Josh Grams wrote:
> I have always wondered how far in that direction you could go with
> Scheme or another high-level dynamic language. In my (again, fairly
> uninformed) opinion it seems mainly a question of how much of the
> dynamic stuff can be analysed and compiled down to static code to redu
Iian Neill wrote:
> Although there are plenty of blogs and forums on programming out there, it's
> really sad that there isn't some mass medium for programming literacy -- and
> I suspect that a big part of it is that, despite its many documented flaws,
> BASIC
> at least had a small and graspable
Shaun,
> Here is my current attempt at replicating the diagram alongside the code laid
> out as in appendix III. http://order-of-no.posterous.com/st71-one-pager .
Shouldn't this be called st72-one-pager?
If I understood correctly, the software systems that were designed by
Alan were:
1) 1968/19
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 it I had
the impression that it would be reasonably faster than an ARM at the
same clock fre
Alan Kay wrote on Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:36:30 -0700 (PDT)
> Yep, I was there and trying to get the Newton project off the awful ATT chip
> they had first chosen.
Interesting - a few months ago I studied the datasheets for the Hobbit
and read all the old CRISP papers and found this chip rather cute.
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 granularity that makes
> more systems sense.
They did just that when they founded ARM Ltd (with Acorn and
Alan,
> Hi Loup
> Actually, your last guess was how we thought most of the optimizations would
> be done (as separate code "guarded" by the meanings). For example, one idea
> was that Cairo could be the optimizations of the "graphics meanings code" we
> would come up with. But Dan Amelang did such
Alan Kay wrote:
> In the "difference between research and engineering department" I
> think I would first port a version of Smalltalk to this system.
The Squeak VM used in the new OLPC machine should work just fine on this
board on top of one of the Linuxes that have already been tested on it.
It
Reuben Thomas wrote:
> On 7 February 2012 11:34, Ryan Mitchley wrote:
> >
> > I think the limited capabilities would be a great visceral demonstration of
> > the efficiencies learned during the FONC research.
> >
> > I was thinking in terms of replacing the GNU software, using it as a cheap
> > har
Eugen Leitl wrote on Sat, 17 Dec 2011 10:43:09 +0100
> [300 EUR GPU]
> [InfiniBand features]
Thanks for the tip about InfiniBand. I kept track of it while it was
being developed but had wrongly assumed it had mostly died off when PCI
Express started to become popular. It is actually a lot faster
Eugen Leitl wrote:
> [human limits - growing code]
Perhaps the copycat work Doug Hofstadter, did is a step in this
direction?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_%28software%29
> [OpenMP doesn't match reality]
I agree 100%. But it didn't mess up the logic as much as MPI does. This
was a class
John Zabroski wrote:
> You said that our field had become so impoverished because nobody
> googles Douglas Englebart and watches The Mother of All Demoes, and
> also noted that evolution finds "fits" rather than optimal solutions.
> But you didn't really provide any examples of how we are the vict
Eugen Leitl wrote:
> It's remarkable how few are using MPI in practice. A lot of code
> is being made multithread-proof, and for what? So that they'll have
> to rewrite it for message-passing, again?
Having seen a couple of applications which used MPI it seems like a dead
end to me. The code is
Karl Ramberg wrote:
> One of Alans points in his talk is that students should be using bleeding edge
> hardware, not just regular laptops. I think he is right for some part but he
> also
> recollected the Joss environment which was done on a machine about to be
> scraped. Some research and develo
Hans-Martin Mosner wrote:
> AFAIK the production board will have a number of (unbuffered) GPIO pins on a
> header, so the hardware-inclined should be
> able to use them.
That is great news! I could see lots of extra connectors on the alpha
board, but had read somewhere that the plan was to remov
The Raspberry Pi people have my full support. Certainly I would like
children to have the same free access to their computers that the
Sinclair Spectrum/BBC Micro generation had and this is normally not the
case even if they have a PC of their own. But while the $25 price tag is
a necessary conditi
Michael Haupt wrote:
> Am 06.09.2011 um 13:49 schrieb Bert Freudenberg:
>
> In the latest Squeak alpha you can drag any slot from one inspector onto any
> slot of another inspector, replacing the object in it.
>
>
> indeed. That is cool. :-DAlmost like arrow dragging in Self, only without the
Alan,
> I hate to be the one to bring this up, but this has always been a
> feature of all the Smalltalks ...
