#lispyGopherClimate #lambdaMOO #virtualReality #programming #software
https://archives.anonradio.net/202508130000_screwtape.mp3 0UTC Wed / Boston 8pm Tue
Talking to @me , who programmed and hosts a popular sushi restaurant in virtual reality.
This is the fourth of a series of interviews, following @vidak's permacomputer, @jeremy_list's Habitat and @kasper's Swooprace. Using Mashey's #unix scale, Paradise sushi is a minor success.
As well as #MUD, #commonLisp #CLIM #gamedev on #itchio.
Mais il y a pire, tout ce bazar serait la conséquence de l'absence de maintenance préventive, "non obligatoire mais fortement conseillée", qui n'aurait pas été effectuée en 2024 "à cause des JO", me souffle-t-on en interne. "On en paye le prix fort aujourd'hui". C'est décidément une semaine noire pour France Télé, après le psychodrame autour du 20H de France 2 et les attaques de Rachida Dati.
#lispyGopherClimate #interview #transcript #webDev #technology #computerHistory #lisp #commonlisp #harlequin #CLIM
https://screwlisp.small-web.org/show/kmp-lisp-web-testing/
Summary and transcript of the first eight minutes of the hour-long downloadable episode, including Kent's summary of his personal web work in lisp (mostly at Harlequin) through the 80s and 90s.
@vindarel @khinsen (being the missing guests)
@kentpitman @dougmerritt @mdhughes
I'm hand-transcribing and summarizing, so this is something like part 1/6.
@mdhughes
Okay, I got it. To disable the builtin com-quit in an application frame *f*:
(setf (command-enabled 'clim-internals::com-quit *f*) nil)
I'm not sure how cross @jackdaniel will be about me using that internal: How else would you do this?
The same could be done to global-command-table itself:
(remove-command-from-command-table 'clim-internals::com-quit (find-command-table 'global-command-table))
Ha. I was thinking I was busy and could get away with just the claim but I guess it does require some better explanation to make sense or sound credible. Apologies in advance for typos as I'm still rushed for time ...
It was back in the mid 1990s, working for a company that did postscript support for printers. They needed "web-ready printing" and you couldn't get that off-the-shelf, so I wrote an HTML parser and learned postscript and put together a layout engine that could spit out PostScript.
HTML layout was less elaborate then. It didn't handle CSS. Lots of web pages didn't yet need it, thankfully. Or Java. Not sure Javascript existed but if so it wasn't widely used, and didn't get a DOM 'til later. So it was an easier target. On the other hand, it was before they got serious about how to resolve confusions in layout, especially tables. I'm pretty sure browsers didn't yet agree. My recollection is that HTML 4 started to more seriously describe layout, clarifying some vexing lack of constraint, but I think it wasn't out when I did this. It's been awhile, so I might misremember what was and was not involved. This is all approximate from unreliable memory.
But nowadays when people make these things they may get Mozilla off the shelf, so I just mean to say whatever I wrote, however incomplete, I really wrote from scratch. So we could take in HTML and print it. Nothing remarkable now, but a bit more effort then.
Anyway, when I was done it randomly occurred to me I might have authored a web browser. In Common Lisp if anyone is wondering. At the company then called Harlequin. (No, not the Harlequin that does romance novels. The one where I made CLHS. Though its big product was raster image processors, RIPs, for printers, and tools for color matching across printers.) So, to test my belief about what I might have done, I wrote an alternate backend for the HTML layout engine that used the Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM) to display to the screen instad of PostScript.
It was immediately obvious that I'd need to add hyperlink support. That's kind of essential for web browsers and I'd skipped it for the web-ready printing. (I can't recall if I literally ignored link anchors or just turned them to footnotes. I recall it was a case where there were multiple options.)
The other missing thing (there were only two major omissions I noticed at the time, though I'm sure others would've come up--I didn't pursue it as other than a fun hack, in the original meaning of that word) was that at the time all browsers had a panel in the top right that was animated when doing web downloads. (Mosaic had a spining globe, and others did something cute that was distinctive to the brand. It seemed essential to claim victory. More essential than Java or Javascript. Heh.)
So I got a Harlequin icon that Craig Swanson, either then or later Chief Designer of Communications at Harlequn, had drawn, and I dismembered it and rearranged the arms and legs in various images that I assembled into a sequence I could treat as an animation making it dance during page and image loads. It turned up some weird bugs in Harlequin's CLIM because we hadn't allocated resources (locks and whatnot) in a way that could be shared across threads. The Harlequin dance wanted to be separately running, but synchronized. So even though my browser wasn't a product we treated it as QA for CLIM. Probably Richard Billington doing that helpful support? Maybe not alone. Again I'm not sure.
But the work of writing the browser was minimal compared to the printer support and didn't take huge calendar time because it was already kinda done. So I claim bragging rights on an accidental browser. :) There's a dilbert about such a feat, and when I saw it I laughed and thought "yeah, I did that".
https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1995-11-14
Maybe more detail more than you wanted. I hope it doesn't sound like I cheated in making the original claim. I suppose it's a subjective matter what counts or doesn't. :)
Still listening to this week's LispyGopher show. Now you're talking about whether CLIM is "about graphics" or "about present/accept".
Personally, I'd say these operate at different levels of abstraction so aren't in competition with one another.
One of the cool innovations of what was originally the Lisp Machine's "Dynamic Windows" and later became CLIM is this notion that present/accept are a very abstract way of saying that your program has stuff to give or receive without getting too into the weeds on how that will be done.
And yet when you render a specific presentation, it can't just be abstractly, you have to make concrete choices.
Graphics is one way to do it. Graphics offer a nice way to densely pack information in a way most of us have visual hardware to unpack efficiently.
Then again, one of my best friends is blind, and she'd likely dispute the efficiency of graphics as a way to communicate, and that's what's important about the presentation system--that it has rich enough understanding of what it's done that you could ask it, even after-the-fact, to re-present something in a different way that might be better accessible. And yet to do so in a way that doesn't say "different information needed to be presented", but merely "the information that got presented would be more helpful if it could be re-rendered based on different assumptions".
(Of course, it's been decades since I used CLIM. But I assume those kinds of things haven't changed much.)
#lisp y #gopher show in about 3 hours at 000UTC Wednesday on https://anonradio.net:8443/anonradio by @SDF
#climate
- Reading @kentpitman from 2013's series on corporations
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2013/12/corporations-are-not-people.html
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2013/12/we-people-and-corporations.html
in context of their climate crimes. *Amoungst the original topics is protecting reproductive choice which is always important.
- I interview more university students
- More #clim #CommonLisp interface manager introuctory noodling.
- @fstateaudio can I use Noise Therapy for music today?
