Robert M. Pirsig "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle" dies at 88

Publison

I know this author has been named many times her. I think Heather brought him up first.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/04/24/525443040/-zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance-author-robert-m-pirsig-dies-at-88

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

Gosh, I read that book back in the '70s. 'Probably still have it around here somewhere. It dovetails the genre of On the Road, Dharma Bums, and Blue Highways, which were popular at the time and still speak to a generation. Hopefully it'll snag some millennials, too!

-Phil

Heater.

Oh, Sorry to hear that.

So many years since I read that.

I will have to read it again. Just now I reading that it's about motorcycles and road trips across the USA. I remember it being about philosophy...

Mike Green

It's about all of those things and his relationship with his son

KeithE

The Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ) was a large part of it, and of "Lila: An Inquiry into Morals": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig's_metaphysics_of_Quality

If you read this as philosophical nonfiction then it's pretty heavy - a descent into madness (obsession with MoQ) and recovery. A recommendation perhaps to stay to the middle path? But on a more geeky note...

From Lila:

What made them so powerful was that they too were on slips, one slip for each instruction. This meant the PROGRAM slips were random access too and could be changed and resequenced as the need arose without any difficulty. He remembered reading that John Von Neumann, an inventor of the computer, had said the single thing that makes a computer so powerful is that the program is data and can be treated like any other data. That seemed a little obscure when Phaedrus had read it but now it was making sense.

This one sounds like it might be from "From NAND to Tetris" ;-)

… An excellent analogy to the independence of the levels is the relation of hardware to software in a computer … It isn’t necessary for a programmer to learn circuit design. Neither is it necessary for a hardware technician to learn programming … except for a memory map called the ‘Machine Language Instruction Repertoire’ … a list so small you could write it on a single page … the electronic circuits and the programs existing in the same computer at the same time have nothing whatsoever to do with each other

… Machine Language instructions were … the end performance of a whole symphony of switching operations … Then … [in] programming this symphony was considered to be a mere single note in a whole other symphony that had no resemblance to the first one … Machine Language Instruction Repertoire was now the lowest element of the lowest level programming language … On top of this low level programming language was a high-level programming language which had the same kind of independence … and on top of the high-level language was still another level of patterns, the application, a novel perhaps in a word-processing program … one could spend all eternity probing the electrical patterns of that computer … and never find that novel … Certainly the novel cannot exist in the computer without a parallel pattern of voltages to support it. But that does not mean that the novel is an expression or property of those voltage … It can reside in a notebook but it is not composed of or possessed by the ink&paper.

Heater.

KeithE,

… An excellent analogy to the independence of the levels is the relation of hardware to software in a computer … It isn’t necessary for a programmer to learn circuit design. Neither is it necessary for a hardware technician to learn programming … except for a memory map called the ‘Machine Language Instruction Repertoire’ … a list so small you could write it on a single page

I'm not sure where you are quoting that from. The bold emphasis is mine. It made me chuckle.

The list is not small. Take a look at the instruction set manuals of our computers today. They are gigantic. Be they Intel x86 architecture or ARM. How many pages do you think it will take to describe the P2 instruction set?

Even back in the days of 8 bit computers the hardware guys put hundreds of instructions into the Z80 instruction set that the software guys never used!

Seems to me that for 5 decades or so that disconnect between what the hardware guys think a machine should provide to software and the software guys expect from hardware has caused lots of problems.

I point to the Intel 432 architecture, and the Intel 860 and the Intel Itanium as examples of failed mismatches between the hardware and software abstractions. There are many others outside of Intel.

What that quote is hinting at is the RISC idea. A Reduced Instruction Set Computer whose hardware only provides instructions that compilers can be expected to use.

That has culminated in the RISC V instruction set. Which can indeed be written on a single page.

My point here is, I guess, that somewhere along the line it is necessary for programmers to know something of hardware design. And it is necessary for hardware technicians to know something programming.

At least enough on both sides that they can make a simple and efficient abstraction layer between hardware and software. The instruction set that is.

It has been a long road.

KeithE

Heater. wrote: »

KeithE,
I'm not sure where you are quoting that from. The bold emphasis is mine. It made me chuckle.

That's from Pirsig's LILA. He was a technical writer for a while, but I'm not sure which computers he worked on. His main point is how layers of abstraction work. When you're using a flip-flop then you're probably not thinking too much about the transistors that make it up. (Unless you violate the timing parameters, or environmental specifications.) Etcetera. When you're writing the Tetris app you're probably not worried about NAND gates.

But to your point there has been some interesting security research that results in things like Rowhammer.js and then ...

ceptimus

I liked this section comparing the attitudes of Phaedrus (an engineer) with DeWeese who was an abstract artist.

...a dining-room table whose edge veneer had come loose and which Phaedrus had reglued. He held the veneer in place while the glue set by wrapping a whole ball of string around the table, round and round and round.

DeWeese saw the string and wondered what that was all about.

"That's my latest sculpture," Phaedrus had said. "Don't you think it kind of builds?"

Instead of laughing, DeWeese looked at him with amazement, studied it for a long time and finally said, "Where did you learn all this?"

For a second Phaedrus thought he was continuing the joke, but he was serious.

I've also read his other book, Lila, which I enjoyed, but it didn't make such a lasting impression on me as Zen.

KeithE

ceptimus wrote: »

I've also read his other book, Lila, which I enjoyed, but it didn't make such a lasting impression on me as Zen.

His depression definitely comes through in Lila.