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
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It’s common in the Twiterverse to run into JS developers who take umbrage at the slogan, “Don’t break the web.” Generally, there is something about JS that they don’t like and they think should be fixed, even if it is a breaking change. 1/
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But with experience, developers learn to think more about the context of the code. Why is it being created? How will it be used? Will it be updated? How will it be maintained? How long will it exist? 3/
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I also think web devs acceptance of breaking changes reflects that “web pages” exist along a large durability spectrum ranging from extremely long-lived to very short-lived/throw-away. Often the most long-lived are document-like and the throw-aways are web apps. 4/
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
not just pixels@getifyX
11 Jul 2020
in my talk, I propose one meta roll-up of all these sorts of settings: the "fidelity slider", an overlay that could hover over the address bar in demand. fidelity slider can default to high (right), but user could, per site, slide it left to medium or low fidelity.
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
Jonathan Korman 🟣@miniver
10 Jul 2020
I like that there is a silicone mold for making typewriter-shaped candy. I love that the copywriter was young enough to assume that this thing was an “antique telephone”, I guess with keys for sending antique texts. aliexpress.com/item/32706738…
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I love this heuristic.
Mathias Verraes@mathiasverraes
10 Jul 2020
1/11 A heuristic for evaluating a new idea/technology/method compared to an old one: Swap them. Imagine that NewThing has been the mainstream choice for the past 30y, and you just learned about OldThing for the first time.
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1/ For my HOPL JS History paper there wasn't enough space or time to write in depth about everything in ES2015/ES6. One of the topics that got only minimal coverage was Promises. @samccone comes to the rescue with this nice history of JS Promises samsaccone.com/posts/history…
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10/ In late 2013 and early 2014 there was much internal TC39 discussion about the details of the Promise API. In particular there was considerable disagreement about whether or not the promises would be monadic. That is still controversial. ecma-international.org/archi…
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11/11 The inclusion of Promises in the ES6 spec. was successful in avoiding a web platform specific promise design. ES6 publication slipped by 6 months to June 2015 but Promises weren't the cause.
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Perhaps "True JS"
@brianleroux@indieweb.social 💙@brianleroux
9 Jul 2020
Taken to describing the way I author as "pure JS" as a counter to "modern JS". The former is standards based and backwards compatible. The latter is non standard dialects dependant on bigco compiler chains which ship breaking changes and suffer resulting ecosystem thrash.
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This is so accurate. The only thing worse than trying to do business with large companies is trying to do business with governments.
John O'Nolan
@JohnONolan
30 Jun 2020
The complete enterprise software sales playbook, a comprehensive guide to the expected process when a big co wants to buy your app: [A thread 👇] Email 1: Hello, I have not a single clue what your product does, and I have not read your website - do you have some sort of PDF?
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