The simple bottom line of that dimension of questions about Newton is that Larry Tesler has wide scope and equally wide and deep abilities, and that the Dylan folks in Cambridge did a very good job in trying to make a new language "along the lines of Lisp".
Regarding "frames" etc., I think what computer people were likely to know and use and how to think in the 80s was possibly wider and deeper than today. Also, take a look at SK8, which was yet another interesting system done by Apple Advanced Development (aka "research") "Frames" themselves came from Marvin Minsky's amalgam of Pat Winston's Thesis' knowledge structures and object oriented programming ideas from PARC and his own lab (Hewitt). Newton was a project that allowed too many people's opinions to hold sway. Many of the clashing opinions were good on their own, but didn't fit with some of the other ideas. I wouldn't know how to start describing the twists and turns this took. More recently Alex Warth of Viewpoints (with Stephen Murrell) did a very nice Prolog in about 9 or 10 lines of OMeta + about 90 lines of JavaScript for the semantics. So this particular approach to quasi-Horn logic is relatively simple and quite pretty in a dynamic language. Cheers, Alan ________________________________ From: Duncan Mak <[email protected]> To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]> Cc: Alan Kay <[email protected]> Sent: Wed, March 30, 2011 9:46:20 AM Subject: Re: [fonc] visual environments created by present/former VPRI staff Hello Alan, On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 11:47 AM, Alan Kay <[email protected]> wrote: At Apple, besides Fabrik and Playground (several versions), there was MacPal and Constructo >There was (unimplemented) "the hopping curriculum" which used a visual syntax >Tableau was yet another "before-after" visual production language (which >eventually became StageCast). All these go back to SNOBOL, and AMBIT (and its >graphical manifestation AMBIT-B at Lincoln Labs). > After reading the little bit of history on the Dylan/Ralph/Newton system that was done at Apple in the early 90s, I have wanted to find out more about it for quite some time. Mikel Evins about the Lisp-based Newton OS http://lispm.dyndns.org/news?ID=NEWS-2004-08-14-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK8 Particularly the bit about frame systems: It had a frame system used to implement a knowledge base that stored things like prototypical Person and Place and Date objects, and supported fuzzy comparisons. The so-called "IA" ("Intelligent Assistant") subsystem used these frames so that it could guess things like the fact that when you write "Joe" you probably mean "Joseph Smith" or "Josephine Baker" from your address book. Recently, I started reading the chapters on Logic Programming in SICP and tried to learn more about Prolog and Frames. It surprised me to see something so "theoretical" used in a consumer-facing product, even though it ultimately failed. Alan, do you know more about these systems, and how they were put together? Z-Bo, sorry if I'm hijacking your thread. -- Duncan.
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