here are lots of ways to approach fast-enough implementation
(including making new hardware or using FPGAs, etc.)
Cheers,
Alan
>________
> From: Loup Vaillant-David
>To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals of New Computing
>
>Cc: karl ramberg
>Sent: Mo
x27;t confuse the two desires.
I.e. if we were to attempt an ultra high level general purpose language today,
we wouldn't use Squeak or any other Smalltalk as a model or a starting place.
Cheers,
Alan
>________
> From: karl ramberg
>To: Alan Kay ; Fundament
It's worth noting that this was the scheme at PARC and was used heavily later
in Etoys.
This is why Smalltalk has unlimited numbers of "Projects". Each one is a
persistant environment that serves both as a place to make things and as a
"page" of "desktop media".
There are no apps, only objec
Check out "Smallstar" by Dan Halbert at Xerox PARC (written up in a PARC
"bluebook")
Cheers,
Alan
From: John Carlson
To: Fundamentals of New Computing
Sent: Monday, September 9, 2013 3:47 PM
Subject: Re: [fonc] Software Crisis (was Re: Final STEP progress r
Kenneth Clarke once remarked that "People in the Middle Ages were as
passionately interested in truth as we are, but their sense of evidence was
very different".
Marshall McLuhan said "I can't see it until I believe it"
Neil Postman once remarked that "People today have to accept twice as much
______
From: Paul Homer
To: Alan Kay
Cc: Fundamentals of New Computing
Sent: Sunday, September 8, 2013 7:34 AM
Subject: Re: [fonc] Final STEP progress report abandoned?
Hi Alan,
I agree that there is, and probably will always be, a necessity to 'think
outside of the box'
atly.
Best wishes,
Alan
____
From: Paul Homer
To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals of New Computing
; Fundamentals of New Computing
Sent: Saturday, September 7, 2013 12:24 PM
Subject: Re: [fonc] Final STEP progress report abandoned?
Hi Alan,
I can't predict what will come, but I definitely
Yes, the "communication with aliens" problem -- in many different aspects -- is
going to be a big theme for VPRI over the next few years.
Cheers,
Alan
From: Tristan Slominski
To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals of New Computing
Sent: Tuesday, September
ood visions will
often help "problem finding" which can then be the context for picking actual
goals).
And most of my time right now is being spent in extending environments for
research.
Cheers
Alan
From: Kevin Driedger
To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals o
4:44 AM
Subject: Re: [fonc] Final STEP progress report abandoned?
That's great news! We desperately need fresh air. As you know, the way a
problem is framed bounds its solutions. Do you already know what problems to
work on or are you soliciting proposals?
Jonathan
From: Alan Kay
Hi Dan
It actually got written and given to NSF and approved, etc., a while ago, but
needs a little more work before posting on the VPRI site.
Meanwhile we've been consumed by setting up a number of additional, and wider
scale, research projects, and this has occupied pretty much all of my tim
This is how Smalltalk has always treated its primitives, etc.
Cheers,
Alan
From: Casey Ransberger
To: Fundamentals of New Computing
Sent: Tuesday, July 30, 2013 1:22 PM
Subject: [fonc] Deoptimization as fallback
Thought I had: when a program hits an unhan
This was Xerox essentially following SONY (check out their Model 30 Word
Processor -- early 80s -- and the portable keyboard capture device that you
could get with it. I think SONY invented the 3.5" floppy for this machine).
The Xerox Sunrise came years later but is very similar to the portable
This is the essential benefit of a LINDA or some other kind of
publish-subscribe approach. Each object has two billboards, one stating what
they can do and the other what they need, etc.
The catch is how are these described (especially given that local tags have
only accidental global meaning).
rop.
Cheers,
Alan
>________
> From: Alan Kay
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing
>Sent: Friday, April 19, 2013 5:53 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] 90% glue code
>
>
>
>The only really good -- and reasonable accurate -- book about the history of
>Lick, ARP
The only really good -- and reasonable accurate -- book about the history of
Lick, ARPA-IPTO (no "D", that is went things went bad), and Xerox PARC is
"Dream Machines" by Mitchel Waldrop.
