Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA

2012-03-14 Thread David Barbour
On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 10:24 AM, Martin Baldan martino...@gmail.comwrote: And that's how you get a huge software stack. Redundancy can be avoided in centralized systems, but in distributed systems with competing standards that's the normal state. It's not that programmers are dumb, it's that

Re: [fonc] Block-Strings / Heredocs (Re: Magic Ink and Killing Math)

2012-03-14 Thread Loup Vaillant
BGB wrote: On 3/13/2012 4:37 PM, Julian Leviston wrote: I'll take Dave's point that penetration matters, and at the same time, most new ideas have old idea constituents, so you can easily find some matter for people stuck in the old methodologies and thinking to relate to when building your

Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA

2012-03-14 Thread Robin Barooah
On Mar 14, 2012, at 2:22 AM, Max Orhai wrote: But, that's exactly the cause for concern! Aside from the fact of Smalltalk's obsolescence (which isn't really the point), the Squeak plugin could never be approved by a 'responsible' sysadmin, because it can run arbitrary user code! Squeak's

Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA

2012-03-14 Thread Alan Kay
As I've mentioned a few times on this list and in the long ago past, I think that the way to go is to make a hardware software system that assumes no piece of code is completely benign. This was the strategy of the B5000 long ago, and of several later OS designs (and of the Internet itself).

Re: [fonc] Block-Strings / Heredocs (Re: Magic Ink and Killing Math)

2012-03-14 Thread Loup Vaillant
Michael FIG wrote: Loup Vaillantl...@loup-vaillant.fr writes: You could also play the human compiler: use the better syntax in the comments, and implement a translation of it in code just below. But then you have to manually make sure they are synchronized. Comments are good. Needing them

Re: [fonc] [IAEP] Barbarians at the gate! (Project Nell)

2012-03-14 Thread Alan Kay
Hi Scott This seems like a plan that should be done and tried and carefully evaluated. I think the approach is good. It could be not quite enough to work, but it should give rise to a lot of useful information for further passes at this. 1. Psychologist O.K. Moore in the early 60s at Yale and

Re: [fonc] [IAEP] Barbarians at the gate! (Project Nell)

2012-03-14 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 12:54 PM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: The many papers from this work greatly influenced the thinking about personal computing at Xerox PARC in the 70s. Here are a couple: -- O. K. Moore, Autotelic Responsive Environments and Exceptional Children, Experience,

Re: [fonc] Apple and hardware (was: Error trying to compile COLA)

2012-03-14 Thread Mack
Jay Freeman has also released his Wraith Scheme for the iPad. On Mar 14, 2012, at 9:17 AM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote: Alan Kay wrote on Wed, 14 Mar 2012 05:53:21 -0700 (PDT) A hardware vendor with huge volumes (like Apple) should be able to get a CPU vendor to make HW that offers real

Re: [fonc] Block-Strings / Heredocs (Re: Magic Ink and Killing Math)

2012-03-14 Thread BGB
On 3/14/2012 8:57 AM, Loup Vaillant wrote: Michael FIG wrote: Loup Vaillantl...@loup-vaillant.fr writes: You could also play the human compiler: use the better syntax in the comments, and implement a translation of it in code just below. But then you have to manually make sure they are

Re: [fonc] Talking Typwriter [was: Barbarians at the gate! (Project Nell)]

2012-03-14 Thread Martin McClure
On 03/14/2012 09:54 AM, Alan Kay wrote: 1. Psychologist O.K. Moore in the early 60s at Yale and elsewhere pioneered the idea of a talking typewriter to help children learn how to read via learning to write. This was first a grad student in a closet with a microphone simulating a smart

Re: [fonc] [IAEP] Barbarians at the gate! (Project Nell)

2012-03-14 Thread Alan Kay
Hi Scott -- 1. I will see if I can get one of these scanned for you. Moore tended to publish in journals and there is very little of his stuff available on line. 2.a. if (ab) { ... } is easier to read than if ab then ...? There is no hint of the former being tweaked for decades to make it