I was going to say that this was introduced in 1976 and that the first
two version of Smalltalk had a more traditional REPL. But I would have
to check since I might be remembering it wron
Alan,
> [second part was about wafer scale memories]
That was a great idea and was eventually adopted by DRAM makers to
increase yields (spare rows that could replace faulty ones at
manufacturing test time). These days losses due to cutting up the wafers
or encapsulation are pretty low, but I am
Alan,
> The Flex Machine was "the omelet you have to throw away to clean the pan",
> so I haven't put any effort into saving that history.
Fair enough! Having the table of contents but not the text made me think
that perhaps the section B.6.b.ii The Disk as a Serial "Associative
Memory" and B.6.c
Alan,
thanks for the detailed history!
> 1966 was the year I entered grad school (having programmed for 4-5 years,
> but essentially knowing nothing about computer science). Shortly after
> encounters with and lightning bolts from the sky induced by Sketchpad and
> Simula, I found the Euler paper
Casey,
> Did Squeak pick up Macintosh style line endings when it travelled through
> Apple, or did Apple pick up Smalltalk style line endings when it travelled
> through PARC?
>
> I've been wondering about this for awhile now.
Wow, this is pretty off topic. But this is indeed where you are most
Casey Ransberger wrote:
> I want to try using a fluffy pop song to sell a protest album... it worked for
> others before me:) If you're really lucky, some people will accidentally
> listen
> to your other songs.
>
> (metaphorically speaking)
>
> "A spoonful of sugar"
http://netjam.org/spoon/
BGB,
> or, maybe all my x86 experience blinds me some to the "elegance" of
> ARM's ISA?...
> whatever is so great about it, well, I am not seeing it at this level.
>
> why then do so many people seem to complain that the x86 ISA is so
> horrible?...
I think this is completely off topic for thi
Karl,
> Here is one proposed to be buildt in
> Squeak http://www.computer.org/comp/proceedings/c5/2003/1975/00/19750120.pdf
Thanks for the link! It looks nice. I am currently helping out with an
undergraduate course on computer architecture and adopted the WinMIPS64
simulator. A more flexible o
Casey,
> > But did you actually understand the Visual6502 and not just the idea of
> > it?
>
> Nope. But it struck me to be able to see it compute. I do think I took
> something of value from the experience: I just don't know what it is yet.
I agree it is a very interesting experiment and I lik
Casey,
> Here's a fun thought: while staring at the Visual6502 visualization, it
> occurred to
> me that the likes of Verilog and VHDL probably represent a rather tall order
> to
> new folks (like, hey, me,) and the idea popped in there. I personally find it
> easier
> to fathom designing circu
Casey,
> Has anyone taken the actor model down to the metal?
I studied this in detail back in 1990 and had several references. These
are physically hard for me to reach right now and probably are not easy
to find on the web.
Though not an actor model, you might find my "RNA" idea of objects and
Scott McLoughlin wrote on Sat, 04 Jun 2011 12:04:20 -0400
> My intention was to far more specifically ask: why "small
> core, user comprehensible and modifiable, and boot-strapable"
> systems seem to be the province of either latently typed (Smalltak,
> Lisp, Scheme, Icon (?), etc.) or untyped (For
Casey,
> [Chuck Thacker chapter]
Note that TinyComputer is a series of designs starting with the one in
the first "Steps" report. Just looking at what changed from one to the
next is very educational.
The recent version in the Beehive brought back some of the flavor of
programming in Alto microc
Ian Piumarta wrote on Wed, 25 May 2011 21:20:24 -0400
> Dear Casey,
>
> > a) I want to play with software
> > b) I want to play with FPGAs
>
> You could start with Thacker's 'Tiny Computer' (described from p.123 onwards
> in http://piumarta.com/pov/points-of-view.pdf) and add/fix whatever you thi
s/news/features/bee3.aspx
> More interestingly, though, is beehive:
> http://projects.csail.mit.edu/beehive/Beehive-2010-01-MIT.pdf
I had mentioned this, but thanks for providing these links.
> On Jan 3, 2011, at 2:16 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
> [...] Chuck Thacker's series o
Casey Ransberger wrote:
> Also inaccurate: in their slide deck, they call out that what they've
> done is "more like a simulation than an emulation," and that this
> approach reduced the amount of code the had tow write, if their
> graphs are meaningful, by something like an order of magnitude.
