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It seems backwards that on the Alto you could style your code with a WYSIWYG editor but 40 years later putting a <b> tag in your Javadoc is about all you can do
by kens 10y ago
It seems backwards that on the Alto you could style your code with a WYSIWYG editor but 40 years later putting a <b> tag in your Javadoc is about all you can do to code.
- pjmlp 10y agoThere are lots of things you could do on the Alto and on the Star that one cannot still do today. For example being able to do systems programming on memory safe languages, Mesa and Cedar, using a live coding environment, with embedded objects and a rich REPL, which even did suggestions for typos.
- rwallace 10y agoThose systems were impressive for their time indeed, but let's not lose sight of our options today; if you want to do systems programming in a memory safe language you can use Rust, and if you want a live coding environment, with embedded objects and a rich REPL, you can use Racket.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoHe said AND not OR for those features. There might be modern stuff with the AND but they usually ignore something. I had luck in distant past making type-safe 3GL's in a LISP that extracted to C/C++ with checks on. Really kludgy, though. Still haven't seen one do such things as cleanly as the old systems with high efficiency as well.
- pjmlp 10y agoThat is not the same thing, not even close. Swift and .NET Native are the modern environments that are closer to it in spirit, but it is not the same thing, not really.