Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id TAA19226 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sat, 20 May 2000 19:04:34 +0100 From: Robin Faichney <robin@faichney.demon.co.uk> Organization: Reborn Technology To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: RE: The Guru mutation Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 16:19:30 +0100 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.0.21] Content-Type: text/plain References: <NBBBIIDKHCMGAIPMFFPJKEJAENAA.richard@brodietech.com> Message-Id: <00052016375804.00329@faichney> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On Sat, 20 May 2000, Richard Brodie wrote:
>Robin wrote:
>
><<putting capitals
>in the middle of compound words like MicroSoft, which started I think
>in the Pascal programming language.>>
>
>Microsoft doesn't have an embedded capital, although some other software
>firms did back in the early-mid '80s.
OK, it was a bad example -- especially with you on this list! But surely
there have been many more since that time? Not that I can (be bothered to
try to) think of any right now.
>For a very short period after founding
>in 1975 it was spelled with a hyphen, i.e., Micro-Soft, but that lasted only
>a very short time and was changed well before the company was well known.
>
><< That's certainly where I first came
>across it, in the mid-80's. In C, mainly used on Unix, words were run
>together, but virtually no upper-case was used then -- there's more of it
>now, especially in C++. There has been a C-like thing for all lower-case
>outside computing, but the internal capitalization meme seems much stronger
>and these are obviously alleles.>>
>
>Internal capitalization was part of the "Hungarian" programming standard
>invented by my mentor Charles Simonyi in the '70s at Xerox (where GUI was
>also invented and stolen by Apple before Microsoft re-stole it). It mutated
>when we developed Windows and divided the company into applications and
>systems sides. Charles had no direct involvement in the systems side and
>they kind of screwed up Hungarian, but it persists in the official Microsoft
>programming examples provided with C++ and Windows SDK.
Interesting -- though it would also be interesting to know about its
development outside of MS. I said I came across it in Pascal, but the main
project I was involved in at that time was programming Windows 1.0 (1.1?)
using Pascal, believe it or not! So that might very well be relevant. I
can't remember what we did while learning Pascal, before encountering the
examples that came with the Windows SDK. (It was a college project, for my
MSc in IT.)
>http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/techart/hunganotat.htm
>
><<BTW, if memetics is to be internally consistent, then whether a change in
>a meme is accidental or deliberate is irrelevant -- from the meme's point
>of view, which is what memetics is about if it's about anything, it makes
>no difference. It's a mutation either way.>>
>
>exACTly.
>
>Memetics is about predicting the future based on differential success of
>cultural replicators. Sociobiology predicts that ultimately everything will
>be reined in by genes. Even if true, which I don't believe, there's still a
>lot of "failed experiments"---like our whole lifetimes---to study using
>memetics.
Yup.
-- Robin Faichney===============================This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat May 20 2000 - 19:05:03 BST