[self-interest] Quiet in Self land?

Casey Ransberger casey.obrien.r at gmail.com
Tue Sep 16 12:23:21 UTC 2014


Hey Chris. Yeah, Squeak has that same problem too. The browser that was designed to meet the specifications of NCSA Mosaic. But the code for these things is virtually useless now. 

The browser, and I'm sure that I'm preaching to the converted here, has absolutely eclipsed the complexity of the operating system that it really actually needs to run above. Another way of saying this: the browser has replaced the operating system.

I'm going to go even further with this argument. It isn't comfortable to talk about and I'm not even comfortable saying it, but: systems like Smalltalk and Self were designed above all to be used by people. The web browser as we have it today is an amalgamation of poorly thought out ideas all jammed together to make something, which in its millions of lines of total code (I count dependencies,) still isn't as good at its job as Self or Smalltalk are. 

If we could just magically live in a world where the better ideas won, we wouldn't even be here. We're here because we have a head full of better ideas than the status quo, and we want to fix the status quo. 

The bitch of it all is: without a way to give users what they actually want, (never mind that Facebook is in poor taste) we're basically dead. A bunch of academics, lamenting what went wrong with personal computing. 

Actually, my "worst idea ever" could really turn the tides. Build the next Google Chrome using Self. Maybe as an accident the computer finally gets to be a "bicycle for the mind."

Of course, this is all absolute crazy-talk:)

> On Sep 16, 2014, at 4:44 AM, "Chris Double chris.double at double.co.nz [self-interest]" <self-interest at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 11:39 PM, Casey Ransberger
> casey.obrien.r at gmail.com [self-interest]
> <self-interest at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> >
> > Haha, but that defeats the entire point. The browser must be written in Self. That's how I get to fire my operating system. It could be Self, it could be Squeak, but if we ever built a web browser, we could seriously run on nearly bare metal and get by.
> 
> There's a somewhat ancient web browser written in Self. See here how
> to load/run it:
> 
> <bluishcoder.co.nz/2009/07/27/displaying-images-with-self.html>
> 
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