to define it, but it's certainly there. So on my very, very brief stint at Wix around 2012, I showed the story to Tomer. We read it together. He read it. And he apparently, well, he can take it from there.

 

So yes, around 2012, David handed me the story and told me to read it. And I briefly read it and understood that it was interesting, although I didn't quite get it. I didn't understand most of it, just to tell the truth. But the story also stuck with me and I came back to it again and again, trying to understand the hack. The idea of the hack. in the story and the more I read it the more I understood it but still there was something missing for me. Now about five years later you know coming and going to the story occasionally five years later I decided as I as I mentioned before I have this background in literature I decided to translate the story as a poem as the poem that it is it it's called it's considered to be a The main epos of hacker folklore, the biggest text, the largest text that survived the internet in the decades between 1950 to 1980, which is about the years of hacker folklore, the way I see it at least. And as I started to translate it, I noticed this certain interesting attributes of the text. It was very musical. It was very interesting to read to someone who doesn't understand computers. And those parts that needed a deep understanding of a computer were not clear to me. And I hope to get some understanding. But I found myself delving more and more into the technical history over the internet for more and more information. And I found a lot of information. It took a lot of work, but I found a lot of information. And for about five years, I did just that. I translated the story slowly. I read more and more about these old computers. I found the manuals. And after a few years, I showed the translation to David and he actually liked it. And I showed it to several other people you were interested in it and it gave me the energy to continue in doing it. At a certain point, I had a lot of information about the computer. I had a lot of information about the era and I noticed a weird fact. As I mentioned, the attribution of the article, real programmers don't use And everywhere they said, okay, Ed Nader read this article on Datamation and decided to write the story of Mel. But as I looked closer, I noticed that the article in Datamation was published about three months after the publish of the story of Mel. And then I started to get really worried. And I said to myself, okay, is it all a hoax? Is Mel even real? Are those people even real? Is this story, did this story actually happen? There are mixed ideas about it. Some said along the way that these are fictional characters. Some said that this is actual

 

you

 

history. What is the truth? And with that question, I went even deeper. And I started to contact people around the world. I started to get clues about when did the story happen exactly and where and how. How did those people meet? When did Ed meet Mel? What were their backgrounds? What did they know? How old were they when they met? And I got to interview a lot of interesting people. I got to find a lot of interesting findings. Just for example, I had my brother who lives in LA follow a clue that I found about two years ago. And he followed it and we found Mel's grave in a cemetery, Jewish cemetery. roots of Mel. I also found another interesting fact after speaking with Ed Nader's daughter, Lara Nader, I found that Ed was a professor in the Tel Aviv University astronomy department for about two years in the 70s, a bit before he wrote the story of Mel. And I got this in the eighties, who were those people in the fifties, where did they come from? And I went even further back and I got to know how male came to be. Where did his family come from? What did his father do? Which environment did he grew up in to become such a prolific application engineer?

 

Wait,

 

They...

 

was he prolific?

 

I think so. I think that in a word, yes, I think that Mel was a super innovative guy, or as David coined it in his coming article about the hack, a very clever guy who could make the computer go exactly the way he wanted it to go. And in a world of undocumented and uncharted territory, undocumented programming standards, there were no standards. There giant machine made of about 10,000 diodes, which could go boo if you told it to go boo, and Mel made it go and play Blackjack. By the

 

Ah

 

way, Mel's Blackjack game was so, just to say how prolific it was, because there were no screens, there were no displays back then, there were no hard drives. MIT computer rooms in special events by students. I mean, this game went around the US in the late 50s and was played by individuals in a world where you can't imagine, you know, that like today you download the game to your phone as if it was nothing. You just do it. The idea of operating such a giant computer, and it was called a mobile computer because because it had four wheels under a huge desk that it sat on. It came from the factories, those heavy duty wheels. So it was called mobile, but it had like a three part set and it came with a chair, okay? The chair was part of the set. So I think Mel got the idea of how to make it go fun, which wasn't a trivial idea at the time at all.

 

I have to read a short quote attributed to Mel in this story, which goes, if a program cannot rewrite its own code, he asked, what good is it? And I thought that this is such

 

Yeah.