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Miles Fidelman
>To: Fundamentals of New Computin
today
is a lot smaller (and mostly stupider) than the ones that need to be dealt with
when trying for human to human or human to alien overlap.
Cheers,
Alan
>________
> From: David Barbour
>To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals of New Computing
>
>Sent: Thursda
similar to the idea that there are lots of
wonderful things in Biology that are out of scale with our computer
technologies. So we should find the things in both Bio and Anthro that will
help us think.
Cheers,
Alan
>____
> From: Jeff Gonis
>To: Alan K
Hi David
This is an interesting slant on a 50+ year old paramount problem (and one that
is even more important today).
Licklider called it the "communicating with aliens problem". He said 50 years
ago this month that "if we succeed in constructing the 'intergalactic network'
then our main prob
Bill is the son of Ralph Griswold of Snobol and Icon fame.
>
> From: John Carlson
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing
>Sent: Friday, April 12, 2013 8:38 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] CodeSpells. Learn how to program Java by writing spells
>for a 3D environment.
>
>
Yep, it had some good ideas.
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Francisco Garau
>To: "fonc@vpri.org"
>Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 12:51 AM
>Subject: [fonc] Old Boxer Paper
>
>It reminds me of scratch & etoys
>
>http://www.soe.berkeley.edu/boxer/20reasons.pdf
>
>- Fr
The first ~100 pages are still especially good as food for thought
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Duncan Mak
>To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals of New Computing
>
>Cc: "mo...@codetransform.com"
>Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2013 10:35 AM
>Su
>If anyone finds an electronic copy of Fisher's thesis I'd love to know
>>about it. My searches have been fruitless.
>>
>>Monty
>>
>>On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 10:04 AM, Alan Kay wrote:
>>...
>>
>>> Dave Fisher's thesis "A Cont
And of course, for some time there has been Croquet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project
... and its current manifestation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cobalt
These are based on Dave Reed's 1978 MIT thesis and were first implemented about
10 years ago at Viewpoints.
Besides all
My suggestion is to learn a little about biology and anthropology and media as
it intertwines with human thought, then check back in.
>
> From: Miles Fidelman
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing
>Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2013 5:56 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] D
Fundamentals of New Computing
>Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2013 4:58 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Design of web, POLs for rules. Fuzz testing nile
>
>Alan Kay wrote:
>>
>> Or you could look at the actual problem "a web" has to solve, which is to
>> present arbi
ducting
experiments on newly met systems).
>
>Yours,
>Barry
>
>
>On 02/14/2013 02:26 AM, Alan Kay wrote:
>Hi Thiago
>>
>>
>>I
think you are on a good path.
>>
>>
>>One
way to think about this problem is that the broker is a human
programmer who
Or the (earlier) Smalltalk Models Views Controllers mechanism which had a
dynamic language with dynamic graphics to allow quite a bit of flexibility with
arbitrary "models".
>
> From: David Harris
>To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals of New
Unit tests are just a small part of the kinds of description that could be used
and are needed.
>
> From: David Harris
>To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals of New Computing
>
>Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2013 7:39 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Te
Hi John
Or you could look at the actual problem "a web" has to solve, which is to
present arbitrary information to a user that comes from any of several billion
sources. Looked at from this perspective we can see that the current web design
could hardly be more wrong headed. For example, what i
e printer -- the printer would
>> then just print out the bit bin. This was known as PostScript when it came
>> out in the world.
>>
>> The "Trickles" idea from Cornell has much of the same flavor.
>>
>> One possible starting place is to notice that
One of the original reasons for "message-based" was the simple relativistic
one. What we decided is that trying to send messages to explicit receivers had
real scaling problems, whereas "receiving messages" is a good idea.
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Eugen Leitl
>
read-of-control, or small numbers of threads; while the Actor model
>led (perhaps not directly) to massive concurrency and Erlang? (I'm still
>waiting for something that looks like Smalltalk meets Erlang.)
>
>Cheers,
>
>Miles
>
>Alan Kay wrote:
>> Hi Miles
>>
ct oriented" would now seem to be very actor-like.
