Dreaming the future of software; Project Editor ECMAScript 2015; Reformed Smalltalker JavaScript historian dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.114… @allenwb@mastodon.social
Sherwood Oregon USA
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- Following 218
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
The Mastodon protocol doesn't please me, but I've never stopped offering an RSS feed. :)
jackrusher.com/journal/homes…
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
More bullish than ever on RSS after reading this post on ActivityPub macwright.com/2022/12/09/act…
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I'm turning some of my Twitter threads into blog posts to preserve them (note that the tweet quote in the first tweet of the following thread is no longer available).
I'm starting with one of my favorites which is now a blog post at wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/…
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Love it! Great work.
I cut my professional teeth designing these sort of bit twiddling optimizations.
Whether you are running on a 16-bit, 32-bit processor, or on a 64-bit pocket super computer—sometimes every bit and ever cycle matters.
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Commemorating an important event in Oregon history.
(The rarely seen full length version)
#OTD in 1970, the Oregon Highway Division consulted with the U.S. Navy and decided the best way to dispose of a whale carcass was to blow it up with a 1/2 ton of dynamite. The explosion caused blubber to rain down on spectators for over a 1/4 of a mile. The TV segment is classic.
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A great preliminary review/analysis of @bluesky's AT Protocol.
We need more people doing public tech reviews written at this level of competence.
Now up: A first look at @bluesky's AT Protocol for distributed social networking
First impression: I could do with less protocol detail and more architecture. I am left with a lot of open questions about how this is going to actually work.
educatedguesswork.org/posts/…
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"Beyond the Bleeps & Bloops:
Narrative, Multi-Sensory, and Social Approaches to
Communicating Data with Sound"
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I really like the terminology "personal software" and hence "personal programming/programmer". Much better than "end-user programming" or Mary Shaw's "vernacular software developer" which nobody will ever self-identify as. I hope to see "personal software" etc gain traction.
super excited to share my work with @geoffreylitt @paulsonnentag @mschoening on malleable software! an exploration of what personal software and tools might look like, with text documents as the substrate.
inkandswitch.com/potluck/
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Intriguing, a Hypercard near clone built using modern tech:
"Decker is a multimedia platform for creating and sharing interactive documents, with sound, images, hypertext, and scripted behavior."
Appears highly approachable and hackable. MIT license.
beyondloom.com/decker/index.…
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
For original source material on MVC see
folk.universitetetioslo.no/t…
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The quoted tweet shows what appears to the guts of a PDP-8/I, circa 1968, a TTL based machine. The original PDP-8, circa 1965, was larger and used discrete transistor logic.
The mass of circuit boards that was an original PDP-8 minicomputer from the 1960s was replaced with a single IC - the HD6120 - in 1981. Today you can run a faithful PDP-8 emulation on a Raspberry Pi 3 without breaking a sweat :) (apart from finding a Pi in stock).
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In other words, what I call a "Personal Digital Habitat"...
Sometimes you get tired of columns, panels, & tiles, crammed into a single app window.
Sometimes you just need more windows & a workspace.
Sometimes you need more than one PKM app trying to do everything.
You need a suite of apps working together.
You need a PKM OS ...
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Excellent talk explaining the essence of "live programming" and why most programming should happen in live programming environments.
Highly recommended.
My talk from @strangeloop_stl is out! There will soon be a mini-site with a transcript, references, and a few additional notes and corrections.
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A thread on why we should be designing software that supports human agency
I think this paragraph says something very important. "Small acts of transformation are among the most human things we do."
If we remove too many obstacles from life, there's nothing left. The process is where we become alive.
(from An Everlasting Meal, by Tamar Adler)
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This reminds me how primitive UNIX (V6) felt when I first encountered it in the late 1970s. At the time I had used many systems, large and small, but TOPS-1O (DEC PDP-10 Timeshare OS) was my favorite and a joy to use. UNIX user experience was so bad it was almost unusable.
"It is very important never to forget the technological context of UNIX: a text-only OS for a tiny, already obsolete […] minicomputer. […] Dumb text terminals, which is why the obsession with text files being piped to other text files" liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org…
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