mmiller

9 ms·

31.
by mmiller 10y ago
I didn't begin to get it until the industry started trying to use browsers for applications in the late '90s/early 2000's. I took one look at the "stateful" architecture they were trying to use, and I said to m
32.
by mmiller 10y ago
I was fortunate to grow up during a time when Alan Kay was a well-known figure in the personal computing world, and while what he said didn't make sense to me at the time, it still interested me intensely, and I always wondered what he
33.
by mmiller 10y ago
Kind of, but it was clunkier. You could Break out of an executing program, edit the code you wanted, and then type CONT to continue execution from the break point. The state from that point forward might not be what you want, though. At lea
34.
by mmiller 10y ago
I don't know in what context "hot editing" was used to start this thread, but what I read in it is the idea that you can change code while it's running. Edit and continue has a different feel to it, because it works by a
35.
by mmiller 10y ago
At first, I was tempted to see this as a disappointing comment, promoting the idea of "If you didn't understand this early, you're not going to, no matter how hard you try, so stop trying," but I think what you could rea
36.
by mmiller 10y ago
One thing I've found about the web, as it exists, is that the people who set up a system for the outside world to use change it over time. The URLs change. The CGI their service will accept changes. As things exist now, a program must
37.
by mmiller 10y ago
Re. consider "send processes rather than messages" Interesting thought to ponder!... What came to mind is Smalltalk-80 kind of did that, though the processes (blocks) were not in the "driver's seat" of the interacti
38.
by mmiller 10y ago
As Alan has said, the importance of funding is more about finding the problem. There's a lot of wandering and false leads involved (though, finding out the false leads is nevertheless valuable. It's still new knowledge). In terms
39.
by mmiller 10y ago
The problem with the idea of procedures acting on data structures is that as a system scales up, it gets more complex in terms of its data structure, and the amount of code that must operate on it, and be dependent on it. As that happens, i
40.
by mmiller 10y ago
I think another way of looking at what you said is people can feel threatened or diminished by certain arguments, even if they're not directed at them, when certain cherished premises are challenged, and part of learning to argue well
41.
by mmiller 10y ago
Take a look here: https://tekkie.wordpress.com/2010/07/05/sicp-what-is-meant-b...
42.
by mmiller 10y ago
I won't presume to speak for Alan, but my understanding of what he's said is very different historically. As I recall, he said that the first Macintosh was "the first computer worth criticizing" (something like that). Wh
43.
by mmiller 10y ago
Indeed. I think another part of it was people wanted to go on using systems the way they had been, with the operating system being a base layer on which things happen, which does not exist as a foundation for building a different system. To
44.
by mmiller 10y ago
To provide a little hope, I think it should be pointed out that the Frank project (VPRI) achieved web browsing that is compatible with the existing web protocol, using real objects. What it allowed is an extension of browsing on the web. So
45.
by mmiller 10y ago
This is the way Facebook is now... Not an improvement. It's not designed for following threads, and it looks like they don't care.
46.
by mmiller 10y ago
What you ask here is very interesting to me, because some time back I got to thinking about what Alan Kay talked about with trying to negotiate meaning, in reference to using Licklider's concept of "communicating with aliens.&quot
47.
by mmiller 17y ago
I think he makes a good point in that nerds tend to exclude themselves, but I think it's a defense mechanism from being rejected. Believe me, when I was in jr. high and high school (more than 20 years ago, now) I wanted to "join the crowd"
48.
by mmiller 19y ago
Amen. This kind of attitude is promoted by people who want to do what Paul Graham did, use Lisp as their "secret weapon" in a startup. I find this attitude dispiriting. How are people going to realize better forms of computing if they're di
49.
by mmiller 19y ago
It makes sense that Lisp would run well on Lisp machines. I don't know why Symbolics didn't succeed more than it did. Alan Kay has complained that the hardware architecture that started in the 1970s and became dominant was deficient. It mig
50.
by mmiller 19y ago
Complexity of implementation? Slowness? Lack of marketing? Unfamiliar syntax? No, none of these explain the lack of popularity. I think you dismiss these factors too quickly. We need to remember that even seemingly little things can preve
51.
by mmiller 19y ago
"Worse Is Better" is an old article, I think from the early 1990s. Back then Lisp did run slowly. I can remember taking a course around 1989/1990 that had us running the n-queens problem in Lisp. People would start up their n-queens program
52.
by mmiller 19y ago
The $100 laptop (also known as the OLPC--One Laptop Per Child project) is not based on Squeak. It's partly based on Linux (the OS), but the stuff users see is largely written in Python. Squeak is on the laptop as one of the things students
53.
by mmiller 19y ago
This is like PG's post on his blog, "Microsoft is dead". Don't declare stuff dead so soon. I still remember Byte Magazine declaring "Object-Oriented Programming is Dead", and within a month, "Unix is Dead". Both deaths were greatly exaggera
54.
by mmiller 19y ago
Your thesis is based on the idea that Microsoft is dead because nobody fears them anymore. I think this is the wrong way to look at it. Does fear = relevance? It can, but how many people fear IBM? I doubt many. IBM is not dead. It's come ba