Lasse Hp

Wow. My own page?

Well, I'm a Danish developer/sysadmin, who first encountered Wiki at JAOO 2001 here in Aarhus. (What an odd event that was, with 11/9 and all; ...)

I became fascinated with programming when I first learned COMAL in school in 1983 at the age of 15. When my teacher loaned me a copy of Wirth's Algorithms+Data Structures=Programs, I learned both Pascal and a good programming style, and an interest in languages and compilers was also ignited.

I admire the simplicity and power that people were able to put into the tools of the late 70'es and the 80'es, and I believe this is something that we could learn many lessons from today. In my day work, I have to struggle with Java and J2EE, and I just don't see what we get back from the complexity we have to fight. I guess I still just don't "get" Java and J2EE.

My full name is Lasse Hillerøe Petersen, which of course triggers one of my other pet peeves (or as we say in Danish "kæphest", "hobby horse"): localization and internationalization. On my ACM membership card, my middle name is for some reason spelled Hiller?e, can you imagine? And of course there are so many variations; Hiller=F8e, Hiller|e, Hillerxe, Hillerøe,even without going into various UTF encodings of Unicode. (And in wiki, I now see, it would show up as LasseHillerøePetersen! How's that for odd!)

I'm a bit worried about using this Wiki. I much prefer discussions in shape of UseNet NewsGroups? (especially as they were before the eternal September of 1993) and wonder how you keep track of a discussion here. But now I'll give it a try.

Update, 20050618: I have been here on and off, adding small comments or corrections here and there. There's a wealth of information here, but I think the organisation of it lends itself best to SerendipitySearch?, there's too little structure. The Wiki pages are like seemingly unrelated mushrooms. We try to use a wiki at work, as an attempt to organise the information that would otherwise seep out between the cracks, but I must admit it looks to me as if it's going to fail. Some information simply doesn't lend itself to written transmission, whether it is in form of wikipages or in more traditional forms of documentation.

Perhaps, but UseNet NewsGroups? are even less structured, after all.

Not really. Usenet newsgroups actually have a rich structure. There is a hierarchy of topic categories, which is semistatic, and underneath each group there is a collection of discussions which are themselves hierarchically organized, although they tend to "naturally degenerate" to lists. It is possible to cross-post, effectively joining separate categories for the scope of a discussion. Usenet is a proven way to conduct discussions with multiple parties reading in.

You may have been confused by the paragraph before the update. I was not suggesting that newsgroups should be used for structuring documentation. On the contrary. But I think Wiki fails in both regards. It fails as a discussion medium (because it doesn't have a message concept like mail or news) and it fails as a documentation store - because it is not structured enough. I'd prefer a formalized way of hoisting interesting discussions from a Usenet-like medium and place them in a separate structure. This idea is not new, and has in fact been the norm on Usenet for years - in the shape of FAQ documents.

Update, 20060409T2037 (local time)

I just added a long rant to WhyIamNotaBlogger. I am recording this fact here on "my" page, and for those who have been curious enough to wind up over here, I would like to add a few more things.

If blogs focus on one author, and wikis center on one document, then a cross between these could be said to concentrate on one discussion. This discussion could be _anchored_ in a person's blog entry, but it would be feasible to cross-pollinate between multiple blogs, or even transfer the whole discussion - or a branch thread that had digressed into a completely different topic - to a different place. I believe that authorship of individual comments and opinions matters, even if the comment as such is not restricted in distribution, it should be traceable to a - possibly pseudonymous - person and a point in time. This facilitates the retention of historical context, which paradoxically is the most volatile thing in this age of the Internet.

Interpersonal communication over the Internet still has a lot of room for improvement. Some of that improvement already is a part of history, which has just gone out of fashion. We need to remember it and recover it.

Tomorrow I will go away for Easter holidays, but I hope anyone who shares my interest in this matter will comment, either here or on a new page. (If so, please keep it to one page, and link from here), or if you prefer, in personal e-mail to me: lhp at toft-hp.dk

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