The Seven Wonders of the Digital World

[BookofNeat]

I would like to submit the chartering of a new group of earthly wonders:

The Seven Wonders of the Digital World!

This is an idea that I've had in my mind and think it would be really cool to at least ponder and consider. I think that the Internet, and by extension, all computers, have given us the opportunity to create things with near infinite possiblities. Despite all the negative and cruel things that can happen in the virtual world, the Seven Wonders of the Digital World give us the opportunity to appreciate the good and edifying influences it can have on society, through sharing our personal experiences and goodwill with others. As such, rather than just hammer out a list with only my subjective input, I want everyone here to submit their own nominations to what they believe should be considered a wonder of the digital world worth cherishing.

 

I'll start with a submission of my own:

 

C

To most people it might be just a letter but to those that have dipped their toes into the realm of computers it doesn't just represent part of a language, it is language. The C language and it's extension in  C ++ is the bedrock over which much of the internet and popular programs exist today. Before web development tools and alternative languages existed, C language virtually created the known web (with help from a few other languages) in both senses of the word. Most games today run on engines designed on its C ++ extension and without it, the gaming landscape would almost certainly look radically differnt to today. There may be a time when C language becomes obsolete but regardless of when it goes quietly into the twilight, for better or worse, the impact it has had on all things electronic has left and will continue to leave a strong legacy behind it.

 

With that, I want to hear what you consider to be a wonder of the digital world and why. If your just here to contribute or just lurk around, I wish you all a terrific day and many digital blessings!

Cheers!

(づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ   (◕ω◕✿)

[Bombastinator]

Is this a thing to try to hurt people by making them read brushscript as body copy?  I have no idea what that said.

[Chikensoops]

Twitter.

For it has supplied us with an endless amount of fools to laugh at. Back then, people needed to pay to go to a circus and see clowns do stupid things, now all you have to do is open a website on your very own computer.

[Chiyawa]

Hmm... Well, for me, I would say Internet.

[Bombastinator]

5 minutes ago, Chiyawa said:

Hmm... Well, for me, I would say Internet.

You read that garbage?  I took one look at it and what remains of my ancient graphic designer muscles said “oh HELL no!” So it didn’t get read by me.

[Imbadatnames]

REPOST IN A READABLE FONT BECAUSE FUCK THAT SHIT. 
 

I would like to submit the chartering of a new group of earthly wonders:

The Seven Wonders of the Digital World!

This is an idea that I've had in my mind and think it would be really cool to at least ponder and consider. I think that the Internet, and by extension, all computers, have given us the opportunity to create things with near infinite possiblities. Despite all the negative and cruel things that can happen in the virtual world, the Seven Wonders of the Digital World give us the opportunity to appreciate the good and edifying influences it can have on society, through sharing our personal experiences and goodwill with others. As such, rather than just hammer out a list with only my subjective input, I want everyone here to submit their own nominations to what they believe should be considered a wonder of the digital world worth cherishing.

 

I'll start with a submission of my own:

 

C

To most people it might be just a letter but to those that have dipped their toes into the realm of computers it doesn't just represent part of a language, it is language. The C language and it's extension in  C ++ is the bedrock over which much of the internet and popular programs exist today. Before web development tools and alternative languages existed, C language virtually created the known web (with help from a few other languages) in both senses of the word. Most games today run on engines designed on its C ++ extension and without it, the gaming landscape would almost certainly look radically differnt to today. There may be a time when C language becomes obsolete but regardless of when it goes quietly into the twilight, for better or worse, the impact it has had on all things electronic has left and will continue to leave a strong legacy behind it.

 

With that, I want to hear what you consider to be a wonder of the digital world and why. If your just here to contribute or just lurk around, I wish you all a terrific day and many digital blessings!

Cheers!

[Arika]

2 hours ago, BookofNeat said:

I would like to submit the chartering of a new group of earthly wonders:

The Seven Wonders of the Digital World!

This is an idea that I've had in my mind and think it would be really cool to at least ponder and consider. I think that the Internet, and by extension, all computers, have given us the opportunity to create things with near infinite possiblities. Despite all the negative and cruel things that can happen in the virtual world, the Seven Wonders of the Digital World give us the opportunity to appreciate the good and edifying influences it can have on society, through sharing our personal experiences and goodwill with others. As such, rather than just hammer out a list with only my subjective input, I want everyone here to submit their own nominations to what they believe should be considered a wonder of the digital world worth cherishing.