 

an amusing quote, especially in the context of the fact that in a recent episode, we talked about those parts of JavaScript that should be avoided, eval because eval is known to be quote unquote evil because it lets you take data in javascript and execute it as code and here he's basically saying that without it there's really no point in coding and it kind of

 

Yep.

 

reminds me of this whole concept that these days we have machine learning rewrite itself. That these learning algorithms optimize themselves. So effectively, you're starting with a certain simple sort of a state machine, but it becomes ever more complicated. And pretty quickly, you don't really know or understand how it works anymore. But it still solves the problems that you want it to solve. Now, obviously, that's not what Mel was doing. Otherwise, I think it's kind of the precursor.

 

Yeah, David, do you want to address the self-modifying code topic? I think you should. Okay.

 

I did not hear what was said there.

 

The... The video you still with us?

 

Can you hear me? Can

 

Yeah,

 

you hear me now?

 

now I can hear you. Yeah.

 

Anyone?

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah, I care, you know.

 

the video we can hear you.

 

Well, now I don't

 

Hello?

 

hear him. Now I hear you.

 

You

 

Yeah.

 

do? OK, I have no idea what happened previously. The browser just just zonked out in the middle of the sentence. So I would say that it's it's it's fun to romanticize about this particular sentence in the story. And it does indeed hold a lot of promise. I think that Mel simply meant something that which we all do all the time, which is to his only way to push the envelope was to have modifying program, the practice that became standard years later, that the code segment is sacred and you're not allowed to write into it first as a recommendation and later on is enforced by the operating system. That's something that's simply common sense once enough experience was gained in the industry. But back then with the very limited hardware that Mel had, if you couldn't modify your own program, you just had, as far as he was concerned, one hand was tied behind your back. And notwithstanding this, which I think is simply a technical thing, the idea of a self-modifying program is really charming. It feels like it touches at the essence of intelligence, which is, I think, why very basically, I think, which is why we're very fascinated with it.

 

Oh yeah, I-

 

I just think a lot of these ideas are... Oh, go ahead, Dan.

 

No, I was just saying that the basic concept here for in case our readers don't exactly our readers, our listeners don't exactly follow along is the concept that in those days coding was effectively writing a series of numbers. And those numbers might be code and they might be data. And what Mel was doing was effectively using them as both. What that means is that to, I don't know, perform an add operation, but it was also the number one. So if you wanted to, you could use that same number stored in the machine, both as an instruction to perform an operation, but then if you kind of moved your instruction pointer around, you could actually also use it, as I numbers, you could in this way actually modify the code that was running as data that you were writing back to the system. And obviously this is very, very different than how we program these days. But you know, that's what they had. And that's the beauty of it.

 

So when all you have is

 

you

 

bad tools, nobody can blame you for making bad choices. You know,

 

Well, I-I

 

if you if you

 

wanna-

 

That's...

 

not bad well

 

that is so...

 

they're not even bad choices they're

 

They were the only

 

Well,

 

choices.

 

that's right.

 

Yeah.

 

But that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. If

 

Yeah,

 

you don't

 

but...

 

have anything better than nobody can blame you for picking what's worse. And that's one of the problems in the political landscape today is when you, you know, look back in history and consider people that had a limited array of choices and say, oh, they were bad people because they did one of the two things that they could have done at the time. You know, but I think I think this whole discussion is it's kind of It's a worship of art, which is fine, but I'm not personally, I'm not interested

 

Thanks for watching!

 

in software as art. Software is so there's this famous architect, Louis Sullivan, and he has this quote that I think is just so fundamental to software and is indicative of the problems that we have with web pages and mobile apps today. Form ever follows function. something is what is most important. It's not the cool part. It's not the interesting part. It's what makes sure that the work gets done. And in the case of programming gets done consistently that consistent inputs yield consistent outputs, you

 

you

 

know, setting date functions and random number generators aside. But

 

Thanks for watching!

 

if you if you have consistent input, you get consistent output that you can follow a process, then you can achieve a desired goal by following the process. That is

 

But yeah,

 

part.

