4 ms·

I'm a bit nostalgic about this. Not because of VBScript or even JScript. But because of ActiveState which provided Perl, TCP, and Python interpreters that worke

I'm a bit nostalgic about this. Not because of VBScript or even JScript. But because of ActiveState which provided Perl, TCP, and Python interpreters that worked with Windows Script Host. I could create and call COM interfaces plus the CPAN library to pick from. I built Tkinter GUIs for my scripts. It was part of the OLE dream that users would have lots of small scripts automating their component-oriented workflows. What we got instead was cargo-cult coding and innumerable vulnerabilities because, to borrow a phrase from the IoT folks, the 'S' in COM/OLE stands for security.

westurner 3y ago
With process-sandboxed WASM in modern browsers, you can call into whatever you can compile into WASM from JS. emscripten-forge hosts WASM packages built from conda-forge -like recipes installable at runtime with micropip in pyodide in e.g. JupyterLite and vscode. There's no scripting MS Agents like Peedy and Bonzai Buddy from VBScript, but there are now a bunch of W3C-standardized APIs with varying levels of browser implementations catalogued at MDN and caniuse; WebSockets, WebRTC, WebUSB, WebBluetooth, WebGPU, WebNN, File System Access API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System... From "Manifest V3, webRequest, and ad blockers" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32953286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32953286 : > What are some ideas for UI Visual Affordances to solve for bad UX due to slow browser tabs and extensions? > - [ ] UBY: Browsers: Strobe the tab or extension button when it's beyond (configurable) resource usage thresholds > - [ ] UBY: Browsers: Vary the {color, size, fill} of the tabs according to their relative resource utilization > - [ ] ENH,SEC: Browsers: specify per-tab/per-domain resource quotas: CPU, RAM, Disk, [GPU, TPU, QPU] (Linux: cgroups,)
Const-me 3y ago
> I built Tkinter GUIs for my scripts MS had the technology which used HTML for GUI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application Interestingly, it arrived in IE5 in 1999, almost 15 years before the very first version of Electron.
- fuzzzerd 3y ago
  Typical Microsoft, way too early. Windows XP Tablet edition. Pocket PC.
  - Const-me 3y ago
    Yeah, but some new tech became very relevant over time. Examples include Unicode in NT 3.5, asynchronous I/O in NT 4, multi-CPU support in Win2k (become mainstream after hyperthreading and especially multicore CPUs), 3D GPU for desktop compositor in Vista (people universally hated the hardware requirement, but over time we got pretty fast 3D GPUs even inside low-end processors). Sadly, it seems they stopped implementing awesome new stuff after Windows 7.

westurner 3y ago

With process-sandboxed WASM in modern browsers, you can call into whatever you can compile into WASM from JS. emscripten-forge hosts WASM packages built from conda-forge -like recipes installable at runtime with micropip in pyodide in e.g. JupyterLite and vscode. There's no scripting MS Agents like Peedy and Bonzai Buddy from VBScript, but there are now a bunch of W3C-standardized APIs with varying levels of browser implementations catalogued at MDN and caniuse; WebSockets, WebRTC, WebUSB, WebBluetooth, WebGPU, WebNN, File System Access API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System... From "Manifest V3, webRequest, and ad blockers" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32953286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32953286 : > What are some ideas for UI Visual Affordances to solve for bad UX due to slow browser tabs and extensions? > - [ ] UBY: Browsers: Strobe the tab or extension button when it's beyond (configurable) resource usage thresholds > - [ ] UBY: Browsers: Vary the {color, size, fill} of the tabs according to their relative resource utilization > - [ ] ENH,SEC: Browsers: specify per-tab/per-domain resource quotas: CPU, RAM, Disk, [GPU, TPU, QPU] (Linux: cgroups,)

Const-me 3y ago

> I built Tkinter GUIs for my scripts MS had the technology which used HTML for GUI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application Interestingly, it arrived in IE5 in 1999, almost 15 years before the very first version of Electron.

fuzzzerd 3y ago
Typical Microsoft, way too early. Windows XP Tablet edition. Pocket PC.
- Const-me 3y ago
  Yeah, but some new tech became very relevant over time. Examples include Unicode in NT 3.5, asynchronous I/O in NT 4, multi-CPU support in Win2k (become mainstream after hyperthreading and especially multicore CPUs), 3D GPU for desktop compositor in Vista (people universally hated the hardware requirement, but over time we got pretty fast 3D GPUs even inside low-end processors). Sadly, it seems they stopped implementing awesome new stuff after Windows 7.