On the office of a colleague (I squatte), I see a book as attractive: Scientists between power and knowledge, Jean-Jacques Salomon. The back cover is attractive: Very few of them … had the courage to resist the attractions and pressures of the military-industrial complex that they feed and they depend. The author is “philosopher and historian of science.” As a participant in the military-industrial complex, I could not but be affected. I laminated index, given the name of Alan Turing and went to page 26. There I read: Tim Berners-Lee … which has developed in 1993 the universal computer language (HTML, Hyper Text Markup Language) First point: the book has not been carefully reviewed, because even a proofreader ignorant of computers should have become aware of the permutation of letters in the acronym HTML. Second point: HTML is not a “universal language”. It is a language (in fact, not a programming language) page description hypertext - in other words, a coded to indicate they want a paragraph here, is a title, and so on. It is not universal to describe pages (it is very focused browsing online and little paper presentation, unlike PDF, for example). It is even less a universal programming language within the meaning of the theory of computability. Well, it should perhaps that I read this book, but see it as two big shells in the first sentence that I read, it cools me.
Jul 03