Allen Wirfs-Brock@awbjs

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
wirfs-brock.com/allen
Joined June 2010
384 Photos and videos
Load newest
Mostly based upon interviews with application developers using Smalltalk at Tektronix. This was the early days of OOP, prior to widespread use of C++. Some background history of Smalltalk at Tektronix wirfs-brock.com/allen/files/…
Jack Rusher@jackrusher
7 Aug 2022
The Smalltalk community getting the software development process right in 1988. Meanwhile, many in industry and government are still *committed* to getting it wrong today. :(
4
11
An architectural vision of a "redecentralized" web. Enticing, pragmatic, plausible...
This tweet is unavailable
4
7
"No-code" has been a recurring marketing slogan since the early days of computing (eg, COBOL, report generators, etc). At best, it obscures useful innovation. At its worse it discredits innovation. Jonathan leads an insightful discussion thread...
Jonathan Edwards
@jonathoda
6 Apr 2020
Why no-code is uninteresting in 1 tweet. No game-changing inventions. Just design tradeoffs between generality & simplicity looking for market fit. The long tail of software makes that hard. Monetization entails self-defeating customer lock-in. Move along, nothing to see here.
3
7
34
Surprise, in 2022 the same HTML can generate both highly interactive web content and nicely formatted printable PDFs Using @paged_js we now have nice PDFs for both the ECMAScript Language Spec (ecma-international.org/wp-co…) and I18N spec (ecma-international.org/wp-co…) back story 1/
2
6
31
more replies
So, when the 2022 editions of the ECMAScript specifications were released in mid June it only took me about a week and a half to turn them into publishable PDFs. Not bad for two documents totaling almost 1000 pages. Thanks @paged_js for existing! 11/
1
5
The next challenge will be to see how much of the Paged CSS conversion work can be automated as a new edition of these specifications are released every year. I think much of it can. But, the "artistic" part of pagination is likely to still need some human intervention. 12/12
1
1
5
JWST's embedded software includes an implementation of a very early version of JavaScript (roughly corresponding to the 1st edition of the 1987 ECMAScript standard). It was developed by a small company named Nombas. brent-noorda.com/nombas/us/i…
Michael Nielsen
@michael_nielsen
12 Jul 2022
Replying to @michael_nielsen
Also: the JWST runs a proprietary version of Javascript 3 (!!!) made by a bankrupt company(!) stsci.edu/~idash/pub/dashevs…
3
7
16
Oops, I meant 1997
Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
Allen Wirfs-Brock@awbjs
10 Jul 2022
Replying to @Gilad_Bracha @jackrusher @jonathoda
Open tech ecological niches often get filled via "Worse is Better" selection. And once filled are very difficult to displace. WiB is a point-in-time judgement influenced by then current environmental factors. Those factors change with time but original selection is locked in.
2
9
They really were. I remember use a magnetic viewer to see the individual bits on 9-track tapes. Surprisingly large. blog.adafruit.com/2020/03/01…
This tweet is unavailable
1
1
Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
Allen Wirfs-Brock@awbjs
28 Jun 2022
Replying to @austin_malerba @hot_town
The ECMAScript spec actually does define the enumeration order for properties. See 262.ecma-international.org/1… and 262.ecma-international.org/1…
1
1
1
Load more