 

I understand what you're saying,

 

Ahem.

 

but I'm looking at it from a different perspective, especially in the context of that particular era. Look at it this way. The Apollo mission got a man to the moon using a computer that's much, much, much weaker than what you currently have in your shirt pocket or your pants pocket in your mobile phone. And they were

 

Yeah.

 

only able to achieve that by doing ingenious things. They could have basically threw up their hands and said, the technology is not there, we cannot get a man to the moon.

 

Yeah.

 

But that's not what they decided to do.

 

I don't think your mills were the people that were working on putting the man on the moon

 

But why not? That's

 

There's a

 

Well...

 

there's a

 

That's it.

 

there's a

 

exactly

 

veritasium

 

it.

 

video But I don't

 

That's

 

think

 

a very

 

it

 

arbitrary,

 

I don't think it

 

You

 

is

 

I think it's an arbitrary assertion. You could go either way because you see the people who put a spacecraft on the moon as protagonists. So you try to identify them with your principles. And if your principles happen to rule out the males of the world, then

 

No,

 

of course

 

I'm

 

you want

 

saying

 

them out.

 

that I don't

 

I think.

 

think the people that were at the level of Mel were the people that were developing the spacecraft. I think it's a miracle

 

Yeah,

 

that

 

yeah,

 

the

 

yeah.

 

spacecraft

 

Thank

 

didn't

 

you.

 

do as the other spacecraft did.

 

Look, what people did back then and what Mel did is on a certain non-trivial level of abstraction, very commonplace today. If you look at what's been happening with JavaScript since, let's say, 2000 until 2015,

 

The video will cut off.

 

and you see how... How about now?

 

Yeah.

 

Can you hear me?

 

Yeah, yeah, now we can

 

We

 

hear

 

can hear

 

you.

 

the video just fine by the way, Tomer.

 

I'm sorry, sorry.

 

No problem.

 

If it's a hint that you would like me to be cut off, then by all means, just

 

No,

 

go ahead.

 

go, go, go.

 

No, no, go.

 

OK, so if you look at I'm giving JavaScript as an example, it's not the best, but I think it's relevant to this forum. If you look at what people what people have been doing with the very limited language that was available back in the early 2000s and how people created entire class systems and entire reflection systems and code completion when there is actually absolutely no typing and no and no interface declaration. But still, people did that. And the same thing happened with Flash. If you look at what happened, until Adobe was kind enough to publish Action Script 3. And there are many other examples. People have been pushing the envelope all the time. Like,

 

Yes, but this

 

as

 

that's

 

a matter of

 

the

 

fact,

 

difference between art and engineering. Engineering is trying to create a stable system that is reproducible and spans across people in time, or that's one definition we could, we can argue about the definition of engineering, I can concede that my definition that I presented of engineering is not the the best definition, but, but it's somewhere about your you're trying to get something that is reproducible, and that is structurally integral, that and

 

Of course.

 

art. So when you when

 

Yep.

 

you

 

Thanks for watching!

 

when you build a building, you can make a building that looks very beautiful and exotic, but it first has to be functional. Otherwise, you end up with a building that's melting the sidewalk because it's concave glass is creating a laser array that's that's literally frying the street,

 

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah

 

right? And, and you've heard about these things, you know, the building I'm talking about, right? I don't remember the name of it. But but this is what happens when you put art in front of engineering, engineering must come first in is the flourish that you add on top once

 

Yeah,

 

the engineering

 

but

 

is sound.

 

I think the word art only complicates the entire discussion because in this case of the story of Mel, I think that art is only the reflection of engineering and history. And from history, you can learn. And by, but even by being aware to the history of your profession, which may be called programming or engineering or web development doesn't matter. But the idea that you're not the first to attribute problems that are with loops and functions and form

 

But there wasn't

 

the tallest functions.

 

a problem. That's the whole point of the story of Mel, is he wanted to do something that was relatively simple, and

 

Oh.

 

he went about doing it the most complex way

 

Eh-heh.

 

possible on purpose, intentionally.

 

Tommel, du sykt!

