3 ms·
He’s not just a proponent of message passing, he’s a proponent of late binding [1]. The idea there is to have a running image of the environment and interact wi
by chongli 3y ago
He’s not just a proponent of message passing, he’s a proponent of late binding [1]. The idea there is to have a running image of the environment and interact with it in real time, updating code while it’s running (no recompiling or anything like that). The idea is a high level of interactivity with very tight feedback loops.
A whole operating system like this would allow you to hack on the user interface and change things on the fly. All of your software would also work like this, promoting open extensibility by the user. You ought to be able to click on any window or other user interface element and be able to view and modify the running code live, without even restarting the computation it’s running (never mind the whole program or even rebooting the computer).
This sort of ability to do live hacking on the internals of what you’re working with is how computers used to work in those early days. It’s also how machinery has always worked in the past. A mechanic could lock in the timing of an engine by rotating the distributor cap and listening to how smoothly it fires.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_binding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_binding
- satellite2 3y agoA browser kind of fit the requirements.
- Phiwise_ 3y agoKay himself does regularly describe the Arpanet as one of the inspurations for OO, and the modern interbet browser as an incomplete implementation of the same ideas: https://youtu.be/1e8VZlPBx_0 https://youtu.be/1e8VZlPBx_0
- yourapostasy 3y agoI wonder if all of that was in an operating system as described but backed by Nix so we accomplish the NixOS-style reproducibility and configuration time travel, what the developer experience and user experience would be like. Instead of binary blob images, we'd have Nix declaratives and flakes we dissect at will, without fear of wedging the system with the live modifications we make.
- yourapostasy 3y agoI wonder if all of that was in an operating system as described but backed by Nix so we accomplish the NixOS-style reproducibility and configuration time travel, what the developer experience and user experience would be like. Instead of binary blob images, we'd have Nix declaratives and flakes we dissect at will, without fear of wedging the system with the live modifications we make. Our hardware is sufficiently capable enough these days that I'm curious if we can do this to conventional Smalltalk and Common Lisp system/machine designs to re-imagine them, and bring back a level of tight feedback looped developer experience that has gone underground in the mainstream.
- bombcar 3y agoThe closest I’ve seen to this is programming in Excel - each step is visible to you and you can tweak it in the cell itself and see what it does.
- devinprater 3y agoHoly crap that'd be amazing for accessibility! Open a menu and look at what the button does, label that button with the screen reader, pass around that label to others, and boom, labeled button.