scroot

45 ms·

451.
by scroot 8y ago
I think about that all the time. Imagine a Smalltalk VM written in WASM. It could load with every site and every site could just be live Smalltalk.
452.
by scroot 8y ago
They are still using bitmapped graphics under the hood, which explains some of the limitation. The community has shrunk, which means there's no one to take them to the world of vector. However, Pharo people are implementing a new vecto
453.
by scroot 8y ago
You all hiring?
454.
by scroot 8y ago
Amen
455.
by scroot 8y ago
One of the more important ideas here is that you have to simulate time within your Actors/Objects [1]. There is so much possibility here, but since the status quo more or less "works" in market terms, it's hard to push f
456.
by scroot 8y ago
This is nothing like a command economy.
457.
by scroot 8y ago
If you ever write a manifesto I think you should grab the libsomebullshit.so domain name
458.
by scroot 8y ago
Recently I've come to believe that you don't need "applications" at all, but rather components that can be put together every which way. OpenDoc was sort of like that and something like a smalltalk system is also sort of
459.
by scroot 8y ago
Yes I agree. It's hard work. You'd think a trillion dollar personal computing company like Apple would put in that work. As for hiding things from users, what we need are good metaphors (ideally layered atop one another). You want
460.
by scroot 8y ago
It's probably part "complexity fetish" (ie you are not a real programmer or computer whiz unless you live and die in a teletype emulator). The other problem is that a couple of generations of developers are now out in the wor
461.
by scroot 8y ago
I still think the Platinum look is one of the best ever
462.
by scroot 8y ago
Closest thing in development at the moment: https://github.com/nopsys/CogNOS
463.
by scroot 8y ago
Lots of Emacs people will map their caps-lock key to ctrl for this reason
464.
by scroot 8y ago
Possible additional point: going into the 80s/90s (the last gasps of "alternative" personal computing architecture), there were not many widely-adopted standards across computing. This is why we all bitched about file incompa
465.
by scroot 8y ago
Do you know if there's any chance we'll get one on the east coast? Or other ways to get involved?
466.
by scroot 8y ago
> I seemed kind of cool but doesn't do much you can't do with webpages and javascript. Its scripting language seemed much easier to do some things with than javascript though. In our current developer culture we tend to view th
467.
by scroot 8y ago
The "other things" are the short-termism and appealing to the lowest common denominator that go with the pursuit of profit before anything else.
468.
by scroot 8y ago
There's one thing: Hypercard and DigiTalk represent directions personal computing should have gone, but didn't (although that's not relevant to the thread topic)
469.
by scroot 8y ago
When MIT stopped teaching Scheme (replaced with Python) a couple of years back, yet another essential concept in computing left the academy. This is exactly the kind of thing Kay means when he talks about computing pop-culture. Anyone who&#
470.
by scroot 8y ago
Yo I cannot reply to some older comments you've made that I found, but I thought you'd be interested to know about this [1]. These guys are working on a version of the Cog VM that will run on its own, and also working on the relev
471.
by scroot 8y ago
I'd say more of a dystopia than a fantasy world
472.
by scroot 8y ago
History is really important here. When Smalltalk systems first spun out of Xerox PARC, they carried hefty licensing fees. The whole free software / open-source movement wasn't as ingrained in developer culture back then. Worth rem
473.
by scroot 8y ago
Do you? If so, which?
474.
by scroot 8y ago
I'm not really familiar with any either. I'm convinced it could work well though. Especially if it starts as a consultancy and then moves into building things.
475.
by scroot 8y ago
Time to also reconsider different kinds of corporations, specifically those that are wholly owned and operated by the people who work for them.
476.
by scroot 8y ago
I do a lot of freelance working with small companies / non-profits. The people there typically need what are programmatically simple tasks done: converting fields of a CSV to some other format, adjusting the appearance of only certain
477.
by scroot 8y ago
I hope they continue doing this work. Very interesting
478.
The Long View: Surveillance, the Internet, and Government Research(lareviewofbooks.org)
1 points by scroot 8y ago|0 comments
479.
by scroot 8y ago
By web browser I didn't necessarily mean Chrome. I mean a browser completely re-implemented in the new system, preferably a "live" system of "objects". I realize it's a tall order. But it would solve your issue
480.
by scroot 8y ago
There are a lot of lessons from the 70s/80s even 90s that are completely absent from today's personal computing environments, and they are ripe for a comeback. Oberon/Genera-like systems had one thing right: make your system

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