russellallen

5 ms·

1.
by russellallen 4y ago
Keeping these amazing old systems around and usable is so very important to counteract the continual reinvention of the wheel that the industry is prone to (aka 'computing is a pop culture')
2.
by russellallen 4y ago
Even the hobbits fail - Frodo claims the ring at the last minute and it is only the intervention of Providence (in the guise of Gollum) that saves the day.
3.
by russellallen 4y ago
It's great. The movable boxes and links between them remind me a lot of the Self programming language which I love, and the way the boxes wiggle when you pick them up is just genius.
4.
by russellallen 5y ago
Yes indeed. People will think it is some sort of Linux distro.
5.
by russellallen 6y ago
I don't know anything about the Singularity Hub, but this article is just a repost of a Creative Commons licensed article from The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom... Ideally t
6.
by russellallen 6y ago
I’d be interested if you could expand on why the modern Smalltalks feel wrong, because on paper they have more features etc. Not arguing - genuinely interested.
7.
by russellallen 6y ago
Cool. That video of the bouncing atoms demo is fascinating. It seems like a revisiting of the experience of the Self team between the second and third generation of Self VMs[1], though the underlying hardware might be just a little faster :
8.
by russellallen 6y ago
Its great to see this here. I vaguely recall some mention in one of the docs I read a while back that you were having difficulties with the JIT causing noticable pauses/latency in interactive environments like Morphic, comparison to th
9.
by russellallen 6y ago
My experience of doing morphic stuff in both Squeak and Self, is that in Squeak there was a bit of a disconnect between the instance side and the class side - you could click together morphs, but in the end you had to write code in morphic
10.
by russellallen 6y ago
Unfortunately the version in Squeak is, in my opinion, fancy looking but a backwards step from the Self version in terms of the underlying system. Morphic doesn't seem to really fit all that well with class based systems.
11.
by russellallen 6y ago
I used the Squeak browser plugin with a class of university students in the late 90s - it worked really well. Native speed, much more interactive GUI than the browsers at that time, and I could update their essentially desktop app between c
12.
by russellallen 6y ago
Hypermodern Python seems to have a lot more steps to it than Ye Olde Python, where you put a hello.py file somewhere and did 'python hello.py'. Yes, yes, I know. But...
13.
by russellallen 6y ago
It’s an era only just ending now with the emergence of Truffle/Graal.
14.
by russellallen 6y ago
As I understand it, when Sun developed Java, they ditched Self. Some of the Self team left, and created a Smalltalk VM using the Self VM techniques called Strongtalk. Sun belatedly realised they needed a fast VM, and rehired the team which
15.
by russellallen 7y ago
> Unicode 13.0 adds 5,930 characters, for a total of 143,859 characters. These additions include 4 new scripts, for a total of 154 scripts, as well as 55 new emoji characters. So how far off is Unicode from being 'done'? At wha
16.
by russellallen 9y ago
Your problem will be definitional. The Rock earned ~ $65mm last year. Is he a 'one man company'? I guarantee he's billing through a services entity... 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/
17.
by russellallen 9y ago
It's on the list but a big task because of the Unix assumptions build into the VM and the need to redo the graphics backend both as primitives and to hook it into the Self level GUI framework.
18.
by russellallen 9y ago
Brendan himself says: I’m not proud, but I’m happy that I chose Scheme-ish first-class functions and Self-ish (albeit singular) prototypes as the main ingredients. The Java influences, especially y2k Date bugs but also the primitive vs. ob
19.
New release of Self programming language(blog.selflanguage.org)
97 points by russellallen 9y ago|37 comments
20.
by russellallen 10y ago
So we now know that contracts on Ethereum mean what they say, unless there is a community consensus that the contract actually means something else, and the machine meaning doesn't properly reflect the intent of the parties. But it is
21.
by russellallen 10y ago
Oh for goodness sakes.
22.
by russellallen 10y ago
Aka a how to manual on how to irreversibly damage British democracy...
23.
by russellallen 10y ago
The general rule in Common Law (English speaking) legal systems is that if the lawyer knows (as opposed to suspects) that their client is guilty, they cannot let their client plead not guilty. They can still defend the client by pleading fo
24.
by russellallen 11y ago
Dunno. I'm pretty sure I drove through it once. Pub was awful.
25.
by russellallen 11y ago
Don't worry, within 24 hours there will be hundreds of comments all explaining how Perl 6 is of no interest to anyone.
26.
by russellallen 11y ago
Yep, the Self website is running on a Self webserver (which is itself running on a half written Self cloud). Seems to be fairly stable, all things considered.
27.
by russellallen 11y ago
Also in Pharo[1] and Squeak[2], but shoehorning it into a class based system turned out to have drawbacks. Juan Vuletich is doing some nice stuff with his Cuis[3] version. The linked description is a little out of date but all the basics ar
28.
by russellallen 11y ago
Lol. For most lawyers out drafting contracts, we're still in the days of mainframes. We write code by hand which will probably never be run on a real judge, but we hope we haven't made any bugs.
29.
by russellallen 11y ago
Good for him. Whatever floats your boat. Personally for me it sounds horrible. Cooking isn't that bad - in fact it gives me some pleasure. And I enjoy different flavours, textures, in fact I enjoy eating. So I don't really underst
30.
by russellallen 11y ago
Oh for goodness sake. This isn't a medical trial of a new anti-MRSA drug. This is an interesting piece of living history research into Anglo-Saxon medical practices. Bald's Leechbook is fascinating for many reasons. One in particu

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