From mail at russell-allen.com Mon Nov 16 01:21:30 2020 From: mail at russell-allen.com (Russell Allen) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2020 12:21:30 +1100 Subject: [Self-interest] Self + Kids + iPad Message-ID: Hi guys, I was pottering on my OurSelf system over the weekend (improving the simple web management interface) when my 4 and 6 year olds rampaged up and demanded to be part of what I was doing. So I pulled up a Self world on the iPad (thought the Safari browser) and opened up the factory morph. The 6 yo got the idea pretty quickly, and started dragging little purple circles to the desktop and arranging them in patterns. When I realised he was trying to drag them all, we discussed how it was making a new copy of the circle each time and so there would never stop being more circles if he needed them. We also opened a radar morph, and moved around a bit. This wasn’t as intuitive, as the big jumps didn’t provide visual cues as to what was happening. It looked too much as if we were either moving to another ‘page’ or (scarily) as if we were deleting all of our hard work in placing coloured circles, squares and rectangles. I think an ideal alternative would either show some visual indication of movement, not just a jump, or allow actual dragging of the desktop around. Having used iPads, both kids are really comfortable with dragging things on the screen with their fingers, and in fact keep on trying to drag things around on my computer monitor (even though they know it doesn’t work). At the moment, dragging with the main mouse button down creates the lasso rectangle - I’m tempted to swap that to a second mouse button and make the dragging work to move your viewpoint instead. The iPad of course relies on a a single button ‘mouse’ (ie a finger) and gestures, which doesn’t really map perfectly to the Self expectation of a multi button mouse without gestures. This makes pop up menus difficult (you have to use a VNC menu to temporarily change the meaning of a ‘click’). Some obvious solutions which come to mind are either - create a MacOS style menubar, but this requires the elements on the screen to have a concept of being ‘selected’, and changes the GUI interaction to ‘select then choose action’ - put lots of buttons everywhere to bring up context menus, but this requires, um, lots of buttons. This could look messy, and also would leave us with lots of small buttons. Even I have a bit of trouble clicking morphic buttons on the iPad, my kids really struggled which was frustrating for them. - create an action palette morph, a la Photoshop. The interaction then is ‘select the action (eg draw line, context menu open etc) then click on the element to apply it. This can work, but is maybe a bit modal. The other source of confusion is the way in which the iPad allows multiple fingers dragging at once. Two small fingers trying to drag different morphs simultaneously was interpreted by morphic as a single finger bouncing all over the screen. Fixing this in morphic is conceptually possible I think, but would require complete replumbing of the event handling mechanism - ouch! We also wrote their names using labelMorphs, and dragged them around. Changing the text of the labelMorph required bringing up an outliner, sending a ‘label:’ message etc which was beyond them but the 6yo seemed to understand the ‘Get it’ and ‘Do it’ buttons as a concept, if not the syntax specifics of colons, single quotes etc. clockMorph worked, but needs some way to set the local time. Would be nicer if it was an analogue clock not just a text line. The beep button unfortunately didn’t work - I will have to look into whether we can do sound over VNC somehow. Anyhow, it was fun, Cheers Russell From dpharris at telus.net Mon Nov 16 01:45:15 2020 From: dpharris at telus.net (David Harris) Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2020 17:45:15 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] Self + Kids + iPad In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: That was a fun description. Interesting how showing it to kids exposes its complexities and areas of confusion/difficulties. Definitely food for thought on how to have an \obvious' UI. Thanks David On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 5:21 PM Russell Allen wrote: > Hi guys, > > I was pottering on my OurSelf system over the weekend (improving the > simple web management interface) when my 4 and 6 year olds rampaged up and > demanded to be part of what I was doing. > > So I pulled up a Self world on the iPad (thought the Safari browser) and > opened up the factory morph. The 6 yo got the idea pretty quickly, and > started dragging little purple circles to the desktop and arranging them in > patterns. > > When I realised he was trying to drag them all, we discussed how it was > making a new copy of the circle each time and so there would never stop > being more circles if he needed them. > > We also opened a radar morph, and moved around a bit. This wasn’t as > intuitive, as the big jumps didn’t provide visual cues as to what was > happening. It looked too much as if we were either moving to another ‘page’ > or (scarily) as if we were deleting all of our hard work in placing > coloured circles, squares and rectangles. > > I think an ideal alternative would either show some visual indication of > movement, not just a jump, or allow actual dragging of the desktop around. > Having used iPads, both kids are really comfortable with dragging things on > the screen with their fingers, and in fact keep on trying to drag things > around on my computer monitor (even though they know it doesn’t work). At > the moment, dragging with the main mouse button down creates the lasso > rectangle - I’m tempted to swap that to a second mouse button and make the > dragging work to move your viewpoint instead. > > The iPad of course relies on a a single button ‘mouse’ (ie a finger) and > gestures, which doesn’t really map perfectly to the Self expectation of a > multi button mouse without gestures. This makes pop up menus difficult (you > have to use a VNC menu to temporarily change the meaning of a ‘click’). > > Some obvious solutions which come to mind are either > > - create a MacOS style menubar, but this requires the elements on the > screen to have a concept of being ‘selected’, and changes the GUI > interaction to ‘select then choose action’ > - put lots of buttons everywhere to bring up context menus, but this > requires, um, lots of buttons. This could look messy, and also would leave > us with lots of small buttons. Even I have a bit of trouble clicking > morphic buttons on the iPad, my kids really struggled which was frustrating > for them. > - create an action palette morph, a la Photoshop. The interaction then is > ‘select the action (eg draw line, context menu open etc) then click on the > element to apply it. This can work, but is maybe a bit modal. > > The other source of confusion is the way in which the iPad allows multiple > fingers dragging at once. Two small fingers trying to drag different morphs > simultaneously was interpreted by morphic as a single finger bouncing all > over the screen. Fixing this in morphic is conceptually possible I think, > but would require complete replumbing of the event handling mechanism - > ouch! > > We also wrote their names using labelMorphs, and dragged them around. > Changing the text of the labelMorph required bringing up an outliner, > sending a ‘label:’ message etc which was beyond them but the 6yo seemed to > understand the ‘Get it’ and ‘Do it’ buttons as a concept, if not the syntax > specifics of colons, single quotes etc. > > clockMorph worked, but needs some way to set the local time. Would be > nicer if it was an analogue clock not just a text line. The beep button > unfortunately didn’t work - I will have to look into whether we can do > sound over VNC somehow. > > Anyhow, it was fun, > Cheers Russell > > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From drdpharris at gmail.com Mon Nov 16 01:43:00 2020 From: drdpharris at gmail.com (David Harris) Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2020 17:43:00 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] Self + Kids + iPad In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: That was a fun description. Interesting how showing it to kids exposes its complexities and areas of confusion/difficulties. Definitely food for thought on how to have an \obvious' UI. Thanks David On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 5:21 PM Russell Allen wrote: > Hi guys, > > I was pottering on my OurSelf system over the weekend (improving the > simple web management interface) when my 4 and 6 year olds rampaged up and > demanded to be part of what I was doing. > > So I pulled up a Self world on the iPad (thought the Safari browser) and > opened up the factory morph. The 6 yo got the idea pretty quickly, and > started dragging little purple circles to the desktop and arranging them in > patterns. > > When I realised he was trying to drag them all, we discussed how it was > making a new copy of the circle each time and so there would never stop > being more circles if he needed them. > > We also opened a radar morph, and moved around a bit. This wasn’t as > intuitive, as the big jumps didn’t provide visual cues as to what was > happening. It looked too much as if we were either moving to another ‘page’ > or (scarily) as if we were deleting all of our hard work in placing > coloured circles, squares and rectangles. > > I think an ideal alternative would either show some visual indication of > movement, not just a jump, or allow actual dragging of the desktop around. > Having used iPads, both kids are really comfortable with dragging things on > the screen with their fingers, and in fact keep on trying to drag things > around on my computer monitor (even though they know it doesn’t work). At > the moment, dragging with the main mouse button down creates the lasso > rectangle - I’m tempted to swap that to a second mouse button and make the > dragging work to move your viewpoint instead. > > The iPad of course relies on a a single button ‘mouse’ (ie a finger) and > gestures, which doesn’t really map perfectly to the Self expectation of a > multi button mouse without gestures. This makes pop up menus difficult (you > have to use a VNC menu to temporarily change the meaning of a ‘click’). > > Some obvious solutions which come to mind are either > > - create a MacOS style menubar, but this requires the elements