scroot

22 ms·

211.
by scroot 6y ago
I would argue that the more CS education has become about training people to perform the jobs of the present (and thus work in the languages and systems of the present), it has become a kind of Unix training ground. There is certainly now a
212.
Message Not Understood: Documentary on History of Personal Computing(kickstarter.com)
3 points by scroot 6y ago|1 comments
213.
by scroot 6y ago
Here is a question I can't quite answer: why is the complexity of something like Xcode so much greater than NeXT, when many of the basic UI components are pretty much the same kinds of things they were 20 years ago (but, subjectively,
214.
by scroot 6y ago
This is more of a cultural issue than a technical one: they want to attract mainstream programmers to their system, and the mainstream pretty much expects git compatibility. I was the same way when I first picked up Squeak/Pharo. Only
215.
by scroot 6y ago
Given the social effects of the past two decades of computing, I don't see how anyone could think AR is a good idea.
216.
by scroot 6y ago
I'm with you, but want to add that this transition isn't the fault of GUIs. The group at PARC that invented the GUI that everyone else commercialized had invented the GUI equivalent of "booting into a BASIC" -- Smallta
217.
by scroot 6y ago
I think about tools like Hypercard, Applescript, and other systems that really allowed "users" to easily do things that today we might view as strictly the purview of "programmers". These kinds of things are no longer po
218.
by scroot 6y ago
> One can only conclude that the makers of Unix held, and still hold, the ordinary computer user in total contempt, and this viewpoint seems to me to be mirrored in the attitudes of the people who are inflicting this awful system on the
219.
by scroot 6y ago
Maybe. But the article opens by quoting Dave Robson's article in the 1981 Byte issue and even links to the archived version of the magazine. That issue was entirely dedicated to articles about Smalltalk. Robson's article is also
220.
by scroot 6y ago
Thanks for the extensive response. I've bookmarked your site. There's a lot more I can say about some of this, but I think I'll just email you when the time is right. At the moment I don't really know about funding sourc
221.
by scroot 6y ago
Hi davisr, what are your plans for this system? I see elsewhere that you are interested in the Smalltalk/Dynabook concepts. Are you envisioning a completely new user interface for this at some point?
222.
by scroot 6y ago
There is GNU Smalltalk, but I don't think it has a big community at the moment. What you are describing, though, is conceptually easy enough to implement: modern Smalltalks (Squeak, Pharo, and friends) all have robust interfaces to Uni
223.
by scroot 6y ago
It's possible. But the mainstream culture of computing is still so entrenched in the division of user/programmer and in the use of text editing as a primary interface that I suspect it would not have caught on in the same way.
224.
by scroot 6y ago
No, this is not a typical line of Smalltalk. That would be considered a very sloppy array indeed. I think it's just there to demonstrate the different literal notations in the language. Smalltalk is actually quite readable in practice,
225.
by scroot 6y ago
It's not really fair to compare the two that closely. Doing so misses a key aspect of Hypercard, which is how it fit holistically into the operating systems of its time. Hypercard "authors" had the ability to do many of the t
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by scroot 6y ago
I really wish he would release the updated Oberon book in another format besides PDF.
227.
by scroot 6y ago
Do you know anything about the status of this project? I started following it on Github a couple of years ago when it appeared but it does not seem like anyone is working on it
228.
by scroot 6y ago
> The only reason this doesn't exist is simply that nobody has decided to build it yet. It also takes a lot of time and effort, and so needs to be funded along with minimal interference from the bureaucracy of a business. Smalltalk
229.
by scroot 6y ago
> However, these dynamic modifications should also be safe and accessible. I'm thinking of something related to AppleScript here, which allows to automate/scripts an amazingly large number of functions on OS X. Combining this w
230.
by scroot 6y ago
I'm a backer of that project and was looking forward to doing bare-metal experiments once the RISC-V alternate SOC comes out (I have implemented some of the RISC-V ISA in Squeak). Are you also a backer? It would be dope to get this wor
231.
by scroot 6y ago
Apparently when it booted in the terminal, there was a nice ASCII portrait of Marx. I also have it on good authority that the program that launched the Smalltalk image from the terminal was called "das," so you literally would typ
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by scroot 6y ago
I believe that the poster means that the University system (in the US at least) has been overtaken by "management theory" over the past four decades or so. This is the same theory prominent in business schools / MBA programs.
233.
by scroot 6y ago
Simplicity and good design take lots of time and money. Our culture is not truly ready to make these kinds of investments in the manner required. Why would they? There is a whole universe of FOSS out there upon which anyone can cheaply crea
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by scroot 6y ago
X.25 is finally getting its day
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by scroot 6y ago
> but I wonder if, to some extent, they were in the right place at the right time? It's certainly true for PARC, which owes its success in large part to the ARPA research community that preceded it. Many of the same people from that
236.
by scroot 6y ago
> there isn't the willingness to actually spend the resources improving its JIT story. We should admit that funding is really important here. The Opensmalltalk-vm is currently sitting on a known optimization (speculative inlining) t
237.
by scroot 6y ago
It's almost like decades of governance by people who say government is the problem leads to ... inept governing ...
238.
by scroot 6y ago
> Regarding your idea about a new type of Y-Combinator-style model for funding science, I like the idea. It seems to me that incubators like Y-Combinator are more enmeshed in / perpetuate the short-termism that has so drastically af
239.
by scroot 6y ago
> Likewise, Steve Jobs saw hypercard as the future, wanting it to sync up online between people Everything I've ever read about Hypercard indicates that the opposite is true: neither Jobs nor the company could "see" that H
240.
by scroot 6y ago
Yeah stagnation can last for a long time, even as the structural aspects of that stagnation become overwhelmingly apparent. We are in the "Brezhnev Period" of computing in that sense

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