Viewing profile — patterns

While I (think) understand the sentiment (ergonomics and practicality), it is still worth studying Lisp for a number of reasons. In particular, I would recommend to everyone to stu…

I picture clusters of information as they move through the computer. Sometimes they look like ships or motorcycles. :-) Usually, I don't visualize anything in particular. I use too…

I have been pondering about this issue for a while. Maybe it is inevitable that successful systems turn into big balls of mud eventually once the "inflection" point has been reache…

I think this is a fair assessment. I agree that Smalltalk is by far not a complete solution to the problem of building and maintaining complex system but "only" an attempt. I found…

Related to this is I watched a fairly recent talk by David May who worked on the implemention of the transputer in the late 80s together with Tony Hoare: https://m.youtube.com/watc…

>I picture three docs, A, B, and C which is a summary composite of things pulled from A & B - C will still need its own manual curation and updating if A and B are changed to remai…

I understand. I think your last objection is very valid and perhaps needs far more consideration. Anyway, I have limited computer access at the moment, but maybe you find the follo…

Yes, I agree a demo would be good. I have to catch some sleep, but I will address your questions as good as I can later. In the meanwhile, you might want to take a look at how Xana…

The old guy in the video is Ted Nelson, the man who coined the term hypertext, made significant contributions to computer science, inspired two generations of researchers and conti…

Since Smalltalk was mentioned, please consider following points: 1. Smalltalk has first class, live activation records (instances of the class Context). Smalltalk offers the specia…

But Racket and Clojure are very different from Lisps such as Common Lisp that embrace the idea of a lively, malleable and explorable environment , which is arguably the biggest ide…

and Smalltalk ;-)!

If done right, a macro system allows you to make your language modular and experiment with new language features without having to change the core language and the compiler. With t…

That's interesting. Thanks for the paper. I skimmed through it, but I did not get every detail, since it's been a long time I worked with languages like ML or Haskell and my formal…

Nice to see Red getting attention. I have been playing with Rebol a while ago and I really liked how easy it is to do program manipulation and writing small DSLs. However, I found …

Interesting. If I may ask: What made you switch "sides"? And what do you miss in Smalltalks coming from Scheme?

I see. Thanks for the clarification!

My pleasure! I found it to be a refreshing read. Thank you very much for your response. I will study your examples and read up the parts in your dissertation.

Another question, Smalltalk related. What I noticed in various Smalltalk systems is that there is a lot of code duplication for handling UI interactions (such as dragging or select…

In your dissertation you mention that "program" internals such as Exceptions should not be asserted as facts and pollute the data-space; only relevant facts/knowledge about the dom…

"Future users of large data banks must be protected from having to know how the data is organized in the machine (the internal representation). A prompting service which supplies s…

I agree. One gripe that I have with functions like map is that it returns a generator, so you have to be careful when reusing results. I fell into this trap a few times. I'd also l…

Oh, this is great. I especially like the fire torch analogy and the animation you came up with ( https://divan.dev/images/torch.gif ). That's exactly how I feel when reading code. …