on the > screen to have a concept of being ‘selected’, and changes the GUI > interaction to ‘select then choose action’ > - put lots of buttons everywhere to bring up context menus, but this > requires, um, lots of buttons. This could look messy, and also would leave > us with lots of small buttons. Even I have a bit of trouble clicking > morphic buttons on the iPad, my kids really struggled which was frustrating > for them. > - create an action palette morph, a la Photoshop. The interaction then is > ‘select the action (eg draw line, context menu open etc) then click on the > element to apply it. This can work, but is maybe a bit modal. > > The other source of confusion is the way in which the iPad allows multiple > fingers dragging at once. Two small fingers trying to drag different morphs > simultaneously was interpreted by morphic as a single finger bouncing all > over the screen. Fixing this in morphic is conceptually possible I think, > but would require complete replumbing of the event handling mechanism - > ouch! > > We also wrote their names using labelMorphs, and dragged them around. > Changing the text of the labelMorph required bringing up an outliner, > sending a ‘label:’ message etc which was beyond them but the 6yo seemed to > understand the ‘Get it’ and ‘Do it’ buttons as a concept, if not the syntax > specifics of colons, single quotes etc. > > clockMorph worked, but needs some way to set the local time. Would be > nicer if it was an analogue clock not just a text line. The beep button > unfortunately didn’t work - I will have to look into whether we can do > sound over VNC somehow. > > Anyhow, it was fun, > Cheers Russell > > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From baltasarq at gmail.com Mon Nov 16 12:06:09 2020 From: baltasarq at gmail.com (Baltasar =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Garc=EDa?= Perez-Schofield) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2020 13:06:09 +0100 Subject: [Self-interest] Self + Kids + iPad In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <15407c867506e7fdef37976fc2d08777eea75055.camel@gmail.com> Hi, there, > I was pottering on my OurSelf system over the weekend (improving the > simple web management interface) when my 4 and 6 year olds rampaged > up and demanded to be part of what I was doing. Really interesting experience. Kids can give important hints about how an interface can be used. Thnigs that we normally take for granted. However, such as the example commented when they try to drag on the computer's monitor, one should not let himself carried out too much. The really interesting thing is that they could immerse themselves on a visual programming language because of its interface capabilities. -- Baltasar From notebook22312 at gmail.com Mon Nov 16 14:41:31 2020 From: notebook22312 at gmail.com (notebook) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2020 23:41:31 +0900 Subject: [Self-interest] Self + Kids + iPad In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Dear Russell: After skimming through your description I started to feel like I'm not using self the way I should. I can't imagine how anyone under 16 could use self the way I do. If possible, it would be nice if , next time, you could record how your children are playing with self and put it on youtube. Regards Chris On 2020/11/16 10:21, Russell Allen wrote: > Hi guys, > > I was pottering on my OurSelf system over the weekend (improving the simple web management interface) when my 4 and 6 year olds rampaged up and demanded to be part of what I was doing. > > So I pulled up a Self world on the iPad (thought the Safari browser) and opened up the factory morph. The 6 yo got the idea pretty quickly, and started dragging little purple circles to the desktop and arranging them in patterns. > > When I realised he was trying to drag them all, we discussed how it was making a new copy of the circle each time and so there would never stop being more circles if he needed them. > > We also opened a radar morph, and moved around a bit. This wasn’t as intuitive, as the big jumps didn’t provide visual cues as to what was happening. It looked too much as if we were either moving to another ‘page’ or (scarily) as if we were deleting all of our hard work in placing coloured circles, squares and rectangles. > > I think an ideal alternative would either show some visual indication of movement, not just a jump, or allow actual dragging of the desktop around. Having used iPads, both kids are really comfortable with dragging things on the screen with their fingers, and in fact keep on trying to drag things around on my computer monitor (even though they know it doesn’t work). At the moment, dragging with the main mouse button down creates the lasso rectangle - I’m tempted to swap that to a second mouse button and make the dragging work to move your viewpoint instead. > > The iPad of course relies on a a single button ‘mouse’ (ie a finger) and gestures, which doesn’t really map perfectly to the Self expectation of a multi button mouse without gestures. This makes pop up menus difficult (you have to use a VNC menu to temporarily change the meaning of a ‘click’). > > Some obvious solutions which come to mind are either > > - create a MacOS style menubar, but this requires the elements on the screen to have a concept of being ‘selected’, and changes the GUI interaction to ‘select then choose action’ > - put lots of buttons everywhere to bring up context menus, but this requires, um, lots of buttons. This could look messy, and also would leave us with lots of small buttons. Even I have a bit of trouble clicking morphic buttons on the iPad, my kids really struggled which was frustrating for them. > - create an action palette morph, a la Photoshop. The interaction then is ‘select the action (eg draw line, context menu open etc) then click on the element to apply it. This can work, but is maybe a bit modal. > > The other source of confusion is the way in which the iPad allows multiple fingers dragging at once. Two small fingers trying to drag different morphs simultaneously was interpreted by morphic as a single finger bouncing all over the screen. Fixing this in morphic is conceptually possible I think, but would require complete replumbing of the event handling mechanism - ouch! > > We also wrote their names using labelMorphs, and dragged them around. Changing the text of the labelMorph required bringing up an outliner, sending a ‘label:’ message etc which was beyond them but the 6yo seemed to understand the ‘Get it’ and ‘Do it’ buttons as a concept, if not the syntax specifics of colons, single quotes etc. > > clockMorph worked, but needs some way to set the local time. Would be nicer if it was an analogue clock not just a text line. The beep button unfortunately didn’t work - I will have to look into whether we can do sound over VNC somehow. > > Anyhow, it was fun, > Cheers Russell > > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest > From randy.smith at gmail.com Mon Nov 16 15:02:06 2020 From: randy.smith at gmail.com (Randy) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2020 07:02:06 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] Self + Kids + iPad In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1EB19BC1-368A-4B98-9C31-0E22604AAE7A@gmail.com> Such a great story! I seem to recall you can left mouse down over the picture on the radar view to drag around for continuous motion, but can’t recall if that was an “official” hack or what. I’m on my phone now but couldn’t log in to the web-based Self (Silicon Valley branch) for some reason—just a gray screen. (?) —Randy > On Nov 15, 2020, at 5:21 PM, Russell Allen wrote: > > Hi guys, > > I was pottering on my OurSelf system over the weekend (improving the simple web management interface) when my 4 and 6 year olds rampaged up and demanded to be part of what I was doing. > > So I pulled up a Self world on the iPad (thought the Safari browser) and opened up the factory morph. The 6 yo got the idea pretty quickly, and started dragging little purple circles to the desktop and arranging them in patterns. > > When I realised he was trying to drag them all, we discussed how it was making a new copy of the circle each time and so there would never stop being more circles if he needed them. > > We also opened a radar morph, and moved around a bit. This wasn’t as intuitive, as the big jumps didn’t provide visual cues as to what was happening. It looked too much as if we were either moving to another ‘page’ or (scarily) as if we were deleting all of our hard work in placing coloured circles, squares and rectangles. > > I think an ideal alternative would either show some visual indication of movement, not just a jump, or allow actual dragging of the desktop around. Having used iPads, both kids are really comfortable with dragging things on the screen with their fingers, and in fact keep on trying to drag things around on my computer monitor (even though they know it doesn’t work). At the moment, dragging with the main mouse button down creates the lasso rectangle - I’m tempted to swap that to a second mouse button and make the dragging work to move your viewpoint instead. > > The iPad of course relies on a a single button ‘mouse’ (ie a finger) and gestures, which doesn’t really map perfectly to the Self expectation of a multi button mouse without gestures. This makes pop up menus difficult (you have to use a VNC menu to temporarily change the meaning of a ‘click’). > > Some obvious solutions which come to mind are either > > - create a MacOS style menubar, but this requires the elements on the screen to have a concept of being ‘selected’, and changes the GUI interaction to ‘select then choose action’ > - put lots of buttons everywhere to bring up context menus, but this requires, um, lots of buttons. This could look messy, and also would leave us with lots of small buttons. Even I have a bit of trouble clicking morphic buttons on the iPad, my kids really struggled which was frustrating for them. > - create an action palette morph, a la Photoshop. The interaction then is ‘select the action (eg draw line, context menu open etc) then click on the element to apply it. This can work, but is maybe a bit modal. > > The other source of confusion is the way in which the iPad allows multiple fingers dragging at once. Two small fingers trying to drag different morphs simultaneously was interpreted by morphic as a single finger bouncing all over the screen. Fixing this in morphic is conceptually