Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
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Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#2Sounds like what Microsoft wanted Windows to be back in the Win 3.1 era with COM and all that.
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#3Sounds like what Microsoft wanted Windows to be back in the Win 3.1 era with COM and all that.
Can you elaborate a bit on what COM was? (or link a resource) I couldn't find its mention on the Windows 3.1 Wikipedia page.
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#4Sounds like what Microsoft wanted Windows to be back in the Win 3.1 era with COM and all that.
Can you elaborate a bit on what COM was? (or link a resource) I couldn't find its mention on the Windows 3.1 Wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model
which is an elaboration of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Data_Exchange
A common use of COM was scripting with Visual Basic in the 1990s, for instance, ask Excel what is in cell B7, or dynamically load a GUI component out of a DLL and script it into a Visual Basic application.
This blends the boundaries between applications in that you might have a Word document that has an Excel spreadsheet embedded in it, and it really does boot up Excel and has Excel render itself in a rectangle inside the Word document.
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#5Sounds like unix to me.
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate a bit on what COM was? (or link a resource) I couldn't find its mention on the Windows 3.1 Wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model which is an elaboration of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Data_Exchange A common use of COM was scripting with Visual Basic in the 1990s, for instance, ask Excel what is in cell B7, or dynamically load a GUI component out of a DLL and script it into a Visual Basic application. This blends the boundaries between applications in that you might have a Word docu…
Thank you for the links!
> A common use of COM was scripting with Visual Basic in the 1990s ...
This sounds nifty!
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#7Codebases are, in my mind at least, a virtual space. I believe that one day programs will look like factory floors or cities. They will produce and consume physical analogues for values and types, which you can pick up and examine. Want to debug a function? Strap on your VR headset, teleport into its physically reified room and watch the execution. Tinker with the pipeline in real time.
I’ve been dreaming about this forever, and there have been many attempts, but with remote work and VR going mainstream I think someone will eventually build something usable and scalable.
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#8Sounds like what Microsoft wanted Windows to be back in the Win 3.1 era with COM and all that.
Can you elaborate a bit on what COM was? (or link a resource) I couldn't find its mention on the Windows 3.1 Wikipedia page.
It's a language agnostic binary interface. It's kind of hard to explain without getting into the technical details of how it works. For many years it was the only stable ABI on windows.
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate a bit on what COM was? (or link a resource) I couldn't find its mention on the Windows 3.1 Wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model which is an elaboration of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Data_Exchange A common use of COM was scripting with Visual Basic in the 1990s, for instance, ask Excel what is in cell B7, or dynamically load a GUI component out of a DLL and script it into a Visual Basic application. This blends the boundaries between applications in that you might have a Word docu…
So basically what Amiga OS had with ARexx in the 1980s.
Edit: I misremembered, that was the 90s as well because it was a later development in the Amiga ecosystem.
Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model which is an elaboration of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Data_Exchange A common use of COM was scripting with Visual Basic in the 1990s, for instance, ask Excel what is in cell B7, or dynamically load a GUI component out of a DLL and script it into a Visual Basic application. This blends the boundaries between applications in that you might have a Word docu…
Thank you for the links! > A common use of COM was scripting with Visual Basic in the 1990s ... This sounds nifty!
It was! Then the malware came. Those links opened a million security holes that were effectively untestable.