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Miles Fidelman
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing
>Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 11:05 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Terminology: "Object Oriented" vs "Message Oriented"
>
>
describe meanings and match on meanings
-- and let there be not just matching (which is like a password) but
"negotiation", which is what a discovery agent does.
And so forth. I think this is a difficult but doable problem -- it's easier
than AI, but has some tinges of it.
Got
sp sense) is
>what gets you there:
>http://www.erlang.org/doc/getting_started/conc_prog.html
>
>
>
>
>
>
>On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 7:15 AM, Loup Vaillant wrote:
>
>This question was prompted by a quote by Joe Armstrong about OOP[1].
>>It is for Alan Kay, but I&
first Smalltalk was
really an exercise in "apply"
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: David Hussman
>To: 'Alan Kay' ; 'Fundamentals of New Computing'
>
>Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 8:36 AM
>Subject: RE: [fonc] Terminolog
ol Definition Language" CMU 1970 thesis. But then we got
overwhelmed by the excitement of being able to make personal computing on the
Alto. A few years later I decided that "sending messages" was not a good
scaling idea, and that something more general to get needed resources &qu
Looks nice to me!
But no ivory towers around to pillage. (However planting a few seeds is almost
always a good idea)
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Charles Perkins
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing
>Sent: Friday, February 8, 2013 3:52 PM
>Subject: [fonc] yet anot
Yes indeed, I quite agree with David.
One of the main points in the 2012 STEPS report (when I get around to finally
finishing it and getting it out) is exactly David's -- that it is a huge design
task to pull off a good DSL -- actually it is a double design task: you first
need to come up with
Sliding deadlines very often allow other pursuits to creep in ...
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Dale Schumacher
>To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals of New Computing
>
>Sent: Friday, January 4, 2013 8:59 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Final STEP progress report
It turns out that the "due date" is actually a "due interval" that starts Jan
1st and extends for a few months ... so we are working on putting the report
together amongst other activities ...
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Mathnerd314
>To: Fundamentals of New Comput
Alan
>
> From: David Barbour
>To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals of New Computing
>
>Sent: Wednesday, January 2, 2013 11:09 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Current topics
>
>
>On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 7:53 AM, Alan Kay wrote:
>
>As humans, w
The most recent discussions get at a number of important issues whose
pernicious snares need to be handled better.
In an analogy to sending messages "most of the time successfully" through noisy
channels -- where the noise also affects whatever we add to the messages to
help (and we may have im
Oh yes ... I'd forgotten that I'd given this paper to the 1401 restoration
group at the Computer History Museum (the 1401 was my first computer more than
50 years ago now -- it was "a bit odd" even relative to the more diverse
designs of its day)
http://ibm-1401.info/AlanKay-META-II.html
Cheer
of real thinking things through. He was able to demolish his own
accomplishments as well, so the destruction was total.
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Jarek Rzeszótko
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing
>Sent: Friday, November 16, 2012 6:59 AM
>Sub
Hi Carl
Just to keep on saying it ... the STEPS project had/has completely different
goals than the Smalltalk project -- STEPS really is a "science project" -- or a
collection of science projects -- that has never been aimed at a deployable
artifact, but instead is aimed at finding better and m
technique is quite different
from steel string jazz chops -- it's taken a while to unlearn some "spinal
reflexes" that were developed a lifetime ago.
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: John Zabroski
>To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals of New Computing
t not only feels very different physically, but
also mentally, and has many extra dimensions of nuance and color that is both
its charm, and also makes it quite a separate learning experience.
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Long Nguyen
>To: Alan Kay ;
f Paderborn and faculty and students were very hospitable,
and it was fun to help them dedicate the building.
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Eugen Leitl
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing
>Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 7:19 AM
>Subject: [fonc
ters, etc.)
The low level tasks replaced almost all the usual hardware on a normal
computer: disk and display and keyboard controllers, general I/O, even refresh
for the DRAM, etc.
This was a great design: about 160 MSI chips plus memory.
