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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Unicorn hunters killed the real tech industry
Sort of wish the "tech" industry had spent the last 15 years developing new technology instead of doing regulatory arbitrage and intentionally poisoning our brains, because nothing works and almost every part of the online experience has gotten worse
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Collaborative multi-person editing is actually a pretty rare use case. I wish that much of the technical energy that is directed towards it was instead directed towards creating personal multi-device integration—a Personal Digital Habitat
wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/…
I just don’t find 17 cursors mutating different parts of the same document simultaneously to be all that more effective than one person having control at a time (or every person having their own sub document), and it’s not like it solves 2 people making actual conflicting edits.
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Only 50%. The other 50% is looking beyond the last 10 year's ruts for new solutions (some of which may be old abandoned ideas) that will work in a new context. [Subtweeting a thread on the role of "experience" in development]
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"[Safari] it's the new Netscape 4."
"Meanwhile it is Chrome that is the new IE, but in reverse."
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
If you are like me in that you grew up in the Linux/UNIX/OpenSource world and never wrote code over in Microsoft land: read @stevesi’s Hardcore Software.
Tales from another world - that put everything I know into perspective.
So good.
hardcoresoftware.learningbys…
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This is scary...if people are growing up with mental models where "documents" are subordinate to "apps" then the app itself becomes a walled garden. No user concepts/expectations of interchange/interoperability/competitive implementations of standard doc formats?
I suspect there are some conceptions that students hold, based on current computer usage, that are impeding students from developing the file/directory mental model...
...and I am sufficiently old that I cannot even guess how this might work.
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Object-oriented design/programming has been widely mischaracterized as primarily being about building inheritance hierarchy. Rebecca’s classic book explains that where object’s actually excel is in providing structure and conceptual clarity for complex software systems.
Our classic OOD book, Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities, and Collaborations is available for free to download as a pdf from Pearson's website ( they've graciously made this available). You can download it at informit.com/promotions/obje… and share w/ students
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
THINK LIKE AN EPIDEMIOLOGIST:
The CDC’s recent announcement that the Delta variant has an average reproductive number of 6-9 has a lot of people concerned & many are asking me about whether this means we need COVID boosters.
Let’s talk through the math of how we might decide!
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
Shout it from the rooftops:
“There was something else that bothered me about that tweet. There was an unspoken assumption that the web is built by professional web developers. That gave me a cold chill.”
THIS is why we don’t casually break the web.
adactio.com/journal/18337
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Want to build a professional quality programming language interpreter? Bob gives you all the nitty-gritty!
I wish we had many more books of this quality that explored in depth various other kinds of complex programs.
Today is the day! Crafting Interpreters is available for purchase in print, Kindle, ebook, and PDF! Behold: craftinginterpreters.com/
It took a lot longer than I expected, but it's all done now. So long that I wrote a blog post about it: journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2…
🎉📖🎉📖🎉📖🎉📖🎉
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Preliminary videos of all the HOPL-IV (History of Programming Languages) presentations/Q&A including “JavaScript: the first 20 years” are now publicly available at pldi21.org/track_hopl.html
(To find links to the papers click on the titles)
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It looks like @Paul_Rony is trying to create Personal Digital Habitats, wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/…
Grids of icons now represented our digital « homes », gating our data behind thicker walls. The OS got weaponized as a platform. We’ve got to create a new place for « the rest of us » as a personal computer company once said.
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
A sad aspect of subscription software is how you’re almost necessarily making things that can’t last. Software has always struggled with ephemerality, but subscriptions are condemned to die with their owner (person or co.). I want to make things that have a shot of outliving me.
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
What's the max you would consider paying for 100 years of "guarenteed" domain registration and serving 10GB of static content?
11%
Not interested
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$100
50%
$1000
17%
$10,000
66 votes • Final results
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