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The Story of Mel (1983)

cs.utah.edu

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Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#171

Post by lproven »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #159
lproven wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dynamic as root from lisp That is a good thing, yes. But TBH I wish Eich had just embedded Lisp in Mozilla instead. > wide use and hence accessible. "Everyone uses it" is not a good argument for anything at all, really. > it takes decade to fix all issues it presented in other area. Well, yes, it has had a lot of R&D done upon it to make it quicker, but again, that is not an endorsement. > Still I would not dismiss…

The way I heard it, Eich was hired to put Scheme in the browser, but then Sun planned a big applet event and he had a week and a half to throw together a scripting language that looked like Java, because plan B would have been something more like VBScript.

Interesting... that would make a bit more sense...

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#172

Post by lproven »

cxr wrote: post #166
lproven wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. My #1 annoyance these days, because it is so egregious, is Electron apps. I guess because the only language some programmers know is Javascript, of which I know little but what little I know places it marginally above PHP in intrinsic horror. So people write standalone apps in a language intended for tweaking web pages, meaning that to deploy those apps requires embedding an entire web browser into every app.…

> meaning that to deploy those apps requires embedding an entire web browser into every app It doesn't require it, that's just what they choose, and it has little to do with the language. (Besides, if you actually observe them—and ignore what they tell you about liking JS—then it's clear that most of them hate their preferred language.) Languages and the bindings that a particular runtime exposes are orthogonal. You…

That's an excellent point, and thank you for elucidating it for me.

I will do a bit more reading up on this.

Cheers!

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#173

Post by BrendanEich »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #159
lproven wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dynamic as root from lisp That is a good thing, yes. But TBH I wish Eich had just embedded Lisp in Mozilla instead. > wide use and hence accessible. "Everyone uses it" is not a good argument for anything at all, really. > it takes decade to fix all issues it presented in other area. Well, yes, it has had a lot of R&D done upon it to make it quicker, but again, that is not an endorsement. > Still I would not dismiss…

The way I heard it, Eich was hired to put Scheme in the browser, but then Sun planned a big applet event and he had a week and a half to throw together a scripting language that looked like Java, because plan B would have been something more like VBScript.

That's muddled: there was no Sun big applet event, I needed to do a demo inside Netscape to get everyone on the "it's possible to do Mocha" page.

And the VBScript threat was later, from Microsoft doing it in IE3. If I'd missed the Netscape 2 boat, it's likely VBScript would prevail (Netscape 3 was originally 2.1, and 4 was originally 3 but delayed a year; find "Collabra-driven" in https://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html).

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#174

Post by erik_seaberg »

BrendanEich wrote: post #173
erik_seaberg wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I heard it, Eich was hired to put Scheme in the browser, but then Sun planned a big applet event and he had a week and a half to throw together a scripting language that looked like Java, because plan B would have been something more like VBScript.

That's muddled: there was no Sun big applet event, I needed to do a demo inside Netscape to get everyone on the "it's possible to do Mocha" page. And the VBScript threat was later, from Microsoft doing it in IE3. If I'd missed the Netscape 2 boat, it's likely VBScript would prevail (Netscape 3 was originally 2.1, and 4 was originally 3 but delayed a year; find "Collabra-driven" in https://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.ht…

Thanks, what I should have done was go find https://brendaneich.com/2008/04/popularity/

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#175

Post by pfarrell »

nocoiner wrote: post #170
pfarrell wrote: post #16

This page [0] includes an analysis of the manual for the possible machine Mel programmed in the story along with a probable photograph of him. [1] is an instruction manual for the blackjack program itself, written by Mel. Classic story solidly in the “should be reposted every six months or so” cohort. 0: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/macho-programmers-drum-mem... 1: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/royalPre…

It’s interesting to me that caption to the 1956 newspaper picture in the first linked article identifies someone from the NSA. I thought the mere existence of that agency was basically classified information well into the ‘70s.

That’s puzzling! Thanks to the author’s sourcing, a quick search turned up a scan of the full article [0]. My initial thought was, maybe it’s a name collision and this National Security Agency in 1956 is an insurance or accounting firm, but the source article doesn’t elaborate.

0: https://www.librascopememories.com/Librascope_Memories/1950_...

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