Cheers,
Alan
>_
Hi Jarek
I think your main point is a good one ... this is why I used to urge Smalltalk
programmers to initially stay away from the libraries full of features and just
use the kernel language as a "runnable pseudo-code" to sketch an outline of a
simple solution. As you say, this helps to gradua
Fonc bounced me on sending the Balzer doc directly, but here is the link at RAND
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2009/RM5772.pdf
A few more references below
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Alan Kay
>To: Fundamentals of New
(Hi Toby)
And don't forget that John McCarthy was one of the very first to try to
automatically compute inverses of functions (this grew out of his PhD work at
Princeton in the mid-50s ...)
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Toby Schachman
>To: Fundamentals of New Comp
d like to
>watch one for each one of you guys on this list ^^
>
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM1bNR4DmhU .:( Mom Loved Him Best - w/ Alan
>in the audience! ):.
>
>cheers*
>Jb
>
>Le 20 avr. 2012 à 03:20, Fernando Cacciola a écrit :
>
>> On Thu, Apr 19, 2
Well, part of it is that the 15 year old was exceptional -- his name is Steve
Putz, and as with several others of our children programmers -- such as Bruce
Horn, who was the originator of the Mac Finder -- became a very good
professional.
And that Smalltalk (basically Smalltalk-72) was quite ap
This is a good idea (and, interestingly, was a common programming style in the
first Simula) ...
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: David Barbour
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing
>Sent: Friday, April 13, 2012 11:03 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Ask For Forgiveness Programm
__
> From: John Zabroski
>To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals of New Computing
>
>Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 5:34 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Kernel & Maru
>
>
>By the way, I think you are referring to the work done by Reps's thesis
>advisor, Tim Teitelbaum,
Yes, that was part of Tom's work ...
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: John Zabroski
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing ; Alan Kay
>
>Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 4:46 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Kernel & Maru
>
>
>What do
Hi John
The simple answer is that Tom's stuff happened in the early 80s, and I was out
of PARC working on things other than Smalltalk.
I'm trying to remember something similar that was done earlier (by someone
can't recall who, maybe at CMU) that was a good convincer that this was not a
grea
Croquet does replicated distributed computing. LOCUS did "freely migrating
system nodes".
One actually needs both (though a lot can be done with today's capacities just
using the Croquet techniques).
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Shawn
pretty much removed
our invention hats.
However, the other abstraction mechanisms and the low overheads for Smalltalk
objects -- via Dan Ingalls' and others' brilliant touch -- were enough to allow
the big inventions to get done and built.
Cheers,
Alan
>_______
o make a fresh image).
Cheers,
Alan
>____
> From: Shawn Morel
>To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals of New Computing
>
>Cc: Florin Mateoc
>Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2012 11:52 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Kernel & Maru
>
>This thread is a re
Take a look at the Squeak bootstrap process paper, which generated a "small
everything", including tools and the ability to self bootstrap to other
platforms.
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr1997001_backto.pdf
A few of us (at Apple at the time) did the original bootstrap (from an old
Smalltalk that
g
>Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2012 9:06 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Kernel & Maru
>
>This one seems to be available as a technical report as well:
>
>http://infolab.stanford.edu/TR/CS-TR-65-20.html
>
>Monty
>
>On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 4:44 AM, Alan Kay wrote:
>> One more
The survey paper is just a survey. Dave's thesis is how to make all the control
structure by extending a "McCarthy" like tiny kernel. Still gold today.
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Eugene Wallingford
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing
>Sent: Wednesday, April 11,
One more that is fun (and one I learned a lot from when I was in grad school in
1966) is Niklaus Wirth's "Euler" paper, published in two parts in CACM Jan and
Feb 1966.
This is "a generalization of Algol" via some ideas of van Wijngaarten and winds
up with a very Lispish kind of language by vir
The first 110 pages of this are still deep gold
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Monty Zukowski
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing
>Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2012 12:02 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Kernel & Maru
>
>Yes, it looks like this is it. $37 for a PDF. Thanks!
