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#smalltalk

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Dimly Lit Corners

#Goals2025

Moving away from the constant upgrade cycle & moving closer to the ideals of #PermaComputing #MalleableSoftware

Design and setup a redundant system of old/used, cheap, low-power devices running ia: #Guix, #Linux, #FreeBSD, #macOS, #HaikuOS, #Plan9Front, #X11, #P9, #NFS, all working together

Become an expert on #MicroControllers #ESP32 #STM32 #RP2040 #MIPS #RiscV

DIY sensors which sing like birds to communicate their status

DIY robots "drones"

Move as much as possible of my computing needs to the #Terminal, #Emacs, #Rio #CLI #TUI #P9

Get an #3DPrinter and learn to use it

Design and build my own portable 8dot #braille terminal & try out if 3x3 or 3x4 dots is also workable.

Design and build my own low-power computers, their OS, and tools

Writing more of my own tools #DIY

#SmallTalk #ObjectPascal #Prolog #Scheme #Racket #CommonLisp #Haskell #Rust #Go #ObjectiveC #Swift

Deploy #LoRa #ReticullumNetwork #RNodes #MeshCore #Meshtastic

Start an #InternetResiliencyClub

Add #Tor, #I2P support by #WebProxy

#SolarPowered #SelfHost over #I2P, #OnionService #Blog #Wiki #Repositories #GopherHole #Darcs #Mercurial

#SelfHost my own #EmailServer, which will only accept email from #KnownServers #CommunityEmail #MutualEmailAcceptance

Share files via #BitTorrent over #I2P

DIY #HomeAutomation
DIY #GardeningAutomation
DIY #GreenHouse

Get a house cat, train the cat, use voice and gestures

Start asking money for advice & technology support

Build/program my own opportunistic and strange cryptocurrency miners #BTC, #XMR, #ZEC, etc #Art

#MakeMoreArt #LearnToDraw #Learn3DModeling #LearnGenerativeArt #LearnToComposeAmbientMusic

#ReCreateJottit #ReCreateInstikiWiki

#WriteMore #PublishMore #Letters, #Essays, #Missives, #Reports, #Treatise

…

#Incomplete#Ongoing#NotFinal
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Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄

Just as old:
Smalltalk-80: Bits of History
archive.org/details/Bits_Of_Hi
#retrocomputing #smalltalk

Slightly less shitty scan of the cover below.

The cover is really just awful. Like, I think less of Smalltalk (which I have professionally programmed in) because of this cover. The more I look the worse it gets.

GFA, made basically solo by Frank, went with all black & text, and it still looks awesome. This, made by a $1B+ corporation, tried to do graphics but couldn't hire a skilled chimp.

Smalltalk-80 Bits of history, words of advice bad tree, balloon, minaret, construction workers view outside window, with fallen wine bottles, little person with magnifying glass. Glenn Krasner
SmalltQlk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice provides insights into the impiementotion of the Smaiitaik-80 system — a personoi, inte¬ grated, interactive programming environment. It will be of value to Smalltalk-80 system implementors, as well as to system program¬ mers in general. This book is organized into four sections. The first section contains papers discussing the history of the Smalltalk-80 system, and in par¬ ticular the development of the Smailtalk-80 Virtual Machine. In the second section the authors discuss their implementation experi¬ ences The third section provides measurements of key parts of the implementations The papers in the fourth section describe the future paths that Smalltalk-80 implementors may take. The authors of these papers are affiliated with five different corpo¬ rations and two universities Glenn Krasner, the editor, is a member of the Software Concepts Group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). This book of implementation considerations is the second in a series of four books on the Smalltalk-80 programming environment Other books in the Addison-Wesley Smalltalk-80 Series: Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation (11371-6) Smalltalk-80: The Interactive Programming Environment (11372-4) Smalltalk-80: Creating a User Interface and Graphical Applications
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Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 🙄

@screwtape @dougmerritt "Objective-C combines the expressive power of C with the speed & performance of Smalltalk." :)

ST is an incredibly powerful tool, but it's trapped in the GUI, and an outdated one, it's not really expressive in code itself. Its performance is so crippling. And you can't disentangle "a program" from the workbench, you ship the workbench to the client, which sucks ass.

Java and Objective-C got the good parts and you can make applications in them.
#smalltalk

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DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

@screwtape
However, the workaround, so that you need not wait an unbounded and unguessable amount of time, is to go to the post's home server.

(The post is about "I like all #programming languages but I have only a few that are my favourites. #Smalltalk is one of those few. But all the current open-source implementations still sport that Smalltalk-80, last-Century chic look....[back then Smalltalk] looked positively fresh, futuristic, and fun. But that look is now 45 years old." Etc.)

In the hopefully unlikely absence of still further errors, it should then be immediately readable -- although I believe *replying* to such a thing still results in that remote-to-you server telling your Mastodon client to take you back to your home server to make the reply.

I forget if I always have to actually follow the person who posted as an additional step in that reply.

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amen zwa, esq.

#Smalltalk #Units

My Phellow Pharo #Programmers who write scientific #software, do have a look at the Units package, which can safely perform mixed-unit computations like the following to obtain the correct result \(63.21 ft\):

\(\texttt{14foot + 15m.}\)

The NASA-Lockheed Mars Climate Orbiter catastrophe could have been avoided, had the probe control software been implemented in Smalltalk.🤣

github.com/zweidenker/Units

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Cli.

GitHubGitHub - zweidenker/Units: A simple package for unitsA simple package for units. Contribute to zweidenker/Units development by creating an account on GitHub.
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amen zwa, esq.

The original #LISP had 7 primitives: \(\texttt{cons}\), \(\texttt{car,}\) \(\texttt{cdr}\), \(\texttt{atom}\), \(\texttt{quote}\), \(\texttt{eq}\), and \(\texttt{cond}\). And the original #Smalltalk syntax could fit on a 5×7 card. That meant a novice could learn the syntax in a matter of minutes, and direct all his efforts to learning how properly to wield the power of that Turing-complete language. This was why, in the 1970s and the 1980s, many college freshmen were taught FP in Scheme (a more modern LISP) and many middle school children were taught OO in Smalltalk. These were surely the best "first" #programming languages.

#FORTRAN and #BASIC were simple, too. FORTRAN, the first high-level language, has been in continuous use since the late 1950s by engineers, who are not keyboard warriors. BASIC was invented in the early 1960s for teaching programming to non-STEM students at Dartmouth. It sired a whole generation of self-taught children in the 1980s.

Compare those to C++, Erlang, Python, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Scala, Rust, Kotlin, and pretty much every language in popular use today. Most consider Python and JavaScript to be the simplest of modern languages. Yet, they are massive, complex languages. No 10-year-old could teach himself those, nor should he.

The original versions of those classic languages cannot be used to solve modern problems. But they should still be taught to youngsters as their first language. Throwing in the kids' faces a modern enterprise language confuses them and discourages them. Consequently, many novices never attain that state of flow, when the joy of programming gushes forth.

#Simplicity is a virtue.

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