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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Nice thread by @geoffreylitt, read it! He's one of a wave of thinkers/developers exploring next generation platforms and UX models. One issue is what does "local-first" mean when we (the users) have multiple "devices" that we constantly switch between.
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I'm super impressed by the approach @craftdocsapp is taking to data ownership.
At the same time, I think they're hitting the limits of modern data storage platforms, and hinting at precisely why we need a new kind of "collaborative filesystem".
Quick thread to explain:
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When I was a kid, I had a "Kenner's Hydro-Dynamic Building Set No. 11" which has a supporting role in @MrAlanCooper's excellent piece. It was great. Perhaps I would have become a chem process engineer if I hadn't stumbled into computing a couple years latter.
I just discovered that @MrAlanCooper did a nifty gloss on this tweetrant of mine about UXD
medium.theuxblog.com/ux-desi…
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So cool. After 20 years of minor polishing of ideas and tools developed in 80s-90s we are again seeing people innovation in these areas. Very exciting.
What is to reading what a word processor is to writing?
Here's a quick demo of a syntax exploder in honor of Doug Engelbart, father of 🐉 demos, who called similar dreams “parsing processors”.
The text is the first paragraph of Doug’s 1962 framework dougengelbart.org/content/vi…
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25 years ago, this was becoming a mainstream app design principle. Then it was largely forgotten as most of us focused on hacking "the web" into what we have today. Modern platforms are at least as capable as what we had then—it makes sense to revisit such forgotten ideas.
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
A tweet is about 1kb of memory*. All of the pictured things can store one tweet:
Two Babbage Analytical Engines
37 punch cards
A Russian woven electronic core memory module
This hard drive built inside Minecraft
*280 characters of up to 4 eight byte octets each in UTF-8.
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New discovery–a history of browsers and web dev. Look very well done. Can't wait for more additions to this series.
New @webdevhistory post! This took me a few weeks, as we're getting into complex territory in #webdev from 1997 onwards. Web apps were the new battleground for Netscape & Microsoft; each had a different component model and definition of “dynamic” HTML. webdevelopmenthistory.com/19…
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A realization I had nearly 20 years ago was that there are many conceptual similarities between Smalltalk virtual images and the entire Web/Internet at scale
From a 2014 talk "A Modular Journey To A World Spanning Virtual Image"
wirfs-brock.com/allen/talks/…
youtu.be/9ZKr2KRrID8
Smalltalk with fine grained late-bound objects gets to the interesting problems early. I'd say it's not a solution but rather a better problem description. How do we make late binding work better, where to draw boundaries, how to seal subsystems, change meta levels, evolve, etc.
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BTW, this tweat is in response to @chatur_shalabh
Smalltalk with fine grained late-bound objects gets to the interesting problems early. I'd say it's not a solution but rather a better problem description. How do we make late binding work better, where to draw boundaries, how to seal subsystems, change meta levels, evolve, etc.
Very Interesting
Microsoft Power FX
Can Excel evolve into a rich, live, fairly general purpose application development canvas?
There have been various research attempts at such things, but this time it is something that msft seems to be taking seriously
powerapps.microsoft.com/en-u…
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Oregon will fix vaccine scheduling by Monday. Possible implementation of specification:
Somebody will occasionally drive from Salem to the Portland carrying a thumb drive containing an Excel spreadsheet with names and contact info. It will be delivered to the call center. 🤷🏻♂️
🌲🏃♀️🦉🌲
I got attacked by an owl on my #trailrun today. It swooped down and grabbed my ponytail with its talons. It pursued me and swooped down 2 more times. I spent the next mile running backwards + flailing a stick around my head in defense... How's your Thursday going?
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allfororegon.org the state mandated covid vac schedule site for Portland metro area is the worse imagineable site under load.
After picking a supposedly available time, you have to do so much BS (captcha, etc) that the time is becomes unavailable.
10+ attempts,total fail
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(actually all4oregon.org)
Site opened at 9:00 am
couldn’t get through to an actual scheduling page until 9:45.
Then 10+ bait and fail time selections until about 10:15. When its announces there are no more slots. Try again next Monday.
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
You either die an employee or work long enough to see yourself turn into a consultant
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One of the great achievements in computer design. Hardware pound/shilling/pence arithmetic.
50 years ago this month, the UK switched to decimal currency. Before that, there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound. This was inconvenient for computers, but the IBM 1401's Sterling currency option implemented pounds, shillings, and pence math in hardware.
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
I guess "scope chain" may be the concept coming from Lisp interpreter. Some PL paper use this term, but only JS spread this term by including it in the spec, though it have been removed in ES3.1 draft on Nov 2008.
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
I know.
It could've scaled. Seriously good sw...built from the ground up! Written lovingly in Pascal (which the compiler was written by Allen Wirfs-Brock and Paul McCullough). Then he moved on to Smalltalk and Tek Labs...
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