D
I am *very* interested in this subject - not only do I hope that the
Squeak computer I am building will be itself an educational object, but
I am also helping two related projects. I'll briefly describe those two
projects before making comments on the "Nand to Tetris" course, but I
should mention t
John Zabroski wrote:
> From OO to FPGA: Fitting Round Objects into Square Hardware? [1]
> was one of the interesting talks I sat in on when I attended SPLASH.
Thanks for the link!
> I was primarily interested in attending because of VPRI's long-range
> mission and the speculation that FPGA hardw
Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
> No idea, but since they invented Java, they could have at a much lower
> cost written their own implementation of Smalltalk.
or two (Self and Strongtalk).
Of course, Self had to be killed in favor of Java since Java ran in just
a few kilobytes while Self needed a
Steve Dekorte wrote on Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:33:37 -0700
> On 2010-07-11, at 06:18 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
> > It isn't
> > about making it smaller (though I also love that - ColorForth is one of
> > my favorite systems) but making it understandable so it can be bui
Steve Dekorte wrote on Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:22:29 -0700
> On 2010-07-10, at 12:25 AM, Hans-Martin Mosner wrote:
> > For quite some time I've been pondering the duality of the class/instance
> > and
> > method/context relations. In some sense, a context is an object created by
> > instantiating its
Casey Ransberger wrote on Sat, 19 Jun 2010 12:44:01 -0700
> Apologies for the off-topic question, but does anyone know if the actual bits
> for Sketchpad are still extant somewhere? Is there any documentation that
> anyone has for the Lincoln TX-2? It'd sure be neat to emulate it.
This first plac
Steve Dekorte wrote on Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:06:45 -0700
> > [Self compiler technologies vs hardware]
>
> It seems to me that those compiler tricks make assumptions about usage
> patterns
> (they assume you're really not doing too much dynamic stuff) and aren't
> generalizable.
> e.g. an associati
Steve Dekorte wrote on Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:42:11 -0700
> Does anyone know of any projects that have used associative memories (which
> are now large and relatively cheap) for implementing dynamic runtimes? Could
> such an approach give us single cycle dynamic lookups and (for the most part)
> elim
Thiago Silva wrote on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:06:53 -0300
> you might be interested in the following transcript of the '97 oopsla speech:
> http://blog.moryton.net/2007/12/computer-revolution-hasnt-happened-yet.html
>
> I also have some material in my disks. Doing a little scanning on
> jecel's list a
John,
you might find my list of Smalltalk related movies interesting:
http://www.smalltalk.org.br/movies/
One problem is that several people I know who really should see these
movies have trouble with English. I could create subtitles, but then
would have to host the modified versions somewhere
Kurt Stephens wrote:
> Smalltalk did not spawn an entire industry of specialized hardware like
> Lisp.
There was a lot more development in that area than most people are aware
of:
http://www.merlintec.com:8080/hardware/26
> However Lisp hardware is a collector's item now. :)
Only two architec
Gerardo Richarte wrote on Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:14:50 -0200
> Hi Ian,
>
> Ian Piumarta wrote:
> > I'd love to see somebody figure out how to dynamically generate bit
> > files from an intermediate representation (Jolt ASTs, for example) to
> > allow reprogramming of the hardware on the fly.
> Take a
Ian Piumarta wrote:
> Several of us here (at VPRI) are interested in the potential of
> better synergy between hardware and software. Something we'd love to
> see is the *OLA back-end generating netlists for FPGAs, or better
> still reprogramming them on the fly (which I'm told is possible,
Waldemar Kornewald wrote on Fri, 23 Nov 2007 12:56:48 +0100
> On Nov 23, 2007 1:36 AM, Wm Annis wrote:
> > (Oops. Sent only to WK first.)
>
> I hope the mailing list settings get fixed at some point.
Well, this is just another example of how things aren't as simple as you
think they are. The cur
Waldemar Kornewald wrote: on Wed, 21 Nov 2007 07:57:20 +0100:
> There are more of such projects? I haven't found anything as serious
> as this one.
I consider my own Neo Smalltalk project (previously known as Self/R and
before that as Merlin OS) to have a lot in common with this one. I also
want t
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