>
Hi Julian
(Adding to Ian's comments)
Doing as Ian suggests and trying out variants can be an extremely illuminating
experience (for example, BBN Lisp (1.85) had three or four choices for what was
meant by a "lambda closure" -- three of the options I remember were (a) "do
Algol" -- this is esse
Yes "time management" is a good idea.
Looking at the documentation here I see no mention of the (likely) inventor of
the idea -- John McCarthy ca 1962-3, or the most adventurous early design to
actually use the idea (outside of AI robots/agents work) -- David Reed in his
1978 MIT thesis "A Ne
This just came up recently on the IAEP and fonc lists via Scott Ananian's
request for comments on his Nell proposal.
Moore's work continues to be impressive today (at least to me). Moore's
thinking was wide deep and rich -- and much of it is quite relevant and useful
today. There was a lot more
One of the motivations is to handle some kinds of scaling more gracefully. If
you think about things from a module's point of view, the fewer details it has
to know about resources it needs (and about its environment in general) the
better.
It can be thought of as a next stage in going from ex
Hi Benoit
This is basically what "publish and subscribe" schemes are all about. Linda is
a simple "coordination protocol" for organizing such loose couplings. There are
sketches of such mechanisms in most of the STEPS reports
Spreadsheets are simple versions of this
The Playground langua
New Computing
>Sent: Friday, March 16, 2012 5:26 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] [IAEP] Barbarians at the gate! (Project Nell)
>
>
>On 15/03/2012 14:20, Alan Kay wrote:
>Alex Warth did both a standard Prolog and an English based language one using
>OMeta in both Javascript, and i
ase, +, > etc. would exist as primitives?
>
>Any other insight you could provide would be much appreciated. Thanks -Shaun
>
>
>On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 6:40 PM, Andre van Delft
>wrote:
>
>The theory Algebra of Communicating Processes (ACP)
>>offers non-determinism (a
fonc] Apple and hardware (was: Error trying to compile COLA)
>
>Alan Kay wrote on Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:44:33 -0700 (PDT)
>> The CRISP was too slow, and had other problems in its details. Sakoman liked
>> it ...
>
>Thanks for the information! Just looking at the papers about
@vpri.org
>Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 3:59 PM
>Subject: [fonc] Dynabook ideas
>
>Le 15/03/2012 00:44, Alan Kay a écrit :
>
>> To me the Dynabook has always been 95% a "service model" and 5% physical
>> specs (there were three main physical ideas for it, o
__
> From: Wesley Smith
>To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals of New Computing
>
>Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 10:13 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] [IAEP] Barbarians at the gate! (Project Nell)
>
>On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 5:23 AM, Alan Kay wrote:
>> You don't want to use asser
ans at the gate! (Project Nell)
>
>
>
>WRT: patterns, I wonder if the list is aware of the work by Barry Jay with his
>Pattern Calculus, wherein he introduces patterns as first class citizens at
>the lambda level.
>
>
>Peter
>
>
>
>On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 8:2
You don't want to use assert because it doesn't get undone during backtracking.
Look at the Alex Warth et al "Worlds" paper on the Viewpoints site to see a
better way to do this. (This is an outgrowth of the "labeled situations" idea
of McCarthy in 1963.)
Cheers,
Alan
>
Alex Warth did both a standard Prolog and an English based language one using
OMeta in both Javascript, and in Smalltalk.
Again, why just go with something that happens to be around? Why not try to
make a language that fits to the users and the goals?
A stronger version of this kind of language
the various histories of smalltalk as a
>step on the way to 72, 76, and finally 80.
>
>I am very intrigued as to what sets 71 apart so dramatically. -Shaun
>
>
>On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Alan Kay wrote:
>
>Hi Scott --
>>
>>
>>1. I will see if I can g
n physical ideas for it, only one was the tablet).
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Jecel Assumpcao Jr.
