4 ms·

Yup, there is almost nothing new under the sun. Everything I use in my day to day job was discovered in the 70s. Heck, half this stuff is even worse than what w

Yup, there is almost nothing new under the sun. Everything I use in my day to day job was discovered in the 70s. Heck, half this stuff is even worse than what was discovered in the 70s. SmallTalk was a complete OS/programming environment with checkpoints, pausing, and live migration. What do we have now that comes close?

tachyonbeam 13y ago
Granted that what we have now often seems like a pile of kludges. Probably because our modern systems evolved "organically" over a span of decades, and technical issues have been solved with compromises rather than careful planning ...However, I'm pretty sure if you booted up a SmallTalk machine from the 70s, you'd find there were A LOT of bugs and unfinished corners. The UI was really not polished or user friendly. The impression I got is that they barely had it working, that it was more of a tech demo than any kind of finished product. I don't think you'd want to trade any of your modern software for something from then. I mean, yes, they thought of clever things back in the 70s, but don't go imagining they had some nice, clean, perfect implementation of those ideas.
- dkarapetyan 13y ago
  Sure, cutting edge stuff is always going to be rough around the edges but I see no such boldness around me any more. All I see is another version of AngularJS popping up every other week. How many MVC frameworks does a JavaScript developer need?
seanmcdirmid 13y ago
The first step to reinventing the future is in having a good understanding of the past. If you want to know what could come after Smalltalk, well... http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/211297/managedtime.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/211297/managedtime.pdf But that is totally off topic (and perhaps you already know this is my research, and just trying to make a point?). The article is not about discovering something new, but a useful reminder of what we already should know.

tachyonbeam 13y ago

Granted that what we have now often seems like a pile of kludges. Probably because our modern systems evolved "organically" over a span of decades, and technical issues have been solved with compromises rather than careful planning ...However, I'm pretty sure if you booted up a SmallTalk machine from the 70s, you'd find there were A LOT of bugs and unfinished corners. The UI was really not polished or user friendly. The impression I got is that they barely had it working, that it was more of a tech demo than any kind of finished product. I don't think you'd want to trade any of your modern software for something from then. I mean, yes, they thought of clever things back in the 70s, but don't go imagining they had some nice, clean, perfect implementation of those ideas.

dkarapetyan 13y ago
Sure, cutting edge stuff is always going to be rough around the edges but I see no such boldness around me any more. All I see is another version of AngularJS popping up every other week. How many MVC frameworks does a JavaScript developer need?

seanmcdirmid 13y ago

The first step to reinventing the future is in having a good understanding of the past. If you want to know what could come after Smalltalk, well... http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/211297/managedtime.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/211297/managedtime.pdf But that is totally off topic (and perhaps you already know this is my research, and just trying to make a point?). The article is not about discovering something new, but a useful reminder of what we already should know.