Artifact Details

Title

The Road Not Taken, lecture by Richard P. Gabriel

Catalog Number

102703070

Type

Moving Image

Description

From abstract:
"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Numerous computer researchers and practitioners believe we've come to a wood where two roads diverge: One road calls for us to continue as we have writing unreliable software using inappropriate languages, and debilitating methodologies under the rickety mathematical and engineering metaphors we developed in the 1960s or earlier, and the other begs us to find new metaphors and ways of approaching software to make system building safe, easier, and with respect for our humanity.

IBM's Autonomic Computing, MIT's Amorphous Computing, the Feyerabend Project, the Biological Framings Workshop-all these are looking beyond current theories in ways reminiscent of Kuhn's paradigm shifts and Feyerabend's counterinduction.

In this talk, Gabriel looks at the problems and proposed directions for the way less traveled: biology, physics, and complexity science, for example.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. "

Date

2003-01-23

Credits

Gabriel, Richard P. (speaker)

Publisher

Xerox PARC

Place of Publication

Palo Alto, CA, US

Duration

01:54:07

Format

DVCAM

Category

Lecture

Series Title

SDForum

Lot Number

X4865.2009