Viewing profile — 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…

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 geniu…

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-wor…

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], th…

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 …

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 toget…

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 fi…

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…

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…

> 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 h…

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/sit…

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 GU…

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 influen…

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…

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…