possible I think, but would require complete replumbing of the event handling mechanism - ouch! > > We also wrote their names using labelMorphs, and dragged them around. Changing the text of the labelMorph required bringing up an outliner, sending a ‘label:’ message etc which was beyond them but the 6yo seemed to understand the ‘Get it’ and ‘Do it’ buttons as a concept, if not the syntax specifics of colons, single quotes etc. > > clockMorph worked, but needs some way to set the local time. Would be nicer if it was an analogue clock not just a text line. The beep button unfortunately didn’t work - I will have to look into whether we can do sound over VNC somehow. > > Anyhow, it was fun, > Cheers Russell > > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest From mail at russell-allen.com Mon Nov 16 23:28:46 2020 From: mail at russell-allen.com (Russell Allen) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2020 10:28:46 +1100 Subject: [Self-interest] Self + Kids + iPad In-Reply-To: <1EB19BC1-368A-4B98-9C31-0E22604AAE7A@gmail.com> References: <1EB19BC1-368A-4B98-9C31-0E22604AAE7A@gmail.com> Message-ID: <52086CC6-902C-47C1-AD2D-273FA0054459@russell-allen.com> Technical digression: The current difficulty with OurSelf is that I need to share Self snapshots between multiple servers, so they can be updated and run. The first obvious solution was to have a folder full of snapshots and scp them to the server just before use. However I need to be able to develop the Self worlds as well as run them, which means we need not just the snapshot but the Self Git tree. Which is about 180M. And I would like to be able in the future to have a snapshot+storage which includes images etc, which could be much larger again. It takes too long to copy 180M from one side of the world to another - it turns starting a Self world from ‘click and it happens’ to ‘click and wait for countdown to finish a couple of minutes later’. I was trying to keep it under 30 seconds. So instead, I mounted a shared directory on each node with sshfs. This syncs each files as needed, and all we need to get started is the snapshot at approx 10M. All good. The problem now is that sshfs isn’t stable enough. Either it crashes and has to be restarted, or more often it loses connection, and when it does that it forgets its cache. This can mean that the snapshot doesn’t arrive until after the Self VM tries to look for it, causing Self not to start properly which is what you just suffered from now. Proper cloud systems I think use distributed replicated object stores such as Ceph or GlusterFS. But proper cloud systems are running Kubernetes on a fleet of a thousand servers and have dedicated people who know what they’re doing tending them. :) I’m almost done on a poor man’s replicated cloud storage which involves flinging incremental ZFS snapshots around. Hopefully this will solve the problem. :) Russell > On 17 Nov 2020, at 2:02 am, Randy wrote: > > Such a great story! I seem to recall you can left mouse down over the picture on the radar view to drag around for continuous motion, but can’t recall if that was an “official” hack or what. > > I’m on my phone now but couldn’t log in to the web-based Self (Silicon Valley branch) for some reason—just a gray screen. (?) > > —Randy > > >> On Nov 15, 2020, at 5:21 PM, Russell Allen wrote: >> >> Hi guys, >> >> I was pottering on my OurSelf system over the weekend (improving the simple web management interface) when my 4 and 6 year olds rampaged up and demanded to be part of what I was doing. >> >> So I pulled up a Self world on the iPad (thought the Safari browser) and opened up the factory morph. The 6 yo got the idea pretty quickly, and started dragging little purple circles to the desktop and arranging them in patterns. >> >> When I realised he was trying to drag them all, we discussed how it was making a new copy of the circle each time and so there would never stop being more circles if he needed them. >> >> We also opened a radar morph, and moved around a bit. This wasn’t as intuitive, as the big jumps didn’t provide visual cues as to what was happening. It looked too much as if we were either moving to another ‘page’ or (scarily) as if we were deleting all of our hard work in placing coloured circles, squares and rectangles. >> >> I think an ideal alternative would either show some visual indication of movement, not just a jump, or allow actual dragging of the desktop around. Having used iPads, both kids are really comfortable with dragging things on the screen with their fingers, and in fact keep on trying to drag things around on my computer monitor (even though they know it doesn’t work). At the moment, dragging with the main mouse button down creates the lasso rectangle - I’m tempted to swap that to a second mouse button and make the dragging work to move your viewpoint instead. >> >> The iPad of course relies on a a single button ‘mouse’ (ie a finger) and gestures, which doesn’t really map perfectly to the Self expectation of a multi button mouse without gestures. This makes pop up menus difficult (you have to use a VNC menu to temporarily change the meaning of a ‘click’). >> >> Some obvious solutions which come to mind are either >> >> - create a MacOS style menubar, but this requires the elements on the screen to have a concept of being ‘selected’, and changes the GUI interaction to ‘select then choose action’ >> - put lots of buttons everywhere to bring up context menus, but this requires, um, lots of buttons. This could look messy, and also would leave us with lots of small buttons. Even I have a bit of trouble clicking morphic buttons on the iPad, my kids really struggled which was frustrating for them. >> - create an action palette morph, a la Photoshop. The interaction then is ‘select the action (eg draw line, context menu open etc) then click on the element to apply it. This can work, but is maybe a bit modal. >> >> The other source of confusion is the way in which the iPad allows multiple fingers dragging at once. Two small fingers trying to drag different morphs simultaneously was interpreted by morphic as a single finger bouncing all over the screen. Fixing this in morphic is conceptually possible I think, but would require complete replumbing of the event handling mechanism - ouch! >> >> We also wrote their names using labelMorphs, and dragged them around. Changing the text of the labelMorph required bringing up an outliner, sending a ‘label:’ message etc which was beyond them but the 6yo seemed to understand the ‘Get it’ and ‘Do it’ buttons as a concept, if not the syntax specifics of colons, single quotes etc. >> >> clockMorph worked, but needs some way to set the local time. Would be nicer if it was an analogue clock not just a text line. The beep button unfortunately didn’t work - I will have to look into whether we can do sound over VNC somehow. >> >> Anyhow, it was fun, >> Cheers Russell >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Self-interest mailing list >> Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org >> http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest From baltasarq at gmail.com Tue Nov 17 11:32:09 2020 From: baltasarq at gmail.com (Baltasar =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Garc=EDa?= Perez-Schofield) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2020 12:32:09 +0100 Subject: [Self-interest] Self + Kids + iPad In-Reply-To: <52086CC6-902C-47C1-AD2D-273FA0054459@russell-allen.com> References: <1EB19BC1-368A-4B98-9C31-0E22604AAE7A@gmail.com> <52086CC6-902C-47C1-AD2D-273FA0054459@russell-allen.com> Message-ID: Hi there, > The current difficulty with OurSelf is that I need to share Self > snapshots between multiple servers, so they can be updated and run. > The first obvious solution was to have a folder full of snapshots and > scp them to the server just before use. However I need to be able to > develop the Self worlds as well as run them, which means we need not > just the snapshot but the Self Git tree. Which is about 180M. And I > would like to be able in the future to have a snapshot+storage which > includes images etc, which could be much larger again. This is the main weakness of Self and other similar programming languages which rely on a snapshot (Squeak, SmallTalk). This could be solved by a true persistent system. But it is even worse, since if you want to just open a browser, then (AFAIK) it has to be included in your snapshot. In my opinion, 10MB just to be able to send a message "Hello world!" and see it replicated on screen is too much. -- Baltasar From ungar at mac.com Tue Nov 17 17:49:56 2020 From: ungar at mac.com (David Ungar) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2020 09:49:56 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] Self + Kids + iPad In-Reply-To: References: <1EB19BC1-368A-4B98-9C31-0E22604AAE7A@gmail.com> <52086CC6-902C-47C1-AD2D-273FA0054459@russell-allen.com> Message-ID: <23ED959C-C5C2-4951-A823-9191E15B13E7@mac.com> Does the existence of the Transporter factor into your thoughts? > On Nov 17, 2020, at 3:32 AM, Baltasar García Perez-Schofield wrote: > > > Hi there, > > > >> The current difficulty with OurSelf is that I need to share Self >> snapshots between multiple servers, so they can be updated and run. >> The first obvious solution was to have a folder full of snapshots and >> scp them to the server just before use. However I need to be able to >> develop the Self worlds as well as run them, which means we need not >> just the snapshot but the Self Git tree. Which is about 180M. And I >> would like to be able in the future to have a snapshot+storage which >> includes images etc, which could be much larger again. > > This is the main weakness of Self and other similar programming > languages which rely on a snapshot (Squeak, SmallTalk). This could be > solved by a true persistent system. > > But it is even worse, since if you want to just open a browser, then > (AFAIK) it has to be included in your snapshot. > > In my opinion, 10MB just to be able to send a message "Hello world!" > and see it replicated on screen is too much. > > -- Baltasar > > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest From kjx at ecs.vuw.ac.nz Tue Nov 17 22:51:10 2020 From: kjx at ecs.vuw.ac.nz (kjx) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2020 11:51:10 +1300 Subject: [Self-interest] Self + Kids + iPad In-Reply-To: <23ED959C-C5C2-4951-A823-9191E15B13E7@mac.com> References: <1EB19BC1-368A-4B98-9C31-0E22604AAE7A@gmail.com> <52086CC6-902C-47C1-AD2D-273FA0054459@russell-allen.com> <23ED959C-C5C2-4951-A823-9191E15B13E7@mac.com> Message-ID: <78F7A83F-DD3C-4C67-8F87-5D083DF4BF8B@ecs.vuw.ac.nz> It gives me more KORZ to deconstrut the underlying model of Self... > On 18/11/2020, at 6:49AM, David Ungar wrote: > > Does the existence of the Transporter factor into your thoughts? > >> On Nov 17, 2020, at 3:32 AM, Baltasar García Perez-Schofield wrote: >> >> >> Hi there, >> >> >> >>> The current difficulty with OurSelf is that I need to share Self >>> snapshots between multiple servers, so they can be updated and run. >>> The first obvious solution was to have a folder full of snapshots and >>> scp them to the server just before use. However I need to be able to >>> develop the Self worlds as well as run them, which means we need not >>> just the snapshot but the Self Git tree. Which is about 180M. And I >>> would like to be able in the future to have a snapshot+storage which >>> includes images etc, which could be much larger again. >> >> This is the main weakness of Self and other similar programming >> languages which rely on a snapshot (Squeak, SmallTalk). This could be >> solved by a true persistent system. >> >> But it is even worse, since if you want to just open a browser, then >> (AFAIK) it has to be included in your snapshot. >> >> In my opinion, 10MB just to be able to send a message "Hello world!" >> and see it replicated on screen is too much. >> >> -- Baltasar >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Self-interest mailing list >> Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org >> http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest > From mail at russell-allen.com Wed Nov 18 06:44:00 2020 From: mail at russell-allen.com (Russell Allen) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2020 17:44:00 +1100 Subject: [Self-interest] Self + Kids + iPad In-Reply-To: References: <1EB19BC1-368A-4B98-9C31-0E22604AAE7A@gmail.com> <52086CC6-902C-47C1-AD2D-273FA0054459@russell-allen.com> Message-ID: > On 17 Nov 2020, at 10:32 pm, Baltasar García Perez-Schofield wrote: >> The current difficulty with OurSelf is that I need to share Self >> snapshots between multiple servers, so they can be updated and run. >> The first obvious solution was to have a folder full of snapshots and >> scp them to the server just before use. However I need to be able to >> develop the Self worlds as well as run them, which means we need not >> just the snapshot but the Self Git tree. Which is about 180M. And I >> would like to be able in the future to have a snapshot+storage which >> includes images etc, which could be much larger again. > > This is the main weakness of Self and other similar programming > languages which rely on a snapshot (Squeak, SmallTalk). This could be > solved by a true persistent system. What do you mean by a true persistent system? In this case at least the problem isn’t the snapshot itself, because 10MB is tiny, but the need to have the full GitHub repo (180M) and maybe in future, also having supporting data (eg a SQL database? Image files? My MP3 collection? All my company’s video training files?) as part of the package of stuff available to that 10MB snapshot. OurSelf is treating Self worlds less like a ‘Hello World” binary and more like a system image for a shared desktop, eg AWS Workspaces or equivalent. So the comparison is more like 10MB Self snapshot vs 2GB Ubuntu system image, or a docker image… I’ve been trying to keep start time under 30s for each Self instance, which will be at the price of disk size by aggressively replicating (but disk space is cheap). Some actions will take longer though. A brand new 10GB bundle of Self snapshot + supporting data will take time to send from one server to another no matter how many tricks I use. Cheers Russell > -- Baltasar > > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest From baltasarq at gmail.com Wed Nov 18 13:10:06 2020 From: baltasarq at gmail.com (Baltasar =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Garc=EDa?= Perez-Schofield) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2020 14:10:06 +0100 Subject: [Self-interest] Self + Kids + iPad In-Reply-To: References: <1EB19BC1-368A-4B98-9C31-0E22604AAE7A@gmail.com> <52086CC6-902C-47C1-AD2D-273FA0054459@russell-allen.com> Message-ID: <75a9860c1ee0d962cf556308793f4439d997772a.camel@gmail.com> Hi, > What do you mean by a true persistent system? An orthogonal persistence system determines the orthogonal roots of persistence, calculates their persistent closure (the set of objects needed for the former to make sense), and stores and retrieves them on/from disk in a transparent way. A memory snapshot more or less does the trick, but, as happens in the case of Self, involves a much bigger memory size to deal with. It also makes it more difficult to share a set of objects (data), with other people, which I guess that is the transporter is for. -- Baltasar From lynixliu at yahoo.com Thu Nov 19 00:53:04 2020 From: lynixliu at yahoo.com (Yang Liu) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 13:53:04 +1300 Subject: [Self-interest] Self + Kids + iPad In-Reply-To: <75a9860c1ee0d962cf556308793f4439d997772a.camel@gmail.com> References: <75a9860c1ee0d962cf556308793f4439d997772a.camel@gmail.com> Message-ID: Hi, Snapshot is the base concept of Self and the Transporter can import/export object from/to files. Is there possible to introduce a proxy or router to transparently get/set objects from the remote snapshots. So each snapshot can work as the node in a p2p network. It’s easier for sharing and no big changes to the Self system itself. — Yang > On 19/11/2020, at 2:10 AM, Baltasar García Perez-Schofield wrote: > > Hi, > >> What do you mean by a true persistent system? > > An orthogonal persistence system determines the orthogonal roots of > persistence, calculates their persistent closure (the set of objects > needed for the former to make sense), and stores and retrieves them > on/from disk in a transparent way. > > A memory snapshot more or less does the trick, but, as happens in the > case of Self, involves a much bigger memory size to deal with. It also > makes it more difficult to share a set of objects (data), with other > people, which I guess that is the transporter is for. > > -- Baltasar > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mail at russell-allen.com Wed Nov 25 04:29:01 2020 From: mail at russell-allen.com (Russell Allen) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 15:29:01 +1100 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! Message-ID: <43E1F568-8941-4739-A832-15DC2CA9F908@russell-allen.com> I’m reasonably confident that although it might not always work, the OurSelf code won’t screw up my servers in a way which is hard to fix, so I’ve removed the need for an invite to try out an online Self world. https://ourself.io Let me know if you try it and it works (or doesn’t!). As a reminder, you choose a server near you and get a link to a morphic desktop, and also to a console. After 20 minutes or so the trial is deleted so don’t worry about breaking anything. Also if you are interested in playing more seriously (saving snapshots etc) or want to try a shared world, send me an email. The existing trial world is very boring! My next step is to start to add interesting applications to play around with. :) Russell From ungar at mac.com Wed Nov 25 04:46:14 2020 From: ungar at mac.com (David Ungar) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 20:46:14 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <43E1F568-8941-4739-A832-15DC2CA9F908@russell-allen.com> References: <43E1F568-8941-4739-A832-15DC2CA9F908@russell-allen.com> Message-ID: <810D6A8D-A62F-4A75-8E75-19F08C8A249D@mac.com> I'm amazed! I was able to get a gas tank going. And turned on the spy, but it obliterated the desktop, till I turned it off with the console. Wow!! What would it take to get ui1 to work? Where is this really running? How is it working?? Thank you so very much! - David > On Nov 24, 2020, at 8:29 PM, Russell Allen wrote: > > I’m reasonably confident that although it might not always work, the OurSelf code won’t screw up my servers in a way which is hard to fix, so I’ve removed the need for an invite to try out an online Self world. > > https://ourself.io > > Let me know if you try it and it works (or doesn’t!). As a reminder, you choose a server near you and get a link to a morphic desktop, and also to a console. After 20 minutes or so the trial is deleted so don’t worry about breaking anything. > > Also if you are interested in playing more seriously (saving snapshots etc) or want to try a shared world, send me an email. > > The existing trial world is very boring! My next step is to start to add interesting applications to play around with. > > :) Russell > > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest From mail at russell-allen.com Wed Nov 25 05:47:32 2020 From: mail at russell-allen.com (Russell Allen) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 16:47:32 +1100 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <810D6A8D-A62F-4A75-8E75-19F08C8A249D@mac.com> References: <43E1F568-8941-4739-A832-15DC2CA9F908@russell-allen.com> <810D6A8D-A62F-4A75-8E75-19F08C8A249D@mac.com> Message-ID: <02F157EC-AC85-4F8F-83E3-91C5DF56B68F@russell-allen.com> The short story is: 4 cheap cloud servers, running in Sydney, Silicon Valley and Tokyo and one in Sydney as a manager. When you start a trial Self world through the webpage, the Self management code connects to one of those servers, and runs Self with your snapshot in a security jail. The Self VM connects to a X11 server, which is turned into a VNC remote desktop connection, which is then carried over a WebSocket to your browser. There are quite a few moving parts unfortunately. There are a strictly limited number of Self instances which can run at any one time, but there’s scope to scale up or out. So what you see in your browser is effectively a X11 desktop with a full screen window open, which is why when you started the spy it covered up the Self desktop. I think there is a key combo which you could have used to switch back and forth. I hadn’t thought about ui1, but it it should be possible to get it to work since it uses X11. If I get some time I’ll try it out. On the back end, ie not the trial worlds, each running Self instance has access to a persistent directory which can be used for the transporter so I have been developing the system recently entirely through the web. I can export modules to a git