mnqpr

@SeanDenigris @ryanwinchester Do you know what happened with Squeak's omniuser interface project? wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5742 I'm really curious what went wrong.

@mnqpr @ryanwinchester Yes of course! The original visionaries like PARC and Doug Engelbart envisioned *everyone * should be programming. This is actually what literacy means - writing as well as “reading”. There is still a vibrant Smalltalk community but “popular” would be a stretch

80% of web applications are just a fancy replacement of somebody's excel file somewhere

@unclebobmartin youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmb…

The most vocal opponents to the development of compilers were programmers. They felt that they would be replaced by the automation of programming. Sound familiar? Hahahahahahaha!

analyzable, verifiable data in the n-dimensional concept space of the stored-program computer. The real charm of Smalltalk is that it doesn't enforce these type of modes on us, at least for me.

In a stored-program computer programs and data are interchangeable and uniform. Mainstream operating systems enforce arbitrary modes on us to use programs, to edit program code etc. This weakens the notion of the stored-program concept and makes harder to think about programs as

@SeanDenigris In-band signalling is a bit strange on a written medium. The computer revolution hasn't happened yet.™

Replies to every interesting tweet: Mem it Saved!!! Blah blah Unroll Unroll Unroll Mem it Saved!!! Blah blah Mem it Saved!!! Blah blah —>Actual relevant reply <—— Mem it Saved!!! Blah blah Unroll Unroll

A really interesting Hitchhiker's Guide to Glamorous Toolkit would be if @girba could invite @Bertrand_Meyer. #MoldableDevelopment and Meyer's seamlessness property of a development method are akin to each other. Object-Oriented Software Construction (bertrandmeyer.com/OOSC2/)

@SeanDenigris The design principles behind Smalltalk were so well thought out! cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/r…

Summary: no matter how good software features sound, if your digital world isn't a live, open, turtles-all-the-way-down environment that you control & extend at will, it's not a question of *if* it will fail you, but of how much data will be trapped *when* you realize it has.

Why everyone needs a #Dynabook - Part 1 Goal: Capture notes - rich text, multimedia and handwritten - on Windows, Mac and mobile

@girba That's a similar notion to the PARC founders had: “One of the blood oaths that was taken by the original founders was that we would never do a system that wasn’t engineered for 100 users,” Alan Kay. spectrum.ieee.org/xerox-parc

There is such a large difference between a prototype and a system. Yet, in a world of 15 seconds attention they look just the same.

“I have no choice of living or dying, you see, sir--but I do have a choice of how I do it. If I tell them not to fight, they will be sorry, but they will fight. If I tell them to fight, they will be glad, and I who am not a very brave man will have made them a little braver.”

The mayor of the occupied city in Steinbeck's great novel The Moon Is Down:

language + class library + IDE, vertically integrated just like Apple's products. Now I know why I gravitated toward these languages.

Before I settled down on Smalltalk/@pharoproject/#GToolkit as my first programming language/environment I had a little interlude with Bertrand Meyer's Eiffel @Eiffel_Language . Smalltalk and Eiffel are both created as a vision. These are not just languages but complete solutions:

@seaside_st was 20 years old yesterday. seaside.st/about/history "Seaside made its public debut (version 0.9) in an announcement to the squeak-dev list on February 21, 2002."

My current conjecture: TDD, CI/CD and #MoldableDevelopment is a way to replace a belief system based method with a scientific method based one.

And the learning and teaching can evolve into a really powerful feedback loop. Searching for my Dynabook...

#GToolkit has a "Mirror of Erised" property because everybody needs a better learning environment not just programmers. It is a data visualiser, a notebook, an IDE, a better learning environment.

Perhaps #MoldableDevelopment is about providing a better learning environment. Programmers constantly have to learn about the problem domain and programmers constantly teach the computer the learned knowledge. Most programming environment concentrate on the "teaching part".

@feenkcom For beginners like me this magic is achieved with the Driller evoked by Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Click.

How to find what shortcuts are active in an editor in #GToolkit? Inspect the graphical element, find the shortcuts view, and if you are at it, let the shortcut tell you the source code, too. #MoldableDevelopment

@girba It is natural to rewrite software when we understand the problem domain or the programming environment better.

@girba "To program is to understand. Nygaard thought programming should not be considered a low-level technical discipline designed just to accomplish a specific task but that writing a program should enhance understanding of the problem domain and the solutions" amturing.acm.org/award_winners/…

Do you ever throw away code that works? If yes, describe a situation. If no, would you ever want to? 👇