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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I thought from the beginning that 500k sounded very bogus
Oregon initially said 500,000 people had been evacuated because of wildfires. The numbers didn’t add up -- and the state backtracked. So only 40k or so Oregonians displaced oregonlive.com/news/2020/09/…
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This is what I thought the ES6 plan was for Annex B. But, it turned out the builders (and non-browser platform adopters) of browser derived engines weren't interested.
See reply threads for:
Unpopular opinion? Instead of TC39 moving legacy features out of Annex B into the main specification, let's migrate legacy features into Annex B instead. We can start with sloppy mode.
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
Just got back from a run in the snow and I can attest that this early-September Colorado storm did not disappoint! #cowx
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Just learned that Butler Lampson has a new modern version of his classic "Hints for computer system design". (Actually, both a short and a long version.)
A must read for developers of complex software/hardware systems.
dropbox.com/sh/4cex542zznbjh…
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Alex points us to the origin story of software design patterns. I remember one Monday at Tek Labs when @WardCunningham showed me one of Christopher Alexander's books that he had found at @Powells and wondered if its ideas would work for software.
I had no idea this is how design patterns started wiki.c2.com/?HistoryOfPatter…. This gives me more context for my conversations with @metayoda and @rebeccawb.
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BTW, wiki.c2.com is the very first wiki. Lots of raw material about the evolution of software development in the late 90s and early 2000s.
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RT @getify: What if writing code was more like the gentle art of tending a delicate garden, instead of machete-hacking your way through an…
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Another Hacker News thread about @Gilad_Bracha’s Smalltalk history blog post from last spring.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id… (My response to Gilad is at wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/… )
Many of the comments display an appalling lack of knowledge of the history of programming langs.
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Smalltalk wasn’t created to rule the software world, it was created to enable the invention of a new (personal computing) software world. As such it was a tremendous success.
nitter.catsarch.com/awbjs/status/126679909…
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Many of the foundation technologies of the personal computing era were motivated as steps towards the vision captured in this 1972 Alan Kay sketch.
What's a sketch that captures a compelling positive vision for the next 30 years of our digitally enhanced lives?
ALT Two kids outside on grass using Alan Kay’s Dynabooks
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You should write-up such failures! Negative results are also valuable.
Here's the kicker... all this coding is based on a theory for a product/experience that cannot really be tested easily. I'm only just now *about* to be able to test it out and see if it works.
It's sorta binary... if it fails, I'll basically have to just throw out all this work.
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A nice overview thread explaining the @agoric vision from @marksammiller
Hi @balajis , after reframing "protocol", I'll explain how we're doing exactly that. Our "Capability-based
Financial Instruments" erights.org/elib/capability/…
explains how a general distributed object protocol + language replace "protocol design" with API design. From abstract: 1/
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Anybody else notice the irony of this "update" being communicated via the also defunded Mozilla Hacks blog.
”An Update on MDN Web Docs”
hacks.mozilla.org/2020/08/an…
– Platform: “The core engineering team will continue to run the MDN site and Mozilla will continue to develop the platform.”
– Content (writing staff was laid off): “we are working on a plan to keep the content up to date.”
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
I think they actually did not. I remain convinced OO never actually happened. That most people do neither OO nor FP but actually imperative/procedural prog and they do it in almost any language
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Interesting interactive thread on the roots of “agile” software dev
This is the sort of historical revisionism and weak reporting that seriously pisses me off. Sutherland did not invent Scrum in the 80s, Scrum is not the founder of agile, there were 17 people involved, etc etc. That HBR is passing this along is seriously bad history/reporting
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
Oh hey I found my opening slide for Intro to Media Studies...
ALT A set of nested Tumblr comments: Do you kids today even understand why podcasts are called podcasts? Well you see kids, almost 20 years ago Apple produced a portable audio player called --- wait I need to go back further. Okay, so in the 20th century the new inventions of radio and television were known as broadcast media --- no, wait, that's not really the start either. Broadcasting originally refers to throwing, or casting, handfuls of seeds onto prepared ground, typically used with grain crops, which, uh... ... the agricultural revolution, which began circa 10,000 BCE in the Levant, was when humans began preserving seeds for replanting...
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