Hi
My major error in this project -- it turned out to be interesting, but hurt one
very important part -- was to switch goals in mid-project from "running in
real-time on a super computer" to "running in real-time on a laptop".
"Real-time" meaning that all the interactive parts were within the range of
what humans expect when they deal with a user interface -- i.e. a completely
usable system.
This decision change happened because Dan Amelang's "Nile" graphics was
surprisingly efficient as well as being super tiny (< 500 lines of Nile code).
This got me thinking about doing live demos in talks, and that some of this
could help the design of the system.
However, it moved the pragmatics from "paying money for HW" and working on the
semantics (which was the original aim) to imposing pragmatics in the software.
We did get something quite impressive on a laptop, but ultimately I think we
didn't have enough cycles to both design/invent and optimize.
We had this problem at Parc when we couldn't replace the Altos in a timely way.
This led to some excellent software engineering, but the new design and
invention part got blunted.
Mea culpa!
Cheers
Alan
From: Kartik Agaram <akkar...@gmail.com>
To: Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com>
Cc: Dirk Pranke <dpra...@chromium.org>; Dave Crossland <d...@lab6.com>;
"fonc@mailman.vpri.org" <fonc@mailman.vpri.org>
Sent: Friday, April 29, 2016 3:13 PM
Subject: Re: [Fonc] Missing Final Annual Report?
Does anyone know/remember what is meant by "real-time" in this passage?
"..we got interested in seeing if we could run in real-time on laptops, and
this part of the design and optimization fought some of the goals."
("Reflections", http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001b_steps.pdf, page 15)
I saw the phrase in several places in the 2012 reports, but didn't see any
references to "real-time" in prior years, except for this one in 2010:
"Nile itself can be made in a little over 100 lines of code in the OMeta
metalanguage, and optimized to run acceptably in real‑time (also in OMeta) in
another 700 lines. OMeta can be made in itself and optimized in about 100 lines
of code." (http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2010004_steps10.pdf, page 4)
Thanks,
Kartik
http://akkartik.name/about
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