russellallen

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')

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.

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.

Yes indeed. People will think it is some sort of Linux distro.

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 this story should be changed to this URL which has further comments by the author attached to it. Also The Conversation is a legitimate Australian academic site.

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.

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 :) Do you think this tradeoff of peak performance vs interactivity is inherent in Tuffle's approach? Or can Truffle realistically aim for the best of both worlds?

One interesting aspect of the Self VM is that it can save the JIT generated native machine code together with the Self code in the image/snapshot, so that you can load a pre-warmed set of objects. Is that possible within the Truffle framework?

[1] https://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/third-generati...

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 the OpenSmalltalkVM.

Am I recalling correctly, and if so is it still the case?

And more generally, in comparison to the OpenSmalltalkVM, what are the TruffleSqueak downsides? The upsides seem nicely obvious!

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 classes to reconstruct those morphs.

There wasn't any automatic way to go from the morph instances to equivalent morph constructors, or any way to save the morph instances to copy and use later. So I ended up ignoring the instance manipulation and just coded morph creation methods.

In this way, the morph class hierarchy became much like a hierarchy of factories.

This mattered when I was doing a GUI to run on my Compaq iPaq because a lot of morphs (such as menus) were being created afresh each time they were needed. This was really slow and I only made it usable by caching the created menus and only displaying them when needed.

On Self I would have just copied the previously constructed menuMorph prototype and displayed it (if of course I had been able to port the huge pile of C++ that is the Self VM to the iPaq :)

This was ages ago though and I haven't played properly with modern Squeak or Cuis.

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.

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 classes and not have to get it reinstalled by IT.

I did have to do some persuading to get IT to install the plugin in the first place though.

It was doomed tech in hindsight though, together with all the other plugins.

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...

It’s an era only just ending now with the emergence of Truffle/Graal.

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 formed the basis of the HotspotVM.

> 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 what point will they be able to stop adding characters and scripts?

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/2016/08/25/the-...

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.

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. object distinction (e.g., string vs. String), were unfortunate.

https://brendaneich.com/2008/04/popularity/

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 a little unsatisfactory to have this ad-hoc method of hard forking. Maybe there should be in future some sort of public process to determine whether an action is consistent with the intentional meaning of the contract (as opposed to the machine meaning). We could all agree to appoint some qualified person to hear disputes and determine whether the code has got it wrong and we should fix the code with a hard fork. Let's call that person a 'judge'.

Now that judge will need to have procedures and rules. He or she isn't deciding on a whim, after all. These rules will set out things like what evidence the judge can look at to determine the intentional meaning of the contract. Just for giggles, let's call one of those rules the 'parol evidence rule'. Also, we don't want anyone to be able to bug the judge and waste their time, so we need some rules as to who can ask the judge to look at a dispute. I'm feeling creative, so let's call those rules 'standing rules'.

What would be really fabulous is if this system could be paid by the taxpayer out of general revenue. That way we can reduce the likelihood of the biggest, richest investors bribing the judges.

But this is obviously all fantasy. No one would ever build such a system.

Oh for goodness sakes.

Aka a how to manual on how to irreversibly damage British democracy...

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 for a lesser sentence etc, or they can cease acting for the client. They don't have any obligation to tell the court, just an obligation not to lie to the court. Of course each jurisdiction will have its own rules about this.

Dunno. I'm pretty sure I drove through it once. Pub was awful.

Don't worry, within 24 hours there will be hundreds of comments all explaining how Perl 6 is of no interest to anyone.

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.

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 are still correct. It's quite a flexible system.

[1]: http://pharo.org/ [2]: http://squeak.org/ [3]: http://www.jvuletich.org/Cuis/Index.html

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.

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 understand, but I'm not going to force my tastes on others.

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 particular they refer to in the article - the local Anglo-Saxon remedies are in general lacking in theory and so more or less evidence based. Later medieval medicine was possibly in many ways worse - Roman and Greek ideas of the four humours were imported and applied as received truth. Later medicine was much more likely to take the approach of "Who are ya going to believe? Aristotle or your lyin' eyes?"

Anglo-Saxon medicine had no overarching theory to apply. So their salves and potions and magic incantations tended to be adhoc, complicated, and, occasionally, actually worked.