Plan 9 from User Space

Are you familiar with Oberon? ACME is really closer to that than Smalltalk. It’s funny you mentioned both though because I’ve toyed with the idea of making an Oberon/Acme environment in Squeak. I’m quite certain it’s doable with Morphic.

On the idea of being stuck in a local maximum of graphical interfaces, see the concept of “wheel of reincarnation” by Ivan Sutherland. http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland...

Rob Pike’s comment about this is very interesting too:

Through the 1970s and 1980s, there was a continuous invention in how graphics, computing, and software interacted. With the dominance of the PC and the VGA card, we now have a largely fixed architecture for graphics in personal computers. There is some playing around with the software model, but basically we have a powerful, privately managed external "card" that does the graphics, and we talk to it with one particular mechanism. During my work on Plan 9, it got harder over time to try new things because the list of ways to talk to the card was shrinking, and other than the blessed ones, slower and slower.

For example, a shared-memory frame buffer, which I interpret as the mechanism that started this conversation, is now a historical artifact. Back when, it was a thing to play with.

As observed by many others, there is far more grunt today in the graphics card than the CPU, which in Sutherland's timeline would mean it was time to push that power back to the CPU. But no.

Not a value judgement, just an observation. The wheel has stopped turning, mostly.

Your problem with Acme is you don’t grok Plan 9. [1] In Plan 9, everything’s a file. Acme in particular represents open buffers and windows as files on disk too. I don’t mean as copies of the text necessarily, but as sockets basically where you can send and receive data about a particular thing inside Acme. It’s kind of wild just how exposed it is. It’s not like you’re sending info to a single process server like an LSP server of today, no, you’re literally getting a file ID to go back to and write to when you finish doing what you’re doing.

Writing a plug-in is actually completely language agnostic. It’s just standard file IO.

Any time you middle click the name of a script, it executes that file by looking it up in a PATH equivalent (pretty sure it’s also project local as well, but I don’t remember).

This is really powerful for two reasons: everything’s an editable text field from your menu bar, your window bar, and the buttons on them; and chorded selections, basically you can send a selection to a command by selecting and then clicking on another piece of text to determine the command.

This allows you to create a UI tailored to whatever you’re doing as you’re doing it. If you watch someone program with Acme, they’re writing little snippets in their status bar to do common tasks, or for more involved things, they’re just creating a new buffer and typing or cut and pasting some relevant code they need to search different parts of (because searching is just one mouse click away). The best part is, you can just save and load that buffer for later. It’s just a plain text file.

It’s definitely a change up from the keyboard-driven focus we’ve come to see, but again, I think we gave up on the mouse way too quickly. If you’re really honest with yourself, I think you’ll find you aren’t constantly clipping around at 1,000 key presses per minute in Vim. You’re spurty, you sit and think, and then you type. Once I started thinking about hands on mouse time as thinking time, then it wasn’t nearly so unacceptable. I even came to prefer it (gasp).

[1] Sorry I couldn’t resist referencing the classic Vim/Vi write up.

I have heard of it. I wasn’t really trying to draw specific parallels between Acme and Smalltalk as similar editing environments. I was just lamenting that two of the most interesting pieces of software I’ve used recently are both older than me, and very little except for efforts to recreate those systems exactly on modern hardware has quite the same feeling of freedom and creativity. They really feel like they are there for you to mold into what you need a computer to be, not tell you how to use a computer.

It’s probably not fair to say that we’ve lost a capacity or appreciation for creativity and novel ideas. In sheer volume, there are probably more people doing XeroxPARC level crazy stuff now than then. It just feels like way more investments are made to copy the thing someone else is doing but tweak it slightly than on truly large moonshots.

Part of this is probably the homogenization cause by mass, instant communication, and not forcing you to wonder, how did they do that, and how would I do it differently. It’s a double edged sword though. Hell, I feel like part of the reason some of this stuff didn’t catch fire and spread was because of the limited ability to share and talk with people too.

I don’t know what the right answer is. I just want more cool shit.

> In sheer volume, there are probably more people doing XeroxPARC level crazy stuff now than then.

I'm not sure about that. From the Computer History Museum's 50th anniversary event of the Alto two days ago, each Alto cost about 18k in early 1970s dollars (about 100k today). And they built hundreds of them. Not sure anyone has the budget to do the level of crazy work that would require the equivalent amount of future computer power today.