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One of my favorite hobbies is called recreational mathematics. This is the kind of revelation that I can only offer in the pages of this magazine and other select locations, feeling confident and hopeful that there is a more receptive public here than, say, at a Christmas dinner conversation or at the pub.
Seventeen years is a long time in our industry. To give us an idea, Gmail appeared eighteen years ago, and in those days Google pledged not to be evil. Those were the days of AJAX web applications, of Prototype versus jQuery, of Ruby on Rails and script.aculo.us. Those were the times before Obama, before the MacBook Air, before the pandemic, before Google Chrome, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, before Android devices, before Docker and Kubernetes, before the Go programming language, before the V8 JavaScript engine, before the 2008 stock market crash, before Brexit, before SPAs, before Node.js and npm, before Star Wars Episode 7, before HD video was widespread.
What happened in the world in 1993? Czechoslovakia separated in a peaceful process into two countries. Bill Clinton became the 42nd president of the USA. A bomb detonated in the basement of the World Trade Center. Janet Reno became the first female Attorney General of the USA. Jiang Zemin became President of the People's Republic of China. The WHO declared tuberculosis a global emergency. A "fan" stabbed Monica Seles in the back. Crowds were protesting against Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade. Andrew Miles solved Fermat's Last Theorem. Miguel Indurain won the Tour de France. The Maastricht Treaty took effect, creating the European Union. And finally, the Hubble Space Telescope took pictures without suffering from myopia.
In 2019 an extraordinary team of web development and design celebrities gathered in the offices of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, to build an emulator of the original web browser created by Tim Berners-Lee, known as WorldWideWeb. This emulator is available online and, fittingly enough, runs on a modern web browser.
Erika Hall and Mike Monteiro founded Mule Design, a design consultancy in San Francisco, around 20 years ago. Mike was (in)famously known around a decade ago on Twitter, where his profanity-laden rants about design, ethics (or lack thereof), unionization, and open condemnation of fascism, reached peaks of popularity and retweets.
One of the most visible side-effects of specialization is that we miss on interesting things existing in other technical galaxies. This is one of the main goals of this magazine; to point to stars in other locations of the sky and let people discover amazing new people. If you are not in the web, JavaScript, or Ruby galaxies, you might have missed on Gary Bernhardt, and that would be too bad.
For some shameful reason, most probably because of some profound ignorance on our side, we managed to publish four years of this magazine without mentioning James "Jim" ("Cope") Coplien not even once. It is high time to correct this, and there is no better moment to do that than in this issue dedicated to Object-Oriented Programming.
The first video of this series will feature none other than Bret Victor in one of his most memorable talks. We have already discussed Bret in a previous article about Smalltalk, where we named him one of the most influential figures in that galaxy. This video, however, shows that his light shines much brighter than that.