repo then push that to GitHub, and can also rebuild my snapshot from those sources from within Self (or by cheating and ssh-ing into the server). What you probably didn’t try was the morphic multiuser code. Jason Grossman and I did a test the other day and it worked nicely. The system gave us both a username/password and a url to log on. We then each got a view of the shared desktop etc. It would be interesting to see how many people we can do at once. Russell > On 25 Nov 2020, at 3:46 pm, David Ungar wrote: > > I'm amazed! I was able to get a gas tank going. And turned on the spy, but it obliterated the desktop, till I turned it off with the console. Wow!! > > What would it take to get ui1 to work? > > Where is this really running? How is it working?? > > Thank you so very much! > > - David > >> On Nov 24, 2020, at 8:29 PM, Russell Allen wrote: >> >> I’m reasonably confident that although it might not always work, the OurSelf code won’t screw up my servers in a way which is hard to fix, so I’ve removed the need for an invite to try out an online Self world. >> >> https://ourself.io >> >> Let me know if you try it and it works (or doesn’t!). As a reminder, you choose a server near you and get a link to a morphic desktop, and also to a console. After 20 minutes or so the trial is deleted so don’t worry about breaking anything. >> >> Also if you are interested in playing more seriously (saving snapshots etc) or want to try a shared world, send me an email. >> >> The existing trial world is very boring! My next step is to start to add interesting applications to play around with. >> >> :) Russell >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Self-interest mailing list >> Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org >> http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest > From mario at wolczko.com Wed Nov 25 06:17:27 2020 From: mario at wolczko.com (Mario Wolczko) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 22:17:27 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <02F157EC-AC85-4F8F-83E3-91C5DF56B68F@russell-allen.com> References: <02F157EC-AC85-4F8F-83E3-91C5DF56B68F@russell-allen.com> Message-ID: <523067FC-6A9F-4921-A7D2-7D9660CB8E63@wolczko.com> Dave has probably forgotten about this, but shortly after 4.0 was released in ‘95 I set up a SPARCstation with Self on the open internet which could be accessed via X11 from anywhere in the world. For a few years Sun Labs owned and operated sunlabs.com and staff could easily get a machine on the Internet without a firewall or NAT. I set up a password-less account which would run a copy of a clean image in a chroot-ed directory. When the session ended everything was wiped and reset to a clean state. As might be expected in hindsight, net bandwidth and latency to most parts of the world was insufficient back then. After a couple of years one or more machines in that domain got hijacked for nefarious purposes and the whole experiment was shut down shortly after that. I wonder if there’s anyone reading this who remembers trying it out (kjx or Jecel, perhaps?). From kjx at ecs.vuw.ac.nz Wed Nov 25 11:10:23 2020 From: kjx at ecs.vuw.ac.nz (kjx) Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 00:10:23 +1300 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <523067FC-6A9F-4921-A7D2-7D9660CB8E63@wolczko.com> References: <02F157EC-AC85-4F8F-83E3-91C5DF56B68F@russell-allen.com> <523067FC-6A9F-4921-A7D2-7D9660CB8E63@wolczko.com> Message-ID: You know, I think I woud've at least tried it - but I have a vague memory of it not really working very well at all across the pacific - J > On 25/11/2020, at 19:17PM, Mario Wolczko wrote: > > (kjx or Jecel, perhaps?). From randy.smith at gmail.com Wed Nov 25 15:23:29 2020 From: randy.smith at gmail.com (Randy) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 07:23:29 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <43E1F568-8941-4739-A832-15DC2CA9F908@russell-allen.com> References: <43E1F568-8941-4739-A832-15DC2CA9F908@russell-allen.com> Message-ID: <2110413A-4916-4745-913C-0259ED730BE4@gmail.com> Very cool. When I made the radar view, I never thought I’d be using it at an insomniatic moment while laying on my back in bed poking at a small glass slab! —Randy > On Nov 24, 2020, at 8:29 PM, Russell Allen wrote: > > I’m reasonably confident that although it might not always work, the OurSelf code won’t screw up my servers in a way which is hard to fix, so I’ve removed the need for an invite to try out an online Self world. > > https://ourself.io > > Let me know if you try it and it works (or doesn’t!). As a reminder, you choose a server near you and get a link to a morphic desktop, and also to a console. After 20 minutes or so the trial is deleted so don’t worry about breaking anything. > > Also if you are interested in playing more seriously (saving snapshots etc) or want to try a shared world, send me an email. > > The existing trial world is very boring! My next step is to start to add interesting applications to play around with. > > :) Russell > > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest From ungar at mac.com Wed Nov 25 16:54:28 2020 From: ungar at mac.com (David Ungar) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 08:54:28 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <02F157EC-AC85-4F8F-83E3-91C5DF56B68F@russell-allen.com> References: <43E1F568-8941-4739-A832-15DC2CA9F908@russell-allen.com> <810D6A8D-A62F-4A75-8E75-19F08C8A249D@mac.com> <02F157EC-AC85-4F8F-83E3-91C5DF56B68F@russell-allen.com> Message-ID: Interleaving... > On Nov 24, 2020, at 9:47 PM, Russell Allen wrote: > > The short story is: > > 4 cheap cloud servers, running in Sydney, Silicon Valley and Tokyo and one in Sydney as a manager. When you start a trial Self world through the webpage, the Self management code connects to one of those servers, and runs Self with your snapshot in a security jail. The Self VM connects to a X11 server, which is turned into a VNC remote desktop connection, which is then carried over a WebSocket to your browser. There are quite a few moving parts unfortunately. Wow, amazing. I'm impressed. > > There are a strictly limited number of Self instances which can run at any one time, but there’s scope to scale up or out. The future is even better than flying cars. > > So what you see in your browser is effectively a X11 desktop with a full screen window open, which is why when you started the spy it covered up the Self desktop. I think there is a key combo which you could have used to switch back and forth. Oh, thanks. > > I hadn’t thought about ui1, but it it should be possible to get it to work since it uses X11. If I get some time I’ll try it out. Thanks in advance. > > On the back end, ie not the trial worlds, each running Self instance has access to a persistent directory which can be used for the transporter so I have been developing the system recently entirely through the web. I can export modules to a git repo then push that to GitHub, and can also rebuild my snapshot from those sources from within Self (or by cheating and ssh-ing into the server). Very cool! > > What you probably didn’t try was the morphic multiuser code. Jason Grossman and I did a test the other day and it worked nicely. The system gave us both a username/password and a url to log on. We then each got a view of the shared desktop etc. It would be interesting to see how many people we can do at once. Yes, it would. No, didn't try it. Wow, Russell. I'm really touched to see this. Thanks again! - David > > Russell > > >> On 25 Nov 2020, at 3:46 pm, David Ungar wrote: >> >> I'm amazed! I was able to get a gas tank going. And turned on the spy, but it obliterated the desktop, till I turned it off with the console. Wow!! >> >> What would it take to get ui1 to work? >> >> Where is this really running? How is it working?? >> >> Thank you so very much! >> >> - David >> >>> On Nov 24, 2020, at 8:29 PM, Russell Allen wrote: >>> >>> I’m reasonably confident that although it might not always work, the OurSelf code won’t screw up my servers in a way which is hard to fix, so I’ve removed the need for an invite to try out an online Self world. >>> >>> https://ourself.io >>> >>> Let me know if you try it and it works (or doesn’t!). As a reminder, you choose a server near you and get a link to a morphic desktop, and also to a console. After 20 minutes or so the trial is deleted so don’t worry about breaking anything. >>> >>> Also if you are interested in playing more seriously (saving snapshots etc) or want to try a shared world, send me an email. >>> >>> The existing trial world is very boring! My next step is to start to add interesting applications to play around with. >>> >>> :) Russell >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Self-interest mailing list >>> Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org >>> http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest >> > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest From ungar at mac.com Wed Nov 25 16:55:37 2020 From: ungar at mac.com (David Ungar) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 08:55:37 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <523067FC-6A9F-4921-A7D2-7D9660CB8E63@wolczko.com> References: <02F157EC-AC85-4F8F-83E3-91C5DF56B68F@russell-allen.com> <523067FC-6A9F-4921-A7D2-7D9660CB8E63@wolczko.com> Message-ID: <54B2795A-C788-44D3-85FF-7A3A5E535364@mac.com> Thanks, Mario. Sorry, I had forgotten, indeed. - David > On Nov 24, 2020, at 10:17 PM, Mario Wolczko wrote: > > Dave has probably forgotten about this, but shortly after 4.0 was released in ‘95 I set up a SPARCstation with Self on the open internet which could be accessed via X11 from anywhere in the world. > For a few years Sun Labs owned and operated sunlabs.com and staff could easily get a machine on the Internet without a firewall or NAT. I set up a password-less account which would run a copy of a clean image in a chroot-ed directory. When the session ended everything was wiped and reset to a clean state. > As might be expected in hindsight, net bandwidth and latency to most parts of the world was insufficient back then. After a couple of years one or more machines in that domain got hijacked for nefarious purposes and the whole experiment was shut down shortly after that. I wonder if there’s anyone reading this who remembers trying it out (kjx or Jecel, perhaps?). > > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ungar at mac.com Wed Nov 25 16:56:34 2020 From: ungar at mac.com (David