Re: [fonc] Block-Strings / Heredocs (Re: Magic Ink and Killing Math)

2012-03-14 Thread Mack
On Mar 13, 2012, at 6:27 PM, BGB wrote: SNIP the issue is not that I can't imagine anything different, but rather that doing anything different would be a hassle with current keyboard technology: pretty much anyone can type ASCII characters; many other people have keyboards (or

Re: [fonc] Apple and hardware (was: Error trying to compile COLA)

2012-03-14 Thread Alan Kay
Yep, I was there and trying to get the Newton project off the awful ATT chip they had first chosen. Larry Tesler (who worked with us at PARC) finally wound up taking over this project and doing a number of much better things with it. Overall what happened with Newton was too bad -- it could

Re: [fonc] [IAEP] Barbarians at the gate! (Project Nell)

2012-03-14 Thread shaun gilchrist
Alan, I would go way back to the never implemented Smalltalk-71 Is there a formal specification of what 71 should have been? I have only ever read about it in passing reference in the various histories of smalltalk as a step on the way to 72, 76, and finally 80. I am very intrigued as to what

Re: [fonc] Talking Typwriter [was: Barbarians at the gate! (Project Nell)]

2012-03-14 Thread Alan Kay
You had to have a lot of moxie in the 60s to try to make Moore's ideas into real technology. It was amazing what they were able to do. I wonder where this old junk is now? Should be in the Computer History Museum! Cheers, Alan From: Martin McClure

Re: [fonc] [IAEP] Barbarians at the gate! (Project Nell)

2012-03-14 Thread Brian Rice
I'm sure that if you took a pretty clean PEG grammar approach to composable mixfix phrasing and cues from Inform 7 and Ruby's Cucumber DSL, Smalltalk-71 would feel as real as any bytecode-native language. On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 11:38 AM, shaun gilchrist shaunxc...@gmail.comwrote: Alan, I

Re: [fonc] Block-Strings / Heredocs (Re: Magic Ink and Killing Math)

2012-03-14 Thread BGB
On 3/14/2012 11:31 AM, Mack wrote: On Mar 13, 2012, at 6:27 PM, BGB wrote: SNIP the issue is not that I can't imagine anything different, but rather that doing anything different would be a hassle with current keyboard technology: pretty much anyone can type ASCII characters; many other

Re: [fonc] Apple and hardware (was: Error trying to compile COLA)

2012-03-14 Thread Jecel Assumpcao Jr.
Alan Kay wrote on Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:36:30 -0700 (PDT) Yep, I was there and trying to get the Newton project off the awful ATT chip they had first chosen. Interesting - a few months ago I studied the datasheets for the Hobbit and read all the old CRISP papers and found this chip rather cute.

Re: [fonc] Apple and hardware (was: Error trying to compile COLA)

2012-03-14 Thread Alan Kay
Hi Jecel The CRISP was too slow, and had other problems in its details. Sakoman liked it ... Bill Atkinson did Hypercard ... Larry made many other contributions at Xerox and Apple To me the Dynabook has always been 95% a service model and 5% physical specs (there were three main physical

Re: [fonc] Apple and hardware

2012-03-14 Thread BGB
On 3/14/2012 3:55 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote: snip, interesting, but no comment If you have a good version of confinement (which is pretty simple HW-wise) you can use Butler Lampson's schemes for Cal-TSS to make a workable version of a capability system. The 286 protected mode was good

Re: [fonc] [IAEP] Barbarians at the gate! (Project Nell)

2012-03-14 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 6:02 PM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.comwrote: If you're going to base it on Javascript, at least make it Coffeescript-like. I also agree that some basic parallelism primitives would be great; it is probably possible to build these into a Coffeescript-like

Re: [fonc] [IAEP] Barbarians at the gate! (Project Nell)

2012-03-14 Thread Alan Kay
Well, it was very much a mythical beast even on paper -- and you really have to implement programming languages and make a lot of things with them to be able to assess them But -- basically -- since meeting Seymour and starting to think about children and programming, there were eight