Rochus

Why? Did mathematics end when pocket calculators became popular? As today, the world initially overreacted (as usual): calculator opponents did warn about dependence, loss of arithmetic skills, and erosion of mathematical understanding. Making an existing exercise easier does not establish that the underlying discipline is in jeopardy.

> would you say that most of the issues you had with the p4 was the board

Both. The USB-JTAG flapping is probably a board issue, as is the HDMI integration; and they use the 1.0 version of the P4 which also has its issues. Your link doesn't work from my location, and I don't have experience with other P4 versions so far.

This is amazing, particularly the much smaller memory use, which I assumes comes because structured types can be used by value in Go (vs. the all heap approach of Java), isn't it? I assume the parallelization of the front-end is explicit in the source code (haven't looked at the source so far); what Go concepts did you use for it?

You could even consider re-using the Go compiler IR and backend for native, statically linked binaries, instead of generating JVM IR.

And that was only the summary of a selection ;-)

I'm using my OP2 Oberon compiler version and also my Micron compiler, and both indeed just need a few seconds for the build of the whole Oberon or Micron System 3 and only a few megabytes of source code. Version 6 of IDF didn't even work on my host.

> Without a downvote that energy just bleeds into more argumentative and off-topic discussion

That will happen anyway.

> People need to just accept them as the cost of doing business here and move on

As they apparently must accept comments, but the latter at least have a clear author, even if hidden behind a pseudonym in most cases. By the end of the day, the quality of the forum seems to depend on the quality and presence of the moderators.

> You can't expect people to be civil anymore, or even sane

Why would you then trust them with a downvote or flagging button?

> If lobste.rs wasn't invite only and didn't have the invitation tree

Maybe, maybe not. We don't have the evidence. Anyway, it's easy to get an invitation.

Lobste.rs (and some others) is living well without downvotes, so the feature is barely vital. It's rather a cheap means to remove work from admins and delegate it to pseudo random actors. Your view on upvotes is backwards. Mathematically it doesn't matter if you only have upvotes; it simply encourages a different, more positive behavior.

Reddit is mostly an example for what happens when rules and moderators are bad.

I would rather remove the downvote button altogether. If the comment violates the rules, flag it. Otherwise it's just an offer for misuse. As is apparently flagging, why else would someone flag this post?

There were dozens of pretty complex challenges, too many to describe here. So just a few examples. First of all, I'm fully bare-metal, with no ESP-IDF (though I use it for studying). A major annoyance is the USB-JTAG flapping which is the same on both board copies and different hosts; so debugging is even more difficult; partly worked around by logging via additional TTL UART connection. It's worse right after power-on and after EN pulses, then stabilizes for ~tens of minutes; could be thermal/supply settling, or simply the burst of re-enumerations any reset causes. Then the LT8912B I2C is shared with HDMI DDC; a lot of time went to find the right drive strength so the LT inits with the cable is in. Also a couple of rev v1.0 silicon issues, e.g two-step cache writeback, dead GPSPI clock, etc. For the display, the Olimex demo was very helpful; dumping all DSI/bridge/GDMA/clock registers over JTAG became an important debugging tool. Now the SD card and display work more or less. Right now, I'm really struggling with the USB keyboard, which is a low-speed device behind the onboard FE1.1s hub; both ways of reaching it fail identically with a bare chhltd and no cause bit.

Thanks, I hope I'll be able to get it done in a timely manner. Currently I have to decompose the statically linked inner core because it doesn't fit into the dedicated memory slot anymore. Did you also have issues with the ttyACM0 connection which starts to drop regularly under certain conditions?

It's indeed amazing that these MCUs essentially correspond to or even exceed the performance of the original Ceres systems in the nineties. The Oberon System and also the later AOS/Bluebottle multi core system are particularly suited for today's MCUs because they don't assume an MMU.

> Olimex esp32-p4-pc, the flagship product: new, powerful

That's a very cool board, but pretty tricky. Great idea to run an old Mac OS on it. I try on and off to port the Oberon System 3 to this board since I received it in February. The display already works pretty good, but still a lot of road blocks.

There are many potential explanations, including the policy changes in 2018. LLMs are definitely a concurrence to the service, but since the decline started years before they were really useful, other reasons might be relevant. I don't know to what degree. I just wondered why some of the forums had significant peaks after the GPT line.

That's interesting, thanks! The peak for most topics was around 2015-2020 apparently, and then came a "continuous" decline. If it really was a major event that caused the decline, wouldn't we expect to see a volatile plunge, like on the stock market?

> I used the AI assistant because I had a headache and there were a lot of errors and problems

That's a great excuse, one I'll have to remember ;-)

Looks like time is flying much faster than I'm aware of; most of the languages I have in mind are indeed older than 2013. At least a few are younger, e.g. Strudel, which is more ergonomic than Common Lisp for the use case.

Interesting, but the video is from 2013 and there was a lot of progress since with a lot of more ergonomic "live coding" languages.

