[Self-interest] slow systems (was: OurSelf trial nowwithout invite!)

[David Ungar]

Paul,

Just skimmed your paper, looks like some great work. I'm wondering what the morals of the story are. What did the experience teach you? Did it change you?

TIA

- David

> On Dec 5, 2020, at 10:55 AM, David Ungar <ungar at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Dec 3, 2020, at 7:46 AM, Paul Chapman <paul at igblan.free-online.co.uk <mailto:paul at igblan.free-online.co.uk>> wrote:
>> 
>> David & David,
>>  
>> > no machine can figure out what I need to be able to see as well as I can
>>  
>> Because I didn’t know in advance what my workflow would look like, I deliberately designed DE so that any of the six windows could display any of the available views. This would be my approach in a non-overlapping Smalltalk environment, which at least partially answers your objection.
> 
> Yes, that's better than the IDE I'm stuck with today. Could I resize them? Change the number of them? Probably hard given the hardware constraints you had.
> 
> 
>>  
>> > Morphic/Self was maybe two hours better at the 3am test than any of the "modern" IDEs
>>  
>> 3am? That’s my primetime. :)
> 
> It varies with my age! Or at least the penalty for going late does.
> 
>>  
>> > Our debugger reified each frame, so you could see as many as you wanted to, at once. Could yank them out, rearrange them, make a column morph of just the slots you wanted to see.
>>  
>> This approach looks great, but I still say it can be achieved with non-overlapping windows. Yes, allow lots of windows. But also allow the user to design and save bespoke non-overlapping layouts which suit her workflow.
> 
> What if the user is a male? ;)
> 
> Seriously, what we had was a big outliner for the whole stack, each frame being a section you could expand. If all you did was expand a few, you had effectively non-overlapping windows, (or panes). But then you could yank them out, so each one was a whole window, or stick them back into a column of entities only related by you. Randy's genius!
> 
>>  
>> > Is the I-APL code available anywhere, such as github?
>>  
>> Sadly, no. It might be on a buried CD-ROM somewhere in my flat. If I ever get around to sorting out my archives, I might find it.
> 
> Yeah, BS (Berkeley Smalltalk), is in the same state, only worse.
> 
>>  
>> I first encountered APL when searching through wastebaskets in room 404 (!) of the Electrical Engineering building at Imperial College, London, for poorly overprinted passwords. It was initially indecipherable, since there were no keywords. So I’d enjoy posting my source code without syntax or semantic definitions to similarly confuse modern programmers. :)
> 
> Let them eat glyphs! :)
> 
>>  
>> I can, however, point you to a copy of my only published paper, on the development of I-APL, delivered at APL88 in Sydney, which I retrieved from Sci-Hub recently because of course it’s otherwise behind a paywall.
>>  
>> http://igblan.co.uk/i-apl/paper.pdf <http://igblan.co.uk/i-apl/paper.pdf>
>>  
>> It calls out some of the claims in my last post as falsehoods! Memory is sometimes unreliable.
> 
> 
> Thanks, I'll take a look! Yes, much of "reality" is falsehoods. As long as I can get up in the morning, and find something to eat in the house reality isn't a total loss.
> 
>>  
>> Cheers, Paul
> 

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