Ungar) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 08:56:34 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: References: <02F157EC-AC85-4F8F-83E3-91C5DF56B68F@russell-allen.com> <523067FC-6A9F-4921-A7D2-7D9660CB8E63@wolczko.com> Message-ID: That would be the gremlins doing their best to uphold Randy's condensed geography theory illusion. > On Nov 25, 2020, at 3:10 AM, kjx wrote: > > You know, I think I woud've at least tried it - but I have a vague memory of it not really working very well at all > across the pacific - J > >> On 25/11/2020, at 19:17PM, Mario Wolczko wrote: >> >> (kjx or Jecel, perhaps?). > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest From ungar at mac.com Wed Nov 25 16:57:32 2020 From: ungar at mac.com (David Ungar) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 08:57:32 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <2110413A-4916-4745-913C-0259ED730BE4@gmail.com> References: <43E1F568-8941-4739-A832-15DC2CA9F908@russell-allen.com> <2110413A-4916-4745-913C-0259ED730BE4@gmail.com> Message-ID: There's a good joke in there somewhere.... Guess you made that view too interesting. Maybe it needs a rotating spiral to help put one back to sleep. > On Nov 25, 2020, at 7:23 AM, Randy wrote: > > Very cool. > > When I made the radar view, I never thought I’d be using it at an insomniatic moment while laying on my back in bed poking at a small glass slab! > > —Randy > > >> On Nov 24, 2020, at 8:29 PM, Russell Allen wrote: >> >> I’m reasonably confident that although it might not always work, the OurSelf code won’t screw up my servers in a way which is hard to fix, so I’ve removed the need for an invite to try out an online Self world. >> >> https://ourself.io >> >> Let me know if you try it and it works (or doesn’t!). As a reminder, you choose a server near you and get a link to a morphic desktop, and also to a console. After 20 minutes or so the trial is deleted so don’t worry about breaking anything. >> >> Also if you are interested in playing more seriously (saving snapshots etc) or want to try a shared world, send me an email. >> >> The existing trial world is very boring! My next step is to start to add interesting applications to play around with. >> >> :) Russell >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Self-interest mailing list >> Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org >> http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest From steve at dekorte.com Wed Nov 25 17:29:49 2020 From: steve at dekorte.com (Steve Dekorte) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 09:29:49 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <54B2795A-C788-44D3-85FF-7A3A5E535364@mac.com> References: <54B2795A-C788-44D3-85FF-7A3A5E535364@mac.com> Message-ID: <4a94e42aaa9e30e1d80668d68ed336ed@smtp.hushmail.com> Not that this is a replacement for the radar view, but would it be difficult to do display scaling which could be connected to multitouch scaling gestures? Btw, is anyone working on an Apple Silicon port of Self? > On Nov 25, 2020, at 8:55 AM, David Ungar wrote: > > Thanks, Mario. Sorry, I had forgotten, indeed. > > - David > >> On Nov 24, 2020, at 10:17 PM, Mario Wolczko wrote: >> >> Dave has probably forgotten about this, but shortly after 4.0 was released in ‘95 I set up a SPARCstation with Self on the open internet which could be accessed via X11 from anywhere in the world. >> For a few years Sun Labs owned and operated sunlabs.com and staff could easily get a machine on the Internet without a firewall or NAT. I set up a password-less account which would run a copy of a clean image in a chroot-ed directory. When the session ended everything was wiped and reset to a clean state. >> As might be expected in hindsight, net bandwidth and latency to most parts of the world was insufficient back then. After a couple of years one or more machines in that domain got hijacked for nefarious purposes and the whole experiment was shut down shortly after that. I wonder if there’s anyone reading this who remembers trying it out (kjx or Jecel, perhaps?). >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Self-interest mailing list >> Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org >> http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ungar at mac.com Wed Nov 25 17:30:32 2020 From: ungar at mac.com (David Ungar) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 09:30:32 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <4a94e42aaa9e30e1d80668d68ed336ed@smtp.hushmail.com> References: <54B2795A-C788-44D3-85FF-7A3A5E535364@mac.com> <4a94e42aaa9e30e1d80668d68ed336ed@smtp.hushmail.com> Message-ID: <34E15720-E4D5-444A-9165-15BEDB448B3C@mac.com> > On Nov 25, 2020, at 9:29 AM, Steve Dekorte wrote: > > > Not that this is a replacement for the radar view, but would it be difficult to do display scaling which could be connected to multitouch scaling gestures? > > Btw, is anyone working on an Apple Silicon port of Self? Might be a fun project after I retire. > >> On Nov 25, 2020, at 8:55 AM, David Ungar wrote: >> >> Thanks, Mario. Sorry, I had forgotten, indeed. >> >> - David >> >>> On Nov 24, 2020, at 10:17 PM, Mario Wolczko > wrote: >>> >>> Dave has probably forgotten about this, but shortly after 4.0 was released in ‘95 I set up a SPARCstation with Self on the open internet which could be accessed via X11 from anywhere in the world. >>> For a few years Sun Labs owned and operated sunlabs.com and staff could easily get a machine on the Internet without a firewall or NAT. I set up a password-less account which would run a copy of a clean image in a chroot-ed directory. When the session ended everything was wiped and reset to a clean state. >>> As might be expected in hindsight, net bandwidth and latency to most parts of the world was insufficient back then. After a couple of years one or more machines in that domain got hijacked for nefarious purposes and the whole experiment was shut down shortly after that. I wonder if there’s anyone reading this who remembers trying it out (kjx or Jecel, perhaps?). >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Self-interest mailing list >>> Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org >>> http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Self-interest mailing list >> Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org >> http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jecel at merlintec.com Wed Nov 25 18:06:31 2020 From: jecel at merlintec.com (Jecel Assumpcao Jr) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 15:06:31 -0300 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <523067FC-6A9F-4921-A7D2-7D9660CB8E63@wolczko.com> References: <02F157EC-AC85-4F8F-83E3-91C5DF56B68F@russell-allen.com> <523067FC-6A9F-4921-A7D2-7D9660CB8E63@wolczko.com> Message-ID: <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> Mario Wolczko wrote on Tue, 24 Nov 2020 22:17:27 -0800 > I wonder if there's anyone reading this who remembers trying it out (kjx or Jecel, perhaps?). I am pretty sure I didn't try it. The day Self 4.0 came out was a holiday in Brazil (Carnaval) so I couldn't go to the univerity. But I was able to connect to a Sun 4 machine from home using a 300 bps modem and rsh. I downloaded Self into the remote machine and ran it, with a tunnel from there to a X11 server on my home Linux PC (4MB 40MHz 386). I had to hold the mouse button for 15 seconds or so to have a menu pop up but I was able to play around with the cool new Morphic GUI. Given the huge bandwidth limitations, I don't think the latency to a Sunlabs machine would have been a problem for me. -- Jecel From randy.smith at gmail.com Wed Nov 25 18:20:57 2020 From: randy.smith at gmail.com (Randy Smith) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 10:20:57 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <4a94e42aaa9e30e1d80668d68ed336ed@smtp.hushmail.com> References: <54B2795A-C788-44D3-85FF-7A3A5E535364@mac.com> <4a94e42aaa9e30e1d80668d68ed336ed@smtp.hushmail.com> Message-ID: <6B88DB5A-F143-49CF-A52B-0079914FDAD1@gmail.com> > On Nov 25, 2020, at 9:29 AM, Steve Dekorte wrote: > > > Not that this is a replacement for the radar view, but would it be difficult to do display scaling which could be connected to multitouch scaling gestures? > Oooo, that would be way cool, though yeah I guess the “view” part of radar view would still be useful. From randy.smith at gmail.com Wed Nov 25 18:22:30 2020 From: randy.smith at gmail.com (Randy Smith) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 10:22:30 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> References: <02F157EC-AC85-4F8F-83E3-91C5DF56B68F@russell-allen.com> <523067FC-6A9F-4921-A7D2-7D9660CB8E63@wolczko.com> <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> Message-ID: <61280805-4C15-469F-BB36-97748B8E4E51@gmail.com> > I had to hold the mouse button for > 15 seconds or so to have a menu pop up but I was able to play around > with the cool new Morphic GUI. > !! Egads. You are a better man than I! From ungar at mac.com Wed Nov 25 18:57:35 2020 From: ungar at mac.com (David Ungar) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 10:57:35 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> References: <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> Message-ID: Impressive persistence! Reminds me a bit of the first time I brought up Berkeley Smalltalk at UC. It was on an AED bitmapped display connected over a 9600 baud serial line to a shared VAX. The first thing that happened was the whole screen was painted maybe black pixel by pixel which took about 20 seconds. Then the whole screen was painted maybe white, or maybe halftone which took another 20 seconds then each window was painted about three times it was extremely slow. Plus a bug in my font code in BitBLT which caused it to say Welcome to SnailTalk. You and I must have some character trait in common for us to both be willing to put up with that kind of performance! - David > On Nov 25, 2020, at 10:07 AM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote: > > Mario Wolczko wrote on Tue, 24 Nov 2020 22:17:27 -0800 > >> I wonder if there's anyone reading this who remembers trying it out (kjx or Jecel, perhaps?). > > I am pretty sure I didn't try it. > > The day Self 4.0 came out was a holiday in Brazil (Carnaval) so I > couldn't go to the univerity. But I was able to connect to a Sun 4 > machine from home using a 300 bps modem and rsh. I downloaded Self into > the remote machine and ran it, with a tunnel from there to a X11 server > on