 

I'll start with a submission of my own:

 

C

To most people it might be just a letter but to those that have dipped their toes into the realm of computers it doesn't just represent part of a language, it is language. The C language and it's extension in  C ++ is the bedrock over which much of the internet and popular programs exist today. Before web development tools and alternative languages existed, C language virtually created the known web (with help from a few other languages) in both senses of the word. Most games today run on engines designed on its C ++ extension and without it, the gaming landscape would almost certainly look radically differnt to today. There may be a time when C language becomes obsolete but regardless of when it goes quietly into the twilight, for better or worse, the impact it has had on all things electronic has left and will continue to leave a strong legacy behind it.

 

With that, I want to hear what you consider to be a wonder of the digital world and why. If your just here to contribute or just lurk around, I wish you all a terrific day and many digital blessings!

Cheers!

 

 

For those who want to read it in non-terrible font.

[Chiyawa]

51 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

You read that garbage?  I took one look at it and what remains of my ancient graphic designer muscles said “oh HELL no!” So it didn’t get read by me.

Yeah. Although it did take me some time to sort it out. I mostly come across Comic Sans MS (I like to read comics) and Time New Romans (newspaper), so I can tolerate a little if the characters is weird but still clear enough to make out what characters they should be.

[Bombastinator]

12 hours ago, Chiyawa said:

Yeah. Although it did take me some time to sort it out. I mostly come across Comic Sans MS (I like to read comics) and Time New Romans (newspaper), so I can tolerate a little if the characters is weird but still clear enough to make out what characters they should be.

Comic sans is pretty easy to read as body copy.  Comic sans is sort of unique in that it’s half way between a display face and a body copy face that needs a lot of space around it to work well.  Has to do with the specific use case of comic bubbles.  Brushscript is a pure display face though.  There are a whole bunch of those.  There are also body copy faces with display face versions, like helvetica compressed ultraheavy.  Regular helvetica, which is fully sans can work as body copy but has been converted fairly well into a display face.  There are some bodycopy faces that don’t.  Most of the serif body copy faces for example.  

Edited October 31, 2022 by Bombastinator

[Bombastinator]

12 minutes ago, Duran_ said:

twitter, snapchat, instagram, blogs, autotune voices... as for me, this is the worst thing

Apparently the OP another commenter converted it into something readable, or maybe my phone just gave up in disgust and did it automatically.  I don’t know.  Haven’t read it yet but I’m about to.

Edited October 31, 2022 by Bombastinator

[Bombastinator]

So the statement seems to be that C should be considered a wonder of the digital world because the internet is based on it.  I have no objection.  There was another fork of C besides c++ called visual C.  That one may have died though.

[Bombastinator]

13 minutes ago, Duran_ said:

I don't understand   what you are talking about?

There is another post where the unreadable body copy of the OP is converted into something actually readable, so I reacted to that.

[BookofNeat]

3 hours ago, Duran_ said:

twitter, snapchat, instagram, blogs, autotune voices... as for me, this is the worst thing

Hello, and welcome to the forums!

 

     Forgive me if I misinterpreted what you wrote but I believe you are citing the things you do not like about the digital shpere and I fully respect that. However, I would also like to know if there is something you hold appreciation for within the virtual world and that you understand has made a big impact on society or could stand as a monument to the creativity of our species. If you don't then that is perfectly fine and I'd just like to wish you a great day and success wherever you are.

 

Cheers! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

[Bombastinator]

3 hours ago, Duran_ said:

maybe the system has given a bug

That’s Cyrillic so russia or another northern Eurasian country nearby.

[Bombastinator]

4 hours ago, Duran_ said:

I don't understand   what you are talking about?

Ok.  The original post used an unusually florid display typeface which might not actually be brushscript but is close enough to it as body copy, which it is terrible at.

 

Newspaper headlines are the classic example of a display face.  Really big fancy letters that are great for grabbing attention and setting a tone, but are difficult to read more than a few words in.  They are usually thick.

 

The rest of the newspaper is body copy.  Body copy faces often have serifs and are generally a lot thinner and lighter with one letter flowing into the next.  They’re a lot easier to read a bunch of words in.  Brushscript is famous because it was meant to copy handwriting, and as a result is both a not-so-great display face, and an unbelievably terrible body copy face. Hard or sometimes even impossible to read. 
comic sans is neither a display face OR a body copy face.  It has a very specific function, and when used as either it’s generally bad, so all type faces are display faces, body copy faces, or comic sans.  Comic sans is actually a really good face, but only for what it was meant to do.

[wasab]

Yeah…. Except computer does not understand C. It only understood 1s and 0s. I don’t really understand why c is so fundamental. All c program are compiled down to assembly which is in turn compiled by an assembler down to 0s and 1s. This is known as ahead of time compilation and produce a 0s and 1s binary executable file which is store on hard disk and which an operating system will load from hard disk to ram memory when executed. The os then just does what it does, context switching, multitasking, memory swapping, interrupt handling ect as it juggles around the countless process and threads that are all executing simultaneously. 