 

So you're basically going back to the argument of what is a real programmer. And that's the whole idea that I think that story points to in the history of programming. That real programming is the innovative take on the existing tools in order to take the like an infinite loop that does nothing but makes the whole thing stick.

 

But that is an artistic choice. That

 

No, that is-

 

is

 

So.

 

fundamentally an artistic choice because

 

No,

 

that

 

I

 

was

 

disagree.

 

not necessary.

 

I think, I disagree.

 

But

 

I think

 

the

 

it's

 

story

 

an optimal,

 

itself references it as an artistic

 

no,

 

choice.

 

no, the story references to it as an optimal choice. It uses the computer resources in the optimal way. And that is the engineering take

 

I don't

 

on that.

 

think so. Then that's really not what I've seen

 

I'm going

 

in the

 

to quote,

 

story.

 

I have often felt that programming is an art form whose real value can only be appreciated by another another verse in the same arcane art. There are lovely gems and brilliant, brilliant coups hidden from the human view and admiration sometimes forever by the very nature of the process. You can learn a lot

 

Okay.

 

about an individual by reading through his code, even in hexadecimal. What Mel, I think was an unsung genius. So this is poetry. This

 

That

 

is

 

is

 

poetry.

 

one of the most beautiful quotes in the story, but let me quote you another one. Mel loved the RPC 4000 because he could optimize his code that is locating instructions on the drum so that as one finish its job, the next would be just arriving at the read head and available for immediate execution. There was a program to do that job, an optimizing assembler, but Mel refused to use it because later it says, compilers. Men wanted to be the compiler. We wanted full control of what

 

you

 

happens in the computer inside.

 

Tomer, you guys are referring to two different aspects of the story. AJ is completely correct that the hack, which is at the heart of the story, is 100% superfluous. We even address it in the article that we're about to publish in the project. Of course, it's an act of vanity. The only redeeming feature is that Mel never bragged about it. He just enjoyed the hack. He just enjoyed the achievement without trying to prove anything to anyone. I think, AJ, can you hear me?

 

Yeah, I hear you. I hear you.

 

Okay, great. So I think that, I find I would love to just continue this for hours because this really touches on the very basic. lifestyle and choices that are made when you program computers. Evidently, most of the things my experience is that most people in the field, most people who actually code computers are not in it for the function. That is, they don't identify 100% or even 50% with the goals of the organization that hires their services. I even may say that we are in it because it is fun, it's rewarding. It gives you many, many moments in which you feel more clever than other people. And you have, you continuously have, riddles that you solve, it's wonderful. So we are in it for the satisfaction and the artistic aspect is just a little, not just, but it's sort of an elevation of the satisfaction where you really feel that sometimes you touch upon some deep truth when you manage to combine a huge spaghetti of logic into just one concise statement. That's wonderful and it's very satisfactory. And I agree

 

Thanks for watching!

 

that from an organizational point of view and an industrial point of view, this may even be a hindrance. And it's the constant conflict that you have between product and management and the developers on the other hand, because it's more like a truce or a ceasefire than

 

Thanks for watching!

 

an actual peace treaty. Developers always want to have fun and they always want to explore new technologies. They always want to solve riddles in an impressive way. And

 

Or

 

the

 

maybe

 

company

 

they

 

wants

 

don't.

 

something else.

 

Maybe they want to produce code that works well and that is reliable.

 

No

 

I'm

 

no no,

 

going

 

okay,

 

to use my

 

yeah,

 

prerogative

 

off.

 

as a host and start to draw this discussion

 

Hehehe

 

to an end because we are starting to run out of time. Even though it's an excellent discussion, I will just finish by saying this. I love writing beautiful code and I love reading beautiful code. from my perspective, that there is a certain artistic aspect to it. Now, it might not be the most important aspect, or it might not even be the main aspect, but it's still, but it's definitely there. And with that, I'm going to draw this discussion to an end, because like I said, we are running out of time, and we still need to do picks, but before we go there, if people want, and I'll mention it again at the end, If people want to read the story of Mel for themselves and also all the research that you guys have done, where can they find it?

