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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A good source of info about the period of peak commercial Smalltalk development and use is the Smalltalk Report. It was the newsletter followed by insiders and enthusiasts:
1991-1995 issues: sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/TheSm…
1996 issues:
macqueen.us/stIndex.html
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
HOPL-I 1978
dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/…
FORTAN, ALGOL, COBOL, Simula, early LISP etc.
HOPL-II 1993
dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/1…
Lisp, Smalltalk, Forth, C, C++, Ada, etc.
HOPL-III 2007
dl.acm.org/action/doSearch?A…
Lua, Erlang, Self, AppleScript, Haskell, etc.
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The ACM Digital Library as taken down its paywall through June 30. If you are interest in the history of programming language this would be a great time to retrieve papers from past HOPLs.
dl.acm.org/
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In the mid-80s new Smalltalk business would make themselves known by print advertising. A common experience several of us had was getting a call from the CIA the 1st day our ad appeared! Why?
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For a more complete description of Smalltalk-72 see the 137 page Smalltalk-72 Instruction Manual.
archive.org/details/bitsaver…
This document is from March 1976 but is really about their 1st generation system. In 1976 they were designing the 3rd gen of Smalltalk.
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The 3rd generation was Smalltalk-76. It was more like "modern" Smalltalks except that blocks weren't yet fully developed and it still used some of the odd glyphs.
Here is the very rare 1977 "Smalltalk[-76] Kernel Language Manual" by Larry Tesler:
archive.org/details/bitsaver…
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seem like contemporaneous parallel developments:
publications.csail.mit.edu/l…
mirrorservice.org/sites/www.…
mirrorservice.org/sites/www.…
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I’ve been spending the last week or so starting to dig out of a 2½ year backlog of interesting stuff I’ve ignored while working on the JavaScript history paper. Several more weeks worth in the queue.
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They really aren’t very comparable. Either in form or maturity. The ST87 docs are really draft proposals for a pretty imprecise 80s style prose spec. In TC39 terms, they would probably be Stage 1 level proposals that still need to have algorithmic specs developed.
So it would be interesting for you to contrast this work in a blog post with the ECMAScript language specification techniques...with examples..
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Another surprise for Smalltalk history buffs: The long lost and forgotten Smalltalk-1987 language specification
wirfs-brock.com/allen/things…
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
Just how wild is the stock market going? I made this #sonification of the Dow Jones so you can hear the sounds of a volatile stock market. In this video, I deconstruct the what the sounds mean and tell you how to listen: youtu.be/wR_lvXAlNMM
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Sone goodies for Smalltalk history buffs. Here are the manuals for Methods, Digitalk’s first product and the predecessor to Smalltalk/V.
wirfs-brock.com/allen/files/…
wirfs-brock.com/allen/files/…
You can see a 1985 ad for Methods here: books.google.com/books?id=uq…
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oops, the second link was bogus. It should be
wirfs-brock.com/allen/files/…
It links to the Methods Environment Guide manual
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Methods (followed by Smalltalk/V) was the first commercially successful Smalltalk product that was development independently of any Xerox provided code. It ran on a 512K IBM PC.
Of course, it was inspired by the Byte Magazine articles written by the Xerox folks.
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Not totally surprised but still blown away by the interest in our JavaScript: The First 20 Years history “paper”. Here are the stats for the 5 days since we released the preprint at
zenodo.org/record/3707007 .
@BrendanEich
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It’s done, the preprint of
JavaScript: the First 20 Years
by Allen Wirfs-Brock and Brendan Eich is now available.
You can start with the “making of” blog post wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/…
Or just plunge in and start reading at zenodo.org/record/3707008
@BrendanEich
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