mmiller

7 ms·

1.
by mmiller 9y ago
"And even COND isn't special, it's just represented as messaging in Smalltalk, right?" Right. What I meant was that the parsing would begin with "eyeball" (ST-72 was an iconic language, so you would get a chara
2.
by mmiller 9y ago
You've got the right idea. If you think about how services on the internet operate, they don't have one way of implementing their internal processes, either. I finally got the idea, after listening to Kay for a while, that even wh
3.
by mmiller 9y ago
One of the things I've realized is that using names for locating what's needed (I assume we're talking about the same idea) is part of the problem. At small scales it's fine. As systems get bigger, it becomes a problem.
4.
by mmiller 9y ago
"Most of the old hands and historians of the moon shot point to the public in the 70s no longer being afraid of the Russians in the way they had been in the 50s, and the successful moon landings helped assuage their fears." That&#
5.
by mmiller 9y ago
I can't remember if I've brought this up already in this thread, but if you want to "kick the tires" on ST-72, Dan Ingalls has an implementation of it up on the web. It's running off of a real ST-72 image. I wrote a
6.
by mmiller 9y ago
What came to mind when I read your comments were some complaints I've had that relate to the "looking for the keys under the streetlight" fallacy. There are intuitions and anecdotes we can have about the unknowns, which is th
7.
by mmiller 9y ago
"We are 'story creatures' and it takes a lot of training and willpower to depart from 'fond stories and beliefs' to 'actually think things through'." What your analysis did for me was help put two and
8.
by mmiller 9y ago
Taking your feedback into consideration, I had the thought that it would be more accurate to talk about things like "2" in an OOP context as symbols with semantics (which provide meaning to them), not data, since "data"
9.
by mmiller 9y ago
Great description of the problem (and great description of what we could have instead)! What came to mind as I read what you said here was a bit that I caught Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about from 8 years ago. As I heard him say this, I th
10.
by mmiller 9y ago
I know this is getting nit-picky, but I think people might be interested in getting some of the details in the history of how Smalltalk developed. Dan Ingalls said in "Smalltalk-80: Bits of History": "The very first Smalltalk
11.
by mmiller 9y ago
Hmm. So, it sounds like the same "keyhole" problem I've seen you talk about before (you used an AIDS epidemic as an example with this). What's seen is taken as "good enough," because the small perspective seems
12.
by mmiller 9y ago
I was using "data" in the spirit of a saying I heard many years ago in CS, that, "Data is code, and code is data." It seems that people in CS are still familiar with this phrase. I was focusing on the latter part of that
13.
by mmiller 9y ago
"This is more of an optimization choice, perhaps? Given the link is maintained, it might be OK to say the source code and the bytecode form are two forms representing the same object?" Sure. :)
14.
by mmiller 9y ago
"The more interesting/optimized ways to map this would be where a single object in the software internet somehow maps to multiple computers, either doing parallel computation or partitioned computation on each. I feel the semantic
15.
by mmiller 9y ago
"In fact a person would be labelled "elitist" to dare suggest anything else -- e.g. that universities are not just vocational schools for getting the skills for one's future job, or that technology should not just be abo
16.
by mmiller 9y ago
I think your analogy is going in a better direction. I had the same idea after taking a look at Squeak for a while. What would need to be added to your analogy is a notion of design. You see, in Smalltalk, for example, your programming take
17.
by mmiller 9y ago
"There aren't any parents around to take care of childish adults. We are it. So we need to grow up and take responsibility for our world, and the first actions should be to try to understand our actual situations." I am seein
18.
by mmiller 10y ago
This kind of gets into philosophy, but a metaphor I came up with for thinking about this (another phrase for it is "thought experiment") is: If I speak something to a rock, what is it to the rock? Is it "signal," or &quo
19.
by mmiller 10y ago
Thanks. I share it wherever I think it will add to the discussion.
20.
by mmiller 10y ago
This is not "bringing X11 back," but it's an improvement on JS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11965253
21.
by mmiller 10y ago
It's difficult at this point to come up with an example, since we don't have it yet (that I know of), but to give you an idea, take a look at Lively Kernel https://www.lively-kernel.org/ If you want a demo, you ca
22.
by mmiller 10y ago
I agree. I hate to be a downer about this, but these days I'm glad to find someone who knows how to debate well, much less argue well.
23.
by mmiller 10y ago
My reference to X11 was mostly rhetorical, to tell the story. I learned at some point that the reason X11 wasn't adopted, at least in the realm of business apps. I was in, was that it was considered a security risk. Customers had the i
24.
by mmiller 10y ago
More "textland" than anything else, though that has to do with the medium we're using to communicate "across space and time." What Alan has advocated is that the medium we're using in this particular instance s
25.
by mmiller 10y ago
I misspoke. I just tried doing what I described, with String. Squeak notified me about "obsolete references" to the original class name in existing source code. It's been a long time since I did this. I might've seen tha
26.
by mmiller 10y ago
I think one thing that scared him away was the word "relevant"... VIM might have as well (very primitive). Emacs tries to do some things that are worth doing, but it brings the user into "textland," not "systemland.
27.
by mmiller 10y ago
The Internet Archive ( http://archive.org ) is doing the same thing. They have old software stored that you can run in online emulators. I only wish they had instructions for how to use the emulators. The old keyboards and control
28.
by mmiller 10y ago
I remember at one point after listening to one of your talks about TCP/IP as a very good OO system, and pondering the question of how to make software like that, an idea that came to mind was, "Translation as computation." I
29.
by mmiller 10y ago
Thanks for the reference. I've been trying to think along these lines.
30.
by mmiller 10y ago
I think what Alan was getting at is that what you see as "data" is in fact, at its basis, just signal, and only signal; a wave pattern, for example, but even calling it a "wave pattern" suggests interpretation. What I th

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