Viewing profile — mmiller

"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 lang…

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…

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 sy…

"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…

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 o…

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 anecdote…

"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 …

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 m…

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 t…

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…

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," becau…

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…

"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 obje…

"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 pa…

"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, o…

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 desig…

"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 …

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…

Thanks. I share it wherever I think it will add to the discussion.

This is not "bringing X11 back," but it's an improvement on JS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11965253

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-kerne…

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.

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…

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…

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 ti…