"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana, who, in his Reason in Common Sense, The Life of Reason, Vol.1
This certainly rings true in computer science. Great things were done in the 60s and 70s which we seem to ignore. The Burroughs machines B5000 ..., SketchPad, Smalltalk, Self, ... I am always amazed that microcomputers revisted all the sins of computers and minicomputers (segmented memory, ...), and newer software seems to be just a new layering of jargon. Good design requires a good knowledge of history, great design needs more. Fonc appears to be a refreshing in depth look at what we are doing. David On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 9:25 AM, Igor Stasenko <siguc...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 25 July 2011 17:01, Dethe Elza <de...@livingcode.org> wrote: > > > > On 2011-07-25, at 12:47 AM, Alan Kay wrote: > > > >> For example, some of our next version of Etoys for children could be > done in JS, but not all -- e.g. the Kedama massively parallel programmable > particle system made by Yoshiki cannot be implemented to run fast enough in > JS. It needs something much faster and lower level -- and this something has > not existed until the Chrome native client (and this only in Chrome which is > only about 11% penetrated). > > > > You don't have to wait for Chrome Native Client to have native levels of > performance. Most of the current crop of browsers (i.e. not IE) use tracing > JIT compilers to get close to native performance (in this experiment writing > a CPU emulator in JS, one emulated instruction took approximately 20 native > instructions: > http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/11/implementing_a.html). > Javascript is fast and getting faster, with array operations coming soon and > Web Workers for safe parallelism (purely message-based threads) available > now. > > > > You can play 3D shooters, edit video, synthesize audio, and run Linux on > an emulated CPU in Javascript. I'm not sure what part of that is not fast > enough. > > > > Some of it is cruft and some of it is less than elegant. But having > higher level primitives (like what SVG and Canvas provide) isn't all bad. > > > > But don't you see a problem: > it evolving from simple 'kiddie' scripting language into a full > fledged system. > > It is of course a good direction and i welcome it. But how different > our systems would be, if guys who started it 20 years back would think > a bit about future? > Why all those "emerging" technologies is just reproducing the same > which were available for desktop apps for years? > Doesn't it rings a bell that it is something fundamentally wrong with > this technology? > > > > > -- > Best regards, > Igor Stasenko AKA sig. > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
