Machine Beauty
by David Gelernter · first published 1997
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When something works well, you can feel it; there is a sense of rightness to it. We call that rightness beauty, and it ought to be the single most important component of design. This recognition is at the heart of David Gelernter's wittily argued essay, Machine Beauty, which defines beauty as an inspired mating of simplicity and power. You can see it in a Bauhaus chair, the Hoover Dam, or an Emerson radio circa 1930. In contrast, too many contemporary technologists run out of ideas and resort to gimmicks and features; they are rarely capable of real, structural ingenuity. Nowhere is this mor
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Mirror Worlds (the book) is a great read. I have it on my shelf next to his other book, Machine Beauty. I didn't know he was a victim of the Unabomber, that's unfortunate.
on “Tuple Space” ↗"Steven Jobs may be no inventor, but to his credit he recognized elegance when he saw it and understood its significance." -- David Gelernter, in his 1998 book Machine Beauty. About ten pages after the above quote, Gelernter describes pretty much everything this suit was about in some detail, e.g. a use of the "time travel" metaphor very much like Time Machine's Finder interface,…
on “Entrepreneur Wins $625 Million Payout From Apple” ↗…Ludwig Wittgenstein Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. -- David Gelernter, "Machine Beauty", Basic Books (1998) Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it. -- Alan Perlis The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components of a computer system are…
on “Why wasn't this page found?” ↗This is amazing. I was literally reading the 3rd chapter of the book "Machine Beauty" in bed, saw the baby Clifford Stoll mentioned and looked it up because it sounded familiar. Of course I've seen the beautiful glass bottles here on HN before, so I went back to my book. After putting…
on “Klein Bottle Amazon Brand Hijacking (2021)” ↗