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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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
Datamation was the leading trade magazine of the IT/EDP side if computing throughout the '60s, '70s, and well into the '80S. I suspect some of the first uses of "legacy" applications/software is to be found in its articles and advertisements.
bitsavers.org/magazines/Data…
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Does that mean it will use decimal arithmetic?
Exclusive: Google plans to spend several billion dollars to build a quantum computer by 2029 in hopes of performing large-scale business calculations without errors >>> wsj.com/articles/google-aims…
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They gave everybody a year to read the long papers, but the (virtual) History of Programming Languages (HOPL IV) is just a month away.
Program: hopl4.sigplan.org/program/pr…
Registratio bundled with PLDI at pldi21.sigplan.org/attending…
Be sure to check HOPL on page 2 when registering
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A thought from 2019...
BTW, I just came up with the term “Heirloom Software/Systems”. Really like it.
Has anybody else used heirloom in this context?
I’ve been looking for something better term than “legacy” especially for significant software that grappled with (and perhaps solved) “modern” problems.
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This gets my old asm-coded VM hacker juices flowing. One might of thought that 64-bit architectures had freed us from memory segmentation/unnecessary indirection concerns.
But lack of direct 64-bit calls & Spectra mitigations means it isn't so. 😪
v8.dev/blog/short-builtin-ca…
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
Personal computing was conceived to be personal. Personal, as in experiencing computation the way it fits you. Your context should come first and dictate what is interesting. The experience should follow.
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Where a paper becomes a book! Thank you, Yifeng, for proposing and and then doing a great job on thus project.
The first book I translated, JavaScript the First 20 Years by @awbjs and @BrendanEich, is now published! Thanks @awbjs for providing the preface for the Chinese version! #javascript #history
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Wow...extremely cool historical artifacts
Bill Atkinson's Polaroids documenting the design and development of the Apple Lisa user interface.
(more at folklore.org/StoryView.py?pr…)
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
Nice, I'll take a closer look at Wildcard.
But, would anybody use it? A basic problem seems to be that most end-users aren't tinkerers. Even awareness and use of basic app settings is relatively rare.
Perhaps if we started at a young age to educate everyone to tinker, sigh.
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But, the component maintenance problem is huge. Is a model the results in maintenance-free components imaginable?
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Re reusable components, OpenDoc failure, etc.
A contrary perspective, both models have become so ubiquitous we don't even recognize them as such: Foss libraries, JS NPM packages, web
widgets...
No exactly opendoc or Brad Cox Software IC model. True green field dev is now rare
The 90s hype-model was "create something so that it that's reusable by others!". Flawed incentive-wise, especially outside big corporations.
Need to drive the other way: "re-use something someone else made earlier!", i.e. demand no buy-in. Hardly any technology takes this line.
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
In January 2020, @jordanwb and I needed to express what it felt like to be enveloped by media. And we gave ourselves the task of using sound to express the feeling. 1/3
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Allen Wirfs-Brock retweeted
There was so much brutality in the #Cocodona250, but also so much beauty. Ben Zeiger captured what might be *the* photo of my race while pacing me: This is ~ mile 163, leaving #sedonaarizona @Cocodona250 @AravaipaRunning
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Sure why not include a 2000 ft climb in the last 10 miles of a 255 mile foot race 🤷🏼 (note topo lines and 9000+ ft summit)
The first runner finished about 30 hours ago. These are in the top 35 or so out of 175 starters.
@jordanwb @Cocodona250
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It's timesharing reborn! Only somebody who didn't live through the timesharing era would think this was a good idea. I remember getting billed $$$ per month per user. It will happen again.
docs.github.com/en/codespace…
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I strongly believe in the value to society produced by such "labs". Unfortunately, after about 1990 short-term focused corporations largely abandoned that innovation model. Attempts to recreate have generally been unsuccessful. I wish @Ben_Reinhardt the best of luck.
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