 

They can find it on the project website. It's called Mel's Loop. It's written as it sounds, M-E-L-S, loop.com. And they are also welcome to contribute to the website via our contact form or via GitHub. It's an open source project. And we have a lot

 

you

 

of ideas on how to make it even better until next year,

 

Thanks for watching!

 

celebrate 40 years and that's where we hope that the entire research would explode on the website.

 

Very cool. So with that, let's move on to PIX. And AJ, being as you're the only panelist, you go first.

 

All righty. So I am going to pick Louise Sullivan. And I'm just going to link to the Wikipedia article on form follows function. It kind of bugs me because it's actually form ever follows function, but I guess the more popular version of the quote. And with that, you know, just Steve Jobs, one of his, you know, the things that he referenced a lot was his calligraphy class. put things in perspective and make things click for him and and influence the way that he drove the path of Apple. And in a similar way, I took a humanities 101 class and it it was so foundational. I mean, in a lot of ways, it probably resonated with who I already was and just gave me vocabulary and great thinkers to be able to draw from, to be able to reinforce some of those biases that I already have. But I took a humanities 101, which is where I learned about Lewis Sullivan. And I don't really know what humanities is. No one really seems to, but it's kind of like somewhere between history, art and literature all mixed together along with other stuff. anthropology, and it's kind of a survey of what does it mean to be human and what do humans do, I guess? I don't really know how to describe what a humanities class is. I don't know if they even exist anymore. But the one I took, we had a couple of different sections. One was on art that I found very influential. It talked about avenues of access, the way that somebody comes through a door and what's that as they travel through that door opposed to another door is intended and does affect the way the person has the experience of arriving at the center piece of art in the middle of the hallway, whether they come from the right or the left. And also this form ever follows function in a couple of things like this that were just really influential to me in terms of what I believe about programming and the art side the engineering side. And I'm also going to pick Rob Pike's talk, Simplicity is Complicated. I've got that linked on creedsacraftsmanship.com or you can look it up by Simplicity is Complicated. And I will also post a link to it right here. I think that it's really important. And then, let's see, I've been watching this show with my wife called The Unexplained. hosted by Willem William Shatner and it's on Netflix right now at least. And it's kind of in the same vein as ancient aliens

 

you

 

or a lot of the the hokey TV shows that are just fun entertainment. But there's also some interesting things. I think shows like ancient aliens and the unexplained and some of these others. It's not necessarily that you're going to get the best educational content out of them. factually wrong. They're drawing from old information because the old information is more interesting, more, you know, has a better spin to it than the more accurate new information. But I just, I love the food for thought that it gives you for some of these things about humans and life and whatnot that we don't have a definite explanation for. So I'm going to pick the unexplained as well. And that's, those are my picks for today.

 

Cool, thank you, AJ. So now my turn. So my first pick is actually, you know, this will probably be old news by the time this episode comes out. But it turns out that we are, it seems like the bubble is bursting. I don't like the term bubble for the tech industry. And hence, I don't like the term bubble bursting either. But we're definitely seeing a significant downturn in the tech industry. Today it was announced that Shopify is letting go of about 1,000 people, which are 10% of its workforce. I know a lot of great people there. We interviewed a great person from Shopify about their hydrogen platform not so long ago. I really hope none of the people that I know were impacted. But what can you do?

 

Thanks.

 

I still remember the big downturn when the dot-com bubble burst back in 2000, 2001, and then the other one in 2008. And the big difference that I'm seeing now is that at least the industry seems to be mostly healthy. That most of the tech companies

 

See you next time. Bye.

 

do have actual products. and consequently that people hopefully will be able to find jobs even if they are let go. So that would be my first pick. My second pick is a television show that I recently watch, actually a series. It's a British television show put out by ITV. It's called The Thief, story that turns out to be completely true. And I very much recommend that if you can watch it, that you do. It's an amazing story. You won't believe that something like this actually happened in real life and turns out that it did. So highly, highly recommended. And my final pick is the same pick that I always pick, the one that we apparently are getting used to because it just keeps on going. But, you know, we always need to remember that hundreds or even thousands of people are dying there each and every day. And, you know, whatever we can do to help, we should. And those are my picks. And now, Tomell, you go. What are your picks? Do you have

 

Okay,

 

pics?