I'm still in business myself and I see the problems. But the article was not about what you suggest. It was about contributing open-source to a community and whether it is still worthwhile and fun, even if some community exponents started to use LLMs.

> I still program on the weekends because it is fun

Fully agree. It's still (or even more than ever) more entertaining than watching Netflix. Why should I care if other people use agents to do the programming?

Well, it might be a rational view for the author, but for me that's like saying "I no longer like cooking, because there are companies providing the recipes I like as ready-made meals", or "I no longer play my instruments and make music, because there are machines which can create the music I like"; both topic apply to me personally, and I wouldn't agree to the statements. I still like to design and implement systems, make clever architectures and solve tricky problems. Why should I care if other people use LLMs to do so?

> we no longer allow submissions which are code repositories

Well, writing a brief article about the code, what it does, why it exists, why it is interesting, is feasible and better than the common "I implemented this" with little additional description. I would rather be concerned that whenever I look at the lobsters front page I don't see anything interesting.

There is another one, which is not a transpiler: https://github.com/rochus-keller/luon

Why didn't they consider Smalltalk? Interlisp is there, also Ada and Pascal, even CLU.

> Unfortunately, and horrifyingly, this response is [dead].

That's strange. I didn't do anything and it still appears on the site in my browser. Did they add "shadow bans" to HN? That was one reason for me to turn my back on Facebook (and the fact that interesting discussions suddenly disappeared later on). I took me more than half an hour to re-check all sources; I (we) probably shouldn't spend that much time on comments anymore.

Thanks. Your quotes are not about the Alto system software. The Star paper is about Star (1981) and itself warns that people "wrongly believe that Star was written in Smalltalk"; your first Sweet quote credits Tajo's window contexts to Lisp property lists, not Smalltalk.

The Alto OS, Bravo (1974) and Gypsy (1975) were written in BCPL by CSL/POLOS people (Lampson, Sproull, Simonyi, Tesler, Mott); the June 1975 Alto OS manual and Alto Packages contain nothing from Smalltalk, and they had no overlapping windows or pop-up menus.

Mesa the language (MPS 1971, named 1974, self-hosting 1976) owes nothing to Smalltalk either. Sweet's "patterned after those of Smalltalk [Kay76]" refers to the Dec 1976 Mesa 1.0 debugger's optional, "experimental" window manager. It never touched compiler, binder or OS and was dropped in Mesa 4.0.

Smalltalk influence is documented for Star and for Cedar's environment goals, both 1980s. For the Alto software of 1973–75 there is none; for Mesa 1976–77 it is BitBlt plus an experimental debugger add-on. BitBlt and overlapping windows were specifically Ingalls' work, which he internally demonstrated in 1975.

Paul McJones has a nice Mesa History Collection with a lot of primary sources from the time: https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/mesa

Mesa and Cedar are both programming languages which have nothing in common with Smalltalk. Cedar is also a later development environment. The original post was about Smalltalk vs. Objective-C, i.e. a language comparison, and then mentioning some graphic tools as well. Thus the comment I responded to was ambiguous in different respects. That's why I asked. It has nothing to do with the discussion you referenced.

> I spent hours telling you about it

I hope not.

And please note that this is again a different topic.

Last time I was talking about Wirth's OO vs. Simula OO, and the similarity of Wirth's implementation with Kay's vision. You then first extended this discussion to whether Kay directly influenced Wirth, which I responded. Then you extended the topic even more to the question whether and to what degree Cedar was influenced by Smalltalk. That was far off my interest and irrelevant for the discussion given that Wirth just took the tiling window manager, which none of the Smalltalk versions had.

Now I'm talking about the development of the Alto computer which included an OS with a GUI and two groundbreaking applications, Bravo and Gypsy (implemented on top of Bravo), all in BCPL, implementing their own interaction and presentation concepts.

If you want to do historical research, you have to go to the primary sources (e.g. https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xe..., https://xeroxparcarchive.computerhistory.org/Xerox_PARC_sour..., or e.g. https://archive.org/details/Xerox_PARC_Gypsy_Demonstration_T...), not to stories written down from memory twenty years later.

We should not forget that the original Alto operating system(s) had a GUI already and was the basis of well known applications like Bravo or Gypsy; the original OS and the said OS and applications were implemente in BCPL; and all were operational before Smalltalk-76. By Wirth's first PARC visit in 1976–77, Mesa had already become a self-hosting systems-development tool (small operating system and symbolic debugger); I'm not aware of any substantial Smalltalk influence at that time.

MPS/MPL began in 1971; the Mesa name was adopted in June 1974; an Alto cross-compiler worked in spring 1975. Cedar is both a language (an extension of Mesa, e.g. by a GC, but the OO features proposed by Lampson were never implemented to my knowledge) and a development environment. I assume your claim is about the latter. The programming language doesn't have anything in common with Smalltalk, and the fundamental work even predated the latter.