4 ms·

For the life of me this Oberon/Plan 9 obsession with "all text can be turned into commands" escapes me. It seems so counterintuitive and just aesthetically disp

by rtpg 6y ago

For the life of me this Oberon/Plan 9 obsession with "all text can be turned into commands" escapes me. It seems so counterintuitive and just aesthetically displeasing. Like there's huge swaths of software where this sort of paradigm just makes no sense ("click to evaluate" your Excel file, and then paste i there?) Like OK, cool, I get an email and I can middle-click it there to run it instead of.... I guess opening a text file and putting it there and hitting enter? Not to mention that limiting yourself to text really limits how far this metaphor can go. I do realize that there's limitations of the time, and that for the time it would be way better than, say, Win 3.1. Just like.... it feels like an evolutional dead-end (compared to say, Smalltalk-y OS's whose concepts have lived on in things like browser dev tools and SFDC' Apex environments). I don't mean to yuck too much on anyone's yum, just feels like there are better ideas out there at this point.

alexisread 6y ago
It's less to do with text really. When you click you're passing a message to the module. Powershell has a very rich object state as well, and the general idea is more like piping between objects (vs unix where everything piped IS text). Another good example is TempleOS where you can render graphics into the cli and interact with them.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  > Another good example is TempleOS where you can render graphics into the cli and interact with them. Lisp and Smalltalk did it first. :)
  - mikelevins 6y ago
    Yes, and the logical extremes, to my mind, were Symbolics Genera (a Lisp-machine OS) and Apple's Sk8 (a "HyperCard on steroids" rapid-application-development environment built on Macintosh Common Lisp). In Genera, any output to a repl window was not dead text; it was a live and mouse-sensitive reference to the actual object in memory. You could mouse on it to get a dynamically-generated menu of operations supported by the pointed-to value, or call functions on it, or whatever. In Sk8 you could grab an arbitrary widget anywhere on the screen and drop it on a MessageBox window to obtain a named variable referring to it. You could then operate on it in a manner similar to that described above.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Interlisp-D did it as well, however we only have the written documentation and manuals. Maybe with the new revival project it can be relieved again.
      - mikelevins 6y ago
        I do hope so. I have their current software running locally. It's essentially a museum piece in its present state, but what I understand from Larry Masinter is that they've got the license unencumbered and intend to turn it back into a going project. I can't wait!
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
robobro 6y ago
> Not to mention that limiting yourself to text really limits how far this metaphor can go. Why?
- rtpg 6y ago
  The basic counter-example I was thinking of is Mathematica. In Mathematica you can paste an image as input, and have the input embedded into the document and used as an operator. Similarly you could imagine files/documents/etc be represented as elements of rich text. This is _not_ an easy problem however! As an example, if I had a document referring to `~/.emacs`, it could be: - the path on the system of the author's machine - the path on the system of the reader's machine - the content of the file on the author's machine - the content of the file on the reader's machine - A sort of lisp data structure based on the content of the file on (author or reader's machine) Basically you enter in to the "reference or value" problem on many things. Text doesn't have this problem because it has no solution to the value problem, for the most part, apart from like embedding a base64 blob into your text. But hey, if you're building an entire OS anyways, and you have some rich text primitives, you could imagine having that in the base libraries and setting up some COM-like primitives all over and work from there. I mean this is basically Word, at this point. But a programmer-y version of Word would be interesting from my perspective.
coldtea 6y ago
>Not to mention that limiting yourself to text really limits how far this metaphor can go. Sounds like the opposite.

by rtpg 6y ago

alexisread 6y ago

It's less to do with text really. When you click you're passing a message to the module. Powershell has a very rich object state as well, and the general idea is more like piping between objects (vs unix where everything piped IS text). Another good example is TempleOS where you can render graphics into the cli and interact with them.

pjmlp 6y ago
> Another good example is TempleOS where you can render graphics into the cli and interact with them. Lisp and Smalltalk did it first. :)
- mikelevins 6y ago
  Yes, and the logical extremes, to my mind, were Symbolics Genera (a Lisp-machine OS) and Apple's Sk8 (a "HyperCard on steroids" rapid-application-development environment built on Macintosh Common Lisp). In Genera, any output to a repl window was not dead text; it was a live and mouse-sensitive reference to the actual object in memory. You could mouse on it to get a dynamically-generated menu of operations supported by the pointed-to value, or call functions on it, or whatever. In Sk8 you could grab an arbitrary widget anywhere on the screen and drop it on a MessageBox window to obtain a named variable referring to it. You could then operate on it in a manner similar to that described above.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Interlisp-D did it as well, however we only have the written documentation and manuals. Maybe with the new revival project it can be relieved again.
    - mikelevins 6y ago
      I do hope so. I have their current software running locally. It's essentially a museum piece in its present state, but what I understand from Larry Masinter is that they've got the license unencumbered and intend to turn it back into a going project. I can't wait!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

robobro 6y ago

> Not to mention that limiting yourself to text really limits how far this metaphor can go. Why?

rtpg 6y ago
The basic counter-example I was thinking of is Mathematica. In Mathematica you can paste an image as input, and have the input embedded into the document and used as an operator. Similarly you could imagine files/documents/etc be represented as elements of rich text. This is _not_ an easy problem however! As an example, if I had a document referring to `~/.emacs`, it could be: - the path on the system of the author's machine - the path on the system of the reader's machine - the content of the file on the author's machine - the content of the file on the reader's machine - A sort of lisp data structure based on the content of the file on (author or reader's machine) Basically you enter in to the "reference or value" problem on many things. Text doesn't have this problem because it has no solution to the value problem, for the most part, apart from like embedding a base64 blob into your text. But hey, if you're building an entire OS anyways, and you have some rich text primitives, you could imagine having that in the base libraries and setting up some COM-like primitives all over and work from there. I mean this is basically Word, at this point. But a programmer-y version of Word would be interesting from my perspective.

coldtea 6y ago

>Not to mention that limiting yourself to text really limits how far this metaphor can go. Sounds like the opposite.