On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 10:24 AM, Martin Baldan wrote:
> 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 they can't agree
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 yo
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
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). Man
Loup Vaillant 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 is bad.
Or use a preprocessor that
Michael FIG wrote:
Loup Vaillant 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 is bad.
Or use a pre
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 protection, and at a granularity that makes
> more systems sense.
They did just that when they founded ARM Ltd (with Acorn and
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 an
On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 12:54 PM, Alan Kay 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, Structure and Ad
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 pro
On 3/14/2012 8:57 AM, Loup Vaillant wrote:
Michael FIG wrote:
Loup Vaillant 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
ar
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
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 (a
> From: C. Scott Ananian
>To: Alan Kay
>Cc: IAEP SugarLabs ; Fundamentals of New Comput
On Mar 13, 2012, at 6:27 PM, BGB wrote:
> 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 key-mappings)
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 have
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
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
>To: F
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 wrote:
> Alan,
>
> "I would go way back to
On 3/14/2012 11:31 AM, Mack wrote:
On Mar 13, 2012, at 6:27 PM, BGB wrote:
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 hav
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.
On 2012-03-14, at 17:55, "Jecel Assumpcao Jr." wrote:
[...]
> I noticed that neither Matlab nor Mathematica are available for the
> iPad, but only simple terminal apps that allow you to access these
> applications running on your PC. What a waste!
>
> -- Jecel
Yep. Single most (and only) useful
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 id
On 3/14/2012 3:55 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
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 enough for this, and was extended in
On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 6:02 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
> 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 dialect using JS under the
You can get around the idea of ubiquity of languages if you're prepared to
build tiny easily understandable (in 5 minutes or less) micro languages.
Consider "how to use iOS touch" as if it were a language and how easy it is to
learn. Afterall, a user interface is simply a visual / behavioural la
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 s
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