scroot

10 ms·

151.
by scroot 5y ago
> I am unaware of how it handles math expressions in particular. It does not automatically do order of operations. You have to explicitly use parentheses, as you say. However methods in Smalltalk tend to be quite short do to the nature o
152.
by scroot 5y ago
> Why would anyone think that a verbose language is a good idea? What if you are a "sometimes" programmer -- you write some code, then come back to it months later. In many ways this was the intent behind the development of ear
153.
Authorship Environments: In search of the “personal” in personal computing(youtube.com)
1 points by scroot 5y ago|0 comments
154.
by scroot 5y ago
Hotline was awesome. In the mid to late 90s, it might have been my primary online activity besides AIM. I used to get all kinds of electronic music samples from various servers. It was a great way to discover random music as well.
155.
by scroot 5y ago
As I understand it, human intervention is one of the biggest unknowns in any of these projections. Despite the inadequacy of the global response, there have been important human interventions since the 1960s. For example, in the US the EP
156.
by scroot 5y ago
Love the shout out for Sista.
157.
by scroot 5y ago
I guess I just don't know C well enough. How can it be legal to put anything at a memory address before a given array? Does the compiler magically manage this? (Also if you know of any posts about this technique I would really apprecia
158.
by scroot 5y ago
Piumarta's papers are totally underrated! There is only one thing I didn't understand from that paper (as a barely-used-c programmer), which is what does it mean to access some_array[-1]? His COLAs paper seems like it's reall
159.
by scroot 5y ago
That's because the Byte issue was the "coming out" for Smalltalk -- a description of their work but not necessarily new work. Bitblt was first implemented in Smalltalk-74 I believe (meaning ~1974)
160.
by scroot 5y ago
This kind of ROI analysis -- along with rankings, management theory, and other woes that have befuddled the aims of a college education -- has really had an interesting effect. Fewer graduates of 4 year colleges are proficiently literate. O
161.
by scroot 5y ago
I don't want to drone on about this too much longer since we obviously disagree about some of the big points here (and agree about the "direction," which is more important anyway), but: > I don’t see how there was anything
162.
by scroot 5y ago
> I don’t see HyperCard or Applescript as better than anything we have now. The way they worked holistically on their systems at the time and brought users into the fold was certainly better than what we have now. I don't know of an
163.
by scroot 5y ago
> But to me the question this raises is - do you think anyone has done better, and if so who?. Yes. Apple in the past, for one. When they included Hypercard free with every Macintosh and also began integrating Applescript into the core o
164.
by scroot 5y ago
> There is structural integrity to OSX, but it’s like a civil engineering project where the integrity is gradually being retrofitted over time. Despite the engineered "user-friendliness" of the OS, it still suffers from a simp
165.
by scroot 5y ago
If you are curious for more details, here is the Smalltalk-72 manual that Kay and Goldberg wrote at PARC: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/Smalltal...
166.
by scroot 5y ago
On the contrary, both communities are very active. Pharo and Squeak both have active mailing lists with dozens of messages each day, and the Pharo community maintains a very lively Discord server
167.
by scroot 5y ago
Additionally,the original Smalltalk "Blue Book" ("Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation") is well written and can be a good introduction. http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBoo
168.
by scroot 5y ago
> Can it build GUIs? Yes. The GUI framework is called Spec (Spec2, to be specific) and supports multiple backends, including GTK.
169.
by scroot 5y ago
> stable commercial product by 1980 This is not true. Even the Smalltalk-80 Blue Book wasn't released until 1983. > If you can't build adoption with a 15+ year head start Historical context is important here. FOSS etc were n
170.
by scroot 5y ago
Juan has done some really impressive work on Morphic3, which uses a vector graphics engine of his own design. He's also pared down Cuis' version of Morphic to its most basic elements, so one could change the appearance of the UI t
171.
by scroot 5y ago
Interesting idea. One could imagine a kind of Actor-Smalltalk where each object is actually its own "thread" (whatever that means at the VM level). The issue then becomes the asynchronous nature of the beast and how to "respo
172.
by scroot 5y ago
It's really a shame what happened to the possibilities for end-user programming/scripting at the OS level. The landscape today is quite dreary. Ask a regular person to "make a button" in their computing environment and t
173.
by scroot 5y ago
I think the point is that everyone should have such an opportunity without having to be independently wealthy in the first place.
174.
by scroot 5y ago
There is a richness to life that has nothing whatsoever to do with money. To the technocratic mind that would confuse this fact, what is "useful" can only ever be presented in the terms of the economics profession. Under such guid
175.
by scroot 5y ago
In terms of Smalltalk, the answer is "yes". Some examples of what it looks like include the original Self language / environment [1], Newspeak [2], and even Tony Garnock-Jones' implementation of Actors [3]. Some of this
176.
by scroot 5y ago
Though I'm not sure what they are up to exactly, isn't this what The Browser Company [1] is trying to do? [1] https://thebrowser.company/
177.
by scroot 5y ago
Hey Robert, it would be great to get in touch. I'm part of a group that has built an authorship system inspired by HyperCard/Smalltalk [1] and we are using OhmJS to implement our language and interpreter. We are inching closer tow
178.
by scroot 5y ago
> It may also be that, for computing, we would have to look at older generations of our software and look for the forks not taken. As an example, Apple's Hypercard enabled individuals to create their own computing experience, someth
179.
by scroot 5y ago
Dave Wilson is doing "The Lord's Work" when it comes to Emacs outreach, over on his System Crafters [1] YouTube channel. One of the series he is running there is an ongoing guide to Emacs Lisp. [1] https://www.yout
180.
by scroot 5y ago
The old girl was put down too young...

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