my home Linux PC (4MB 40MHz 386). I had to hold the mouse button for > 15 seconds or so to have a menu pop up but I was able to play around > with the cool new Morphic GUI. > > Given the huge bandwidth limitations, I don't think the latency to a > Sunlabs machine would have been a problem for me. > > -- Jecel > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest From mario at wolczko.com Wed Nov 25 21:02:13 2020 From: mario at wolczko.com (Mario Wolczko) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 13:02:13 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: References: <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> Message-ID: We dreamed of drawing the display in a minute. The first time I ran my VM on a Perq1 it took hours to paint the first screen. > On Nov 25, 2020, at 10:57 AM, David Ungar wrote: > > Impressive persistence! > > Reminds me a bit of the first time I brought up Berkeley Smalltalk at UC. It was on an AED bitmapped display connected over a 9600 baud serial line to a shared VAX. The first thing that happened was the whole screen was painted maybe black pixel by pixel which took about 20 seconds. Then the whole screen was painted maybe white, or maybe halftone which took another 20 seconds then each window was painted about three times it was extremely slow. Plus a bug in my font code in BitBLT which caused it to say Welcome to SnailTalk. > > You and I must have some character trait in common for us to both be willing to put up with that kind of performance! > > - David > >> On Nov 25, 2020, at 10:07 AM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote: >> >> Mario Wolczko wrote on Tue, 24 Nov 2020 22:17:27 -0800 >> >>> I wonder if there's anyone reading this who remembers trying it out (kjx or Jecel, perhaps?). >> >> I am pretty sure I didn't try it. >> >> The day Self 4.0 came out was a holiday in Brazil (Carnaval) so I >> couldn't go to the univerity. But I was able to connect to a Sun 4 >> machine from home using a 300 bps modem and rsh. I downloaded Self into >> the remote machine and ran it, with a tunnel from there to a X11 server >> on my home Linux PC (4MB 40MHz 386). I had to hold the mouse button for >> 15 seconds or so to have a menu pop up but I was able to play around >> with the cool new Morphic GUI. >> >> Given the huge bandwidth limitations, I don't think the latency to a >> Sunlabs machine would have been a problem for me. >> >> -- Jecel >> _______________________________________________ >> Self-interest mailing list >> Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org >> http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest > From jecel at merlintec.com Wed Nov 25 21:47:29 2020 From: jecel at merlintec.com (Jecel Assumpcao Jr) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 18:47:29 -0300 Subject: [Self-interest] slow systems (was: OurSelf trial now without invite!) In-Reply-To: References: <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> Message-ID: <20201125214732.DC33E12412CE@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> David Ungar wrote on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 10:57:35 -0800 > Impressive persistence! > > Reminds me a bit of the first time I brought up Berkeley > Smalltalk at UC. It was on an AED bitmapped display > connected over a 9600 baud serial line to a shared VAX. > The first thing that happened was the whole screen was > painted maybe black pixel by pixel which took about 20 > seconds. Then the whole screen was painted maybe white, > or maybe halftone which took another 20 seconds then > each window was painted about three times it was extremely > slow. Plus a bug in my font code in BitBLT which caused > it to say Welcome to SnailTalk. Great story! The Tektronix guys described nearly the exact same thing in their chapter in the Smalltalk "green book"[1]. Their 68000 prototype board didn't have any graphics of its own, so they connected it via a serial port to one of their commercial graphics terminals. > You and I must have some character trait in common for > us to both be willing to put up with that kind of performance! Putting up with it once is a very educational experience. On the other hand I find unacceptable things that other people think is normal, which is why I keep designing replacements for them. A friend once asked about buying a mini clone of the Altair. I told him it would be very interesting to actually toggle in a whole program using the front panel switched. But he might not want to do it a second time, and certainly not a third. So it would not be a good use of his money. I can imagine sitting in front of a terminal watching the pixels slowly coming in and dreaming of a Smalltalk On A RISC chip (sorry, RISC-III is the politically correct name now ;-) -- Jecel From ungar at mac.com Wed Nov 25 23:25:05 2020 From: ungar at mac.com (David Ungar) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 15:25:05 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] slow systems (was: OurSelf trial now without invite!) In-Reply-To: <20201125214732.DC33E12412CE@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> References: <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> <20201125214732.DC33E12412CE@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> Message-ID: <55186399-B242-4A49-A1CB-EB610DDFBFE4@mac.com> > On Nov 25, 2020, at 1:47 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote: > > David Ungar wrote on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 10:57:35 -0800 >> Impressive persistence! >> >> Reminds me a bit of the first time I brought up Berkeley >> Smalltalk at UC. It was on an AED bitmapped display >> connected over a 9600 baud serial line to a shared VAX. >> The first thing that happened was the whole screen was >> painted maybe black pixel by pixel which took about 20 >> seconds. Then the whole screen was painted maybe white, >> or maybe halftone which took another 20 seconds then >> each window was painted about three times it was extremely >> slow. Plus a bug in my font code in BitBLT which caused >> it to say Welcome to SnailTalk. > > Great story! Thank you. > > The Tektronix guys described nearly the exact same thing in their > chapter in the Smalltalk "green book"[1]. Their 68000 prototype board > didn't have any graphics of its own, so they connected it via a serial > port to one of their commercial graphics terminals. Yes, what today's younger adults won't know is how much of a revolution it was, to have multiple, overlapping windows, pop-up (even 15-second) menus, instant execution, fix-and-continue, and objects! The standard of the day was 24x80 glass ttys. > >> You and I must have some character trait in common for >> us to both be willing to put up with that kind of performance! > > Putting up with it once is a very educational experience. On the other > hand I find unacceptable things that other people think is normal, which > is why I keep designing replacements for them. Amen, brother! > > A friend once asked about buying a mini clone of the Altair. I told him > it would be very interesting to actually toggle in a whole program using > the front panel switched. But he might not want to do it a second time, > and certainly not a third. So it would not be a good use of his money. Yup! > > I can imagine sitting in front of a terminal watching the pixels slowly > coming in and dreaming of a Smalltalk On A RISC chip (sorry, RISC-III is > the politically correct name now ;-) Exactly!! > > -- Jecel > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest From ungar at mac.com Wed Nov 25 23:26:54 2020 From: ungar at mac.com (David Ungar) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 15:26:54 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: References: <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> Message-ID: <9BE96BB0-47F5-41F1-B4AC-8321EC252794@mac.com> Well, we did have to walk up a good hill to get to the CS building from the BART station. > On Nov 25, 2020, at 1:02 PM, Mario Wolczko wrote: > > We dreamed of drawing the display in a minute. The first time I ran my VM on a Perq1 it took hours to paint the first screen. > >> On Nov 25, 2020, at 10:57 AM, David Ungar wrote: >> >> Impressive persistence! >> >> Reminds me a bit of the first time I brought up Berkeley Smalltalk at UC. It was on an AED bitmapped display connected over a 9600 baud serial line to a shared VAX. The first thing that happened was the whole screen was painted maybe black pixel by pixel which took about 20 seconds. Then the whole screen was painted maybe white, or maybe halftone which took another 20 seconds then each window was painted about three times it was extremely slow. Plus a bug in my font code in BitBLT which caused it to say Welcome to SnailTalk. >> >> You and I must have some character trait in common for us to both be willing to put up with that kind of performance! >> >> - David >> >>> On Nov 25, 2020, at 10:07 AM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote: >>> >>> Mario Wolczko wrote on Tue, 24 Nov 2020 22:17:27 -0800 >>> >>>> I wonder if there's anyone reading this who remembers trying it out (kjx or Jecel, perhaps?). >>> >>> I am pretty sure I didn't try it. >>> >>> The day Self 4.0 came out was a holiday in Brazil (Carnaval) so I >>> couldn't go to the univerity. But I was able to connect to a Sun 4 >>> machine from home using a 300 bps modem and rsh. I downloaded Self into >>> the remote machine and ran it, with a tunnel from there to a X11 server >>> on my home Linux PC (4MB 40MHz 386). I had to hold the mouse button for >>> 15 seconds or so to have a menu pop up but I was able to play around >>> with the cool new Morphic GUI. >>> >>> Given the huge bandwidth limitations, I don't think the latency to a >>> Sunlabs machine would have been a problem for me. >>> >>> -- Jecel >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Self-interest mailing list >>> Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org >>> http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest >> _______________________________________________ >> Self-interest mailing list >> Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org >> http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest >> > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest From kyle.hayes at gmail.com Thu Nov 26 00:26:46 2020 From: kyle.hayes at gmail.com (Kyle Hayes) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 16:26:46 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <9BE96BB0-47F5-41F1-B4AC-8321EC252794@mac.com> References: <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> <9BE96BB0-47F5-41F1-B4AC-8321EC252794@mac.