 

in this regard, if any language can be compiled down to binary (0s or 1s) or interpreted into 0s and 1s, it will be a fully functioning program. You can theoretically write a browser or any other program for that matter in whatever language, even emojis as long as there exists a compiler/interpretor that can compiled or interpret it into executable 0s and 1s. 

 

There is also those quirky things call transpiler which does not compile down but rather compile side ways into another higher language before some other compiler/interpreter does the final work of compiling down. E.g. it compiles one language into another with similar level of abstraction as oppose to compiler which transforms code into a form with lower abstraction. 

 

in this regard, c or c++ or whatever does not matter since you can literally have any interpreter/transpiler/compiler for any language and turning them into anything. Yeah, there is a performance hit, interpreting 0s and 1s is always worse than just reading a precompiled code and higher a language is, usually more feature rich it is and more robust it is. There is garbage collection and lots of error checking which adds in overhead. C is only so fast because it has none of that. You can write some seriously dangerous c code and nothing will stop you from doing that. Writing c program usually means you will run into segmentation fault constantly and back in the days, lots of stack overflow vulnerabilities.

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, wasab said:

Yeah…. Except computer does not understand C. It only understood 1s and 0s. I don’t really understand why c is so fundamental. All c program are compiled down to assembly which is in turn compiled by an assembler down to 0s and 1s. This is known as ahead of time compilation and produce a 0s and 1s binary executable file which is will store on hard disk and which an operating system will load from hard disk to ram memory when executed. The os then just does what it does, context switching, multitasking, memory swapping, interrupt ect as it juggles around the countless process and threads that are all executing simultaneously. 

 

in this regard, if any language can be compiled down to binary (0s or 1s) or interpreted into 0s and 1s, it will be a fully functioning program. You can theoretically write a browser or any other program for that matter in whatever language, even emojis as long as there exists a compiler/interpretor that can compiled or interpret it into executable 0s and 1s. 
 

There is also those quirky things call transpiler which does not compile down but rather compile side ways into another higher language before some other compiler/interpreter does the final work of compiling down. E.g. it compiles one language into another with similar level of abstraction as oppose to compiler which transforms code into a form with lower abstraction. 
 

in this regard, c or c++ or whatever does not matter since you can literally have any transpiler/compiler for any language and turning them into anything. Yeah, there is a performance hit, interpreting 0s and 1s is always worse than just reading a precompiled code and higher a language is, usually more feature rich it is and more robust it is. There is garbage collection and lots of error checking which adds in overhead. C is only so fast because it has none of that. You can write some seriously dangerous c code and nothing will stop you from doing that. Writing c program usually means you will run into segmentation fault constantly and back in the days, lots of stack overflow vulnerabilities.

So your argument seems to be that compilers should be the wonder, and c, not actually being assembly, is merely subservient to it.  I would say can’t they both be?  Compilers are unquestionably a greater wonder.  Without compilers all programming would have to be in p-code, which is awful.

[wasab]

2 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

So your argument seems to be that compilers should be the wonder, and c, not actually being assembly, is merely subservient to it.  I would say can’t they both be?  Compilers are unquestionably a greater wonder.  Without compilers all programming would have to be in p-code, which is awful.

browser and the internet are wonders. I care more about the products that are consumed rather than the tools used to create them. tools are just tools. It is the end products that counts. Of course, as a software developer, picking the right tools would certainly make your life a lot easier. I remember compiler used to cost money. Back then, you would actually need to pay for a license to download and use a compiler just like Microsoft office suite. Nowadays, it is shipped with most operating systems out of the box and free of charge which kinda left people taking it for granted. 

[BookofNeat]

1 hour ago, wasab said:

browser and the internet are wonders. I care more about the products that are consumed rather than the tools used to create them. tools are just tools. It is the end products that counts. Of course, as a software developer, picking the right tools would certainly make your life a lot easier. I remember compiler used to cost money. Back then, you would actually need to pay for a license to download and use a compiler just like Microsoft office suite. Nowadays, it is shipped with most operating systems out of the box and free of charge which kinda left people taking it for granted. 

Hello!

 

     Thanks for the comments and I can understand the points you have brought up. I still stand by the reasons I gave for C language being considered a digital wonder since I'm also evaluating it's capacity to create rather than just the work itself. As an example, someone could consider MenV/Presto (Pixar's animation software) a digital wonder due to how many quality films the software have been created by it. Just as well, something like The Legend of Zelda francise can be considered a digital wonder because of its worldwide recognition, innovative gameplay and overall impact on the video game industry. As a product, I would consider it as a wonder but I can also appreciate the software that created the games, and vice-versa.