 

so I have two picks. One of them is very obscure and the other one is way too obscure. So I'll start with the very obscure. I pick a book that's called Net Pioneers 1.0 by published in Sternberg Press in 2009. It's an anthology of articles and photos of innovative ideas over the web in the early days of the web. And if we discuss hacker folklore, this is like the next phase of folklore where innovation and artistic approaches meet new standards and unchartered territories like early web days and create really wonderful things from scarce materials

 

you

 

or stuff like that. The book was published in 2009, it's in English, and I strongly recommend it. And my second pick is the very obscure pick, but I felt that if I had this opportunity to recommend something that I would recommend, the thing that made me very happy listening to in the recent time, it's an album over at Bandcamp that's called Post Gogol World, It's a group of musicians that published about eight parts album with crazy, wonderful, hip jazz music. And on that music, they read English translations of absurd stories written by a guy called Daniel Halms, which I cannot recommend enough. absurd, modern Russian literature that would blow your mind. I mean, it's so beautiful that all I can say is just give it a listen and enjoy the post-Google world.

 

Thank you, Tomer. And how about you, David? Do you have any picks for us?

 

Yes, I have some picks. I decided not to go for things that define my world because that's a tall order. So I just picked the things that were on my mind this particular week. The first is something that came up when I was interviewing someone for a coding job. So I would recommend to anyone who likes application programming to at least get to know, if not program in the framework made by Microsoft, starting something like 15 years ago, And it's not the framework itself, but the recommendation is to get to know it. And they tried to figure out why it hasn't, why the thing that was supposed to happen, which was that everybody would be coding in WPF. Why didn't, why did that not happen? What does it, what does it tell us about how software evolves and what match there should be between people who actually use, who actually code and software? So WPF is my first pick.

 

Just before

 

My

 

you

 

second

 

continue

 

pick is just

 

to your second,

 

a squash player that I

 

before you continue to your second pick, just to see if I remember correctly, WPF is like that kind of HTML for building application UIs or something like that, right? It was like an XML based language for

 

WPF

 

specifying

 

contains...

 

user interfaces.

 

WPF is based on XAML, which is a variant of XML, but that's just the declarative part. The WPF is an application framework, which really I don't want to start talking about because then I won't stop. But very briefly, when I came across it and also other people that I spoke to, the sensation was they finally got it right. it that manages data and data binding the way you expect it. I thought that many other people thought it was perfect and it was destined to just take the world by storm and nothing of the sort happened. So it's

 

Thanks for watching!

 

really interesting to look at the process and to also get ideas from the framework. It's brilliant. And the second pick is just a squash player that I watched several times this week and I'm not enamored with her, but I think she's just a wonderful site. I think that currently she's the world number one or number two. And just just watch her. It's easy to find many, many clips of her on YouTube. Just watch Nuran Gohar. It's it's power train motion. She's extremely powerful, extremely agile. Just just look at her. And my final pick is something that was spewed out by the Fortune program on UNIX many, many years ago on my terminal. And it's a saying that I think everyone should be aware of from time to time. And the saying goes like this. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. That's it.

 

Excellent cool. So before we conclude if people want to get in touch with you guys Maybe in order to participate in this project Maybe just to discuss some of the things we talked about on the show or for any other purpose How do how can they reach you?

 

First there is the contact form over at meldsloop.com. I'm also over Twitter

 

you

 

and pretty much reachable through every social network

 

What's

 

today.

 

your handle on Twitter?

 

It's my full name, Tomelitash. It's very easy to write, just like 20 characters or so.

 

You spell it exactly like it sounds.

 

Hahaha

 

Ha!

 

Yeah, exactly as it sounds.

 

Cool. And how about you, David?

 

I can be reached at the tunnel.

 

Ha ha ha

 

Okay then. In that case, thank you very much for coming on our show and telling us about this amazing story. And that's it for today. So thank you and bye bye.

 

Thank you. Bye

 

Thank

 

bye.

 

you very much. Goodbye.

 

Yes, thank

 

Bye bye.

 

you. Oh, do we do we tell them to.

 

No, I-