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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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
Containers are a pale imitation of the Smalltalk "image." If I loaded an image I burned to CD in the 1990s, my cursor would be at the same point, variables would be the same values, the program paused at the same debugging point. Trick was that CDs were sometimes not big enough!
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It's not really a matter of choice. For most programmers, language selection is dictated by the environment they work within. Those of us who design/impl PLs are in privileged positions. We need to be highly emphatic with users in our design decisions.
IMO, there are many non-simple PLs with millions of programmers. (Java, JS, Swift, etc) If you agree, how do explain their popularity? I would posit that their users must feel served by those PLs because they use them. Perhaps those millions think differently than we?
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
i want there to be one line of code that i can put in my program that finds what other copies of itself are around (whether on my phone, on my other laptop, on other people's phones and laptops in the room, on my Raspberry Pis, etc) and hooks up w them
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Almost every popular programming language, mainstream developer tool, and desktop "productivity" application fit this criteria. And there are very few incentives for creating something better to replace them.
What software programs do you still use today because even though they're old and outdated they feel familiar and cozy to you?
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
Come to Berlin and join the first academic conference on Local-First Software!
Our Workshop on Programming Language Support for Local-first Software is looking for submissions: 2022.ecoop.org/home/plf-2022. Deadline: 01.04.! Join us at ECOOP in Berlin on the 6th & 7th of June!
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Why runtime check of typescript or similar type systems is a bad idea. 🧵
Implementing static type checking in the runtime environments would be a bad idea even if our industry does standardize on a specific static type system. This is because the type checking of code would not be performed until the code is executed. All branches of it. ➡️
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The new “types as comments” for ECMAScript proposal is generating a lot of discussion. It allows JS to host "pluggable type systems”.
@Gilad_Bracha originated the pluggable types concept 20 years ago.
For background see:
bracha.org/pluggableTypesPos…
bracha.org/pluggable-types.p…
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I’m seeing speculation about Microsoft’s motives behind the “types as comments” proposal. Note that msft is one of three companies co-championing the proposal.
The original idea (and I gather much of the proposal writing) came from @giltayar who does not work for msft
I'd like to thank @littledan who first saw the rant about transpilation in my JSDoc Typings blog post (gils-blog.tayar.org/posts/js…), and approached me with the idea of writing the proposal together.
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
By now, some of you may have heard about the new proposal to be suggested to the TC39 committee. This innocent sounding title is for a proposal that suggests adding some level of typing to the JavaScript language.
github.com/giltayar/proposal…
🧵
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I consider myself to be a dynamic language peep, but if I was still active on TC39 I’d be advocating for this proposal. It appears practical, technically solid, respects technical diversity, and doesn’t break the web (or TypeScript).
Well done!
ECMAScript excitement 😉
A new TC39 proposal for optional type syntax in JavaScript 🎉
"Types as Comments" means that type annotations would be fully ignored by JavaScript engines.
Thanks to @giltayar for creating this proposal 👍
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
We need to create systems of governance that really empower the people, not try to con them into a safe sanitized feeling of power. As a child of the 60s I still have the dream, but I don’t think many of my generation remember.
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Probably worth noting that BCPL was also the "high level" language used at Xerox PARC in the early years of the Alto.
BCPL was incredibly portable and often used to bootstrap new systems. BCPL compilers took less than 16 kb of space. This was still more than twice the size of the PDP-7 minimum working memory. So Bell Labs tasked Thompson and Ritchie with making BCPL even *smaller*.
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
"It turns out that this definition has been used extensively for over half a century, even though it doesn't make sense, copied and modified from one source to another."
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
François Girard, the local head of PR at IBM France, asked his former letter teacher Jacques Perret (a philologist at The Sorbonne) a proper word to replace “computer”. He coined “ordinateur”, a theologian term meaning "The one who put the things in the right order".
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Early computing historical precedent—use of * for multiplication and ** for exponentation date back at least mid-1950s FORTRAN. That was the punch card era with a very limited set of available characters. No ^ which came along in 1970s.
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The availability of ^ created a dilemma for language designers. Follow the FORTRAN precedent or use the arguably more descriptive ^ character. Different language designers made different choices.
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