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing
>Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 3:55 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Apple and hardware (was: Error trying to compile COLA)
cClure
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing
>Cc: Viewpoints Research
>Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 11:26 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Talking Typwriter [was: Barbarians at the gate! (Project
>Nell)]
>
>On 03/14/2012 09:54 AM, Alan Kay wrote:
>>
>> 1. Psycholo
012 9:17 AM
>Subject: [fonc] Apple and hardware (was: Error trying to compile COLA)
>
>Alan Kay wrote on Wed, 14 Mar 2012 05:53:21 -0700 (PDT)
>> A hardware vendor with huge volumes (like Apple) should be able to get a CPU
>> vendor to make HW that offers real protection, and at a
Hi Scott --
1. I will see if I can get one of these scanned for you. Moore tended to
publish in journals and there is very little of his stuff available on line.
2.a. "if (a
> From: C. Scott Ananian
>To: Alan Kay
>Cc: IAEP SugarLabs ; Funda
Hi Scott
This seems like a plan that should be done and tried and carefully evaluated. I
think the approach is good. It could be "not quite enough" to work, but it
should give rise to a lot of useful information for further passes at this.
1. Psychologist O.K. Moore in the early 60s at Yale an
ication required for the OS to allow them access to
>>>features (like an installed camera, or the network) that are outside the
>>>default application sandbox.
>>>
>>>
>>>The acceptance of the App Store model for the iPhone/iPad has persuad
In that world, the Squeak plugin could be certified as safe to download in a
>way that System Admins might believe.
>
>
>
>On Feb 29, 2012, at 3:09 PM, Alan Kay wrote:
>
>Windows (especially) is so porous that SysAdmins (especially in school
>districts) will not allow teac
My friend Peter Norvig is the Director of Research at Google.
I told him that I had heard of an "astounding jump" in the penetration of
Chrome.
He says the best numbers they have at present is that Chrome is "20% to 30%
penetrated" ...
Cheers,
Alan
__
Hi Loup
Someone else said that about links.
Browsing about either knowing where you are (and going) and/or about dealing
with a rough max of 100 items. After that search is necessary.
However, Ted Nelson said a lot in each of the last 5 decades about what kinds
of linking do the most good. (Ch
t in from browserland ... there is now -- 19 years later -- an allowed route
to put samples in your machine's sound buffer that works on some of the
browsers.
Holy cow folks!
Alan
>
> From: Duncan Mak
>To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals of New Comp
entially achieved with POLs. (I
>mean, I really don't know. It could even be domain-dependent.)
>
>I agree however that having both (POLs + tools) would be much better,
>and is definitely worth pursuing. I'll think about it.
>
>Loup.
>
>
>
>Alan Kay wrote:
at need to be there
for industrial-strength use.
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Loup Vaillant
>To: fonc@vpri.org
>Sent: Wednesday, February 29, 2012 1:27 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA
>
>Alan Kay wrote:
>> Hi Loup
Yes, this is why the STEPS proposal was careful to avoid "the current day
world".
For example, one of the many current day standards that was dismissed
immediately is the WWW (one could hardly imagine more of a mess).
But the functionality plus more can be replaced in our "ideal world" with
bit could be done as far as driving an
extensible interpreter with it.
However, some of these ideas were done better later. I think by Leler, and
certainly by Joe Goguen, and others.
Cheers,
Alan
>
> From: Jakob Praher
>To: Alan Kay ; Fundamentals o
Hi Reuben
Yep. One of the many "finesses" in the STEPS project was to point out that
requiring OSs to have drivers for everything misses what being networked is all
about. In a nicer distributed systems design (such as Popek's LOCUS), one would
get drivers from the devices automatically, and th
AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA
>
>Alan Kay wrote:
>> Hi Loup
>>
>> As I've said and written over the years about this project, it is not
>> possible to compare features in a direct way here.
>
>Yes, I'm aware of that. The probl
t;Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2012 2:21 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA
>
>Originally, the VPRI claims to be able to do a system that's 10,000
>smaller than our current bloatware. That's going from roughly 200
>million lines to 20,000. (Or, as Alan Kay
Hi Ryan
Check out Smalltalk-71, which was a design to do just what you suggest -- it
was basically an attempt to combine some of my favorite languages of the time
-- Logo and Lisp, Carl Hewitt's Planner, Lisp 70, etc.
This never got implemented because of "a bet" that turned into Smalltalk-72,
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