 

     I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself well but basically, I would consider things to be digital wonders based on their impact and how much good they have done for the people that have been affected by them.

 

P.S. I know I said the C made the web in a great part but really, It's more about the video games than anything else. ≧◡≦

 

Cheers! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

[Biohazard777]

39 minutes ago, BookofNeat said:

I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself well but basically, I would consider things to be digital wonders based on their impact and how much good they have done for the people that have been affected by them.

Then calling them the 7 Wonders wasn't the best call.
7 Ancient: The Pyramids of Giza, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Temple of Artemis, Statue of Zeus, Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, Colossus of Rhodes, Lighthouse of Alexandria.
You won't find chisels, wheels, rolling logs, sundials, etc. Which could have been important tools for the construction of said wonders, but not wonders themselves.
C is a tool, DOOM is a wonder. 

[Bombastinator]

4 hours ago, wasab said:

browser and the internet are wonders. I care more about the products that are consumed rather than the tools used to create them. tools are just tools. It is the end products that counts. Of course, as a software developer, picking the right tools would certainly make your life a lot easier. I remember compiler used to cost money. Back then, you would actually need to pay for a license to download and use a compiler just like Microsoft office suite. Nowadays, it is shipped with most operating systems out of the box and free of charge which kinda left people taking it for granted. 

Compilers predate Microsoft by a lot.  They predate microcomputers.   They even predate pascal, which was like basically every computer language aside from onoff and assembly code was a direct result of the invention OF compilers.  (That p-code thing was a brain fart.  P-code is sort of like assembly language but isn’t, and is created by a computer language iirc (getting way out of my understanding here.  There may be very basic errors) These days compilers compile compilers. Without compilers your profession wouldn’t exist because Microcomputers wouldn’t exist. Digital computers would be bizarre curiosities the size of buildings not really used by anyone because they were so incredibly hard to use that almost no one would do it.  Compilers made computer languages possible, which made microcomputers possible.  They changed the world.  They’re much more fundamental than things like the internet.  There are a bunch of old languages which aren’t really used anymore like FORTH and stuff like that. PASCAL is used more, but it’s really only because there are programs that still use it that still run, and have to be maintained. They’re all “low level” languages though.  C was the first usable high level language, and it was so good it’s still being used.

Edited November 1, 2022 by Bombastinator

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, Biohazard777 said:

Then calling them the 7 Wonders wasn't the best call.
7 Ancient: The Pyramids of Giza, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Temple of Artemis, Statue of Zeus, Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, Colossus of Rhodes, Lighthouse of Alexandria.
You won't find chisels, wheels, rolling logs, sundials, etc. Which could have been important tools for the construction of said wonders, but not wonders themselves.
C is a tool, DOOM is a wonder. 

The inclined plane is a wonder of physics though.  All the tools you just named are implementations of that and the lever, which is another.

[Biohazard777]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

The inclined plane is a wonder of physics though.  All the tools you just named are implementations of that and the lever, which is another.

Without going into whether you are correct or not, it is totally beside the point I was trying to make. 

[Bombastinator]

5 minutes ago, Biohazard777 said:

Without going into whether you are correct or not, it is totally beside the point I was trying to make. 

No, it applies directly.  You said these things were obviously not wonders, but a chisel is an inclined plane and a lever. A wheel is as well.  Some Greek dude wrote a treatise about inclined planes and levers and such a couple thousand years ago.  I forget which one.  I remember the quot though “give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum to balance it in and I will move the world” or some such.  I probably screwed it up real good, but it was to that effect.  If he put it at seven though (which I don’t remember him doing, but I miss a lot of stuff) I agree with you in that it’s a bad posit and I doubt that C would make it to the top seven though.

Edited November 1, 2022 by Bombastinator

[Biohazard777]

38 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

No, it applies directly.  You said these things were obviously not wonders, but a chisel is an inclined plane and a lever. A wheel is a lever.  Some Greek dude wrote a treatise about this a couple thousand years ago.  I forget which one.  I remember the quot though “give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum to balance it in and I will move the world” or some such.  I probably screwed it up real good, but it was to that effect.  If he put it at seven though (which I don’t remember him doing, but I miss a lot of stuff) I agree with you in that it’s a bad posit and I doubt that C would make it to the top seven though.

I understand what you mean, we can take these tools and deconstruct them further.

And of course all of the ones I mentioned are physics based (being ancient times and all that).

We can do the same to C, reduce / deconstruct it to bare maths and say C is a wonder of mathematics.
Inclined planes are great, so are wheels and so is C, some are simple, some are complex, but at the end of the day they are all still tools (which we use to construct something, that something can be a wonder IMO).
Statue of Zeus isn't a tool, neither is DOOM. (DOOM is just an example, maybe it doesn't belong in the top 7 heh).