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The code is ancient and crufty and only runs on Windows. It also only supports IA32, so no IA64 or ARM. There's been some motion towards building it on Linux; I

The code is ancient and crufty and only runs on Windows. It also only supports IA32, so no IA64 or ARM. There's been some motion towards building it on Linux; I don't know whether this got anywhere. StrongTalk's a JIT, so it's going to be painful to port, unfortunately. And JITs have moved on a long way since then. I'd really like it to be resurrected and brought into the modern age, but in all honestly I think it's just dead.

i336_ 11y ago
That's really sad. Thinking about what you said gave me an idea. Real-world native languages fall out of use forever on a daily basis. Linguistic historians want to preserve the unique attributes of these languages, because they each tell a story and add to the character of humanity's history. Computer languages share some of these attributes in a broad sense, but these must also be offset with the technical merit(s) of the language in question: if a language's foundational concepts have become outdated, continuing to use that language outside of a job description is a liability. However, if a language's fundamental design is still interesting, but the low-level technologies used to implement it have fallen out of favor (for example, targeting IA32, or only functioning on an obsolete processor, etc) that language will also still become effectively "dead," and arguably unfairly so. It could be said that there are language designers and language implementers. The designers have sufficient scope in their mental model to sweep across the domain of language design and implementation and distill that into a functioning codebase. Implementors, on the other hand, just want to fulfil a spec. I wonder what would happen if there were a website out there that listing all "dead but worthy" languages along with instructions on how to get them running? Does anything out there like this exist? I'm envisaging students, language enthusiasts, etc, modernizing these old language specifications - which would allow the community to readily reasses the technical merits of the language in question. It might ultimately be demoted again, but we'd have a reasonable, modern justification of why.

i336_ 11y ago

That's really sad. Thinking about what you said gave me an idea. Real-world native languages fall out of use forever on a daily basis. Linguistic historians want to preserve the unique attributes of these languages, because they each tell a story and add to the character of humanity's history. Computer languages share some of these attributes in a broad sense, but these must also be offset with the technical merit(s) of the language in question: if a language's foundational concepts have become outdated, continuing to use that language outside of a job description is a liability. However, if a language's fundamental design is still interesting, but the low-level technologies used to implement it have fallen out of favor (for example, targeting IA32, or only functioning on an obsolete processor, etc) that language will also still become effectively "dead," and arguably unfairly so. It could be said that there are language designers and language implementers. The designers have sufficient scope in their mental model to sweep across the domain of language design and implementation and distill that into a functioning codebase. Implementors, on the other hand, just want to fulfil a spec. I wonder what would happen if there were a website out there that listing all "dead but worthy" languages along with instructions on how to get them running? Does anything out there like this exist? I'm envisaging students, language enthusiasts, etc, modernizing these old language specifications - which would allow the community to readily reasses the technical merits of the language in question. It might ultimately be demoted again, but we'd have a reasonable, modern justification of why.