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 3:26 PM David Ungar wrote: > Well, we did have to walk up a good hill to get to the CS building from > the BART station. > Uphill both ways, in the snow? On a different note, wasn't there someone working on a 64-bit x86-64 port? Or am I making that up? Best, Kyle -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From paul at igblan.free-online.co.uk Thu Nov 26 00:56:36 2020 From: paul at igblan.free-online.co.uk (Paul Chapman) Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 00:56:36 -0000 Subject: [Self-interest] slow systems (was: OurSelf trial nowwithout invite!) In-Reply-To: <55186399-B242-4A49-A1CB-EB610DDFBFE4@mac.com> References: <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> <20201125214732.DC33E12412CE@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> <55186399-B242-4A49-A1CB-EB610DDFBFE4@mac.com> Message-ID: <8B9CFF5128E4442FBB66830C03E4AAC9@001PC> David, Five years before I saw Smalltalk, I built a windowed IDE in C for a FORTH-like language (called DE before I’d heard the term IDE) of my own design, which rendered on a 25x80 monochrome text screen. Exactly six resizable and maximizable/restorable, non-overlapping windows; no icons; no menus; no mouse. Each window could display any of: selectable list of global functions; editable function source with settable breakpoints; function symbolic object code; contents of RAM (heap); contents of call stack; contents of value stack; contents of local variable; source trace; object trace; application I/O console. Where a value referenced something else symbolically, the symbol was shown; eg READ_LINE+0014H, RAM+1210H. The IDE ran entirely in RAM on a 128K IBM PC clone. The output was a symbolic object-code file. An STSC APL*PLUS program then compiled this to binary – eventually taking 5 hours. It took me 9 months to use this language and IDE to implement I-APL, a complete, standard-conforming APL interpreter which compiled to 26K of object code which ran under a VM. The VM was then implemented on a number of platforms (by other members of the I-APL project), including CP-M, Apple II, IBM PC, BBC Micro, etc. It took me one month (1st-30th September 1987) to design the language and implement the IDE. On schedule! My take-away? Overlapping windows are overrated, and maybe even counterproductive to dev (see most IDEs of the past 20+ years: they use minimizable-in-place windows and docking). I do love my mouse now, but tabbing through the windows was easy in my IDE. My Smalltalk/V dev setup was always 3 non-overlapping windows: Transcript, Workbench (my idea: ListBox+TextEdit where I could define & run small pieces of code), and one CHB for the app. A second, overlapping, CHB, usually minimized, was used for browsing non-app classes. Of course walkback windows and inspectors overlapped (but when I get around to writing a Smalltalk dev environment, they won’t.) Menus *might* be a design choice left over from when graphics displays had much lower resolutions, to save on real estate. (Look at the welcome proliferation of toolbars.) In those days, IBM keyboards had 10 function keys arranged in 2 columns on the left. I stole WordStar’s 2-function-key commands (one from the left column, one from the right) allowing 25 commands at my fingertips without having to hit CTRL or ALT. These were my ‘menu shortcuts’ and all I needed. And I still find icons annoying: they’re not scalable, ie eventually they all look like a multicoloured splodge. Same with emojis. Okay, maybe my eyesight isn’t as good as it used to be. As you can probably tell, I’m still resting on this particular laurel. Cheers, Paul -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ungar at mac.com Thu Nov 26 01:20:05 2020 From: ungar at mac.com (David Ungar) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 17:20:05 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] slow systems (was: OurSelf trial nowwithout invite!) In-Reply-To: <8B9CFF5128E4442FBB66830C03E4AAC9@001PC> References: <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> <20201125214732.DC33E12412CE@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> <55186399-B242-4A49-A1CB-EB610DDFBFE4@mac.com> <8B9CFF5128E4442FBB66830C03E4AAC9@001PC> Message-ID: Paul, What you did was very cool! Quite an achievement, and great taste to implement APL. Back in the day, the ST group at PARC did overlapping windows, and the Mesa folks did Spaces, IIRC, non-overlapping windows. Although I have heard from many who prefer the non-overlapping ones, I stronger prefer the overlapping sort, at least given the particular systems I have been to. I can give quasi-rational reasons for the preference--no machine can figure out what I need to be able to see as well as I can--but my best guess would be that it comes down to a combination of brain wiring (n.b. the "typical mind fallacy") and the "incidental" aspects of the experience. For instance, how verbose the language is, how the IDE lays out windows (e.g. Xcode insists on putting certain things in certain places), and whether the new window jumps "into the hand". That last was a Smith-ism, which turned out to be fantastic, IMO. Ask for implementors, and just put it down where you like. Whether next-to, or overlapping. For my money, Morphic/Self was maybe two hours better at the 3am test than any of the "modern" IDEs I've used. 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. And it was much less tool-centric than ST, or almost anything I've seen after. Menus and icons are two more stories. I suspect the hierarchical radial ones might be OK, but haven't used them. The guy with the best insight on this stuff is Randy Smith. - David > On Nov 25, 2020, at 4:56 PM, Paul Chapman wrote: > > David, > > Five years before I saw Smalltalk, I built a windowed IDE in C for a FORTH-like language (called DE before I’d heard the term IDE) of my own design, which rendered on a 25x80 monochrome text screen. Exactly six resizable and maximizable/restorable, non-overlapping windows; no icons; no menus; no mouse. Each window could display any of: selectable list of global functions; editable function source with settable breakpoints; function symbolic object code; contents of RAM (heap); contents of call stack; contents of value stack; contents of local variable; source trace; object trace; application I/O console. Where a value referenced something else symbolically, the symbol was shown; eg READ_LINE+0014H, RAM+1210H. The IDE ran entirely in RAM on a 128K IBM PC clone. The output was a symbolic object-code file. An STSC APL*PLUS program then compiled this to binary – eventually taking 5 hours. > > It took me 9 months to use this language and IDE to implement I-APL, a complete, standard-conforming APL interpreter which compiled to 26K of object code which ran under a VM. The VM was then implemented on a number of platforms (by other members of the I-APL project), including CP-M, Apple II, IBM PC, BBC Micro, etc. > > It took me one month (1st-30th September 1987) to design the language and implement the IDE. On schedule! > > My take-away? > > Overlapping windows are overrated, and maybe even counterproductive to dev (see most IDEs of the past 20+ years: they use minimizable-in-place windows and docking). I do love my mouse now, but tabbing through the windows was easy in my IDE. My Smalltalk/V dev setup was always 3 non-overlapping windows: Transcript, Workbench (my idea: ListBox+TextEdit where I could define & run small pieces of code), and one CHB for the app. A second, overlapping, CHB, usually minimized, was used for browsing non-app classes. Of course walkback windows and inspectors overlapped (but when I get around to writing a Smalltalk dev environment, they won’t.) > > Menus *might* be a design choice left over from when graphics displays had much lower resolutions, to save on real estate. (Look at the welcome proliferation of toolbars.) In those days, IBM keyboards had 10 function keys arranged in 2 columns on the left. I stole WordStar’s 2-function-key commands (one from the left column, one from the right) allowing 25 commands at my fingertips without having to hit CTRL or ALT. These were my ‘menu shortcuts’ and all I needed. > > And I still find icons annoying: they’re not scalable, ie eventually they all look like a multicoloured splodge. Same with emojis. Okay, maybe my eyesight isn’t as good as it used to be. > > As you can probably tell, I’m still resting on this particular laurel. > > Cheers, Paul > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ungar at mac.com Thu Nov 26 01:29:02 2020 From: ungar at mac.com (David Ungar) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 17:29:02 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: References: <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> <9BE96BB0-47F5-41F1-B4AC-8321EC252794@mac.com> Message-ID: <28A01498-4550-4A00-B111-69D23BD42AB6@mac.com> Well, no snow in Berkeley, just sea breezes, and very cheap, questionable quality Chinese food. And volleyball atop a nuclear reactor. Ah, the good times! I'm not sure if Russel was working on such. It's a serious undertaking, but would be nice to have. Since I've been an Apple fan for a century, if I do one, it might be to see what performance can be gotten from Apple Silicon. OTOH, I might rather do a Korz VM. (Korz published with Ossher and Kimelman, inspired by Us, published with, you guessed it, Randy.)) > On Nov 25, 2020, at 4:26 PM, Kyle Hayes wrote: > > > > On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 3:26 PM David Ungar > wrote: > Well, we did have to walk up a good hill to get to the CS building from the BART station. > > Uphill both ways, in the snow? > > On a different note, wasn't there someone working on a 64-bit x86-64 port? Or am I making that up? > > Best, > Kyle > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jason.grossman at xeny.net Thu Nov 26 01:34:03 2020 From: jason.grossman at xeny.net (Jason Grossman) Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 12:34:03 +1100 Subject: [Self-interest] slow systems (was: OurSelf trial nowwithout invite!) In-Reply-To: References: <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> <20201125214732.DC33E12412CE@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> <55186399-B242-4A49-A1CB-EB610DDFBFE4@mac.com> <8B9CFF5128E4442FBB66830C03E4AAC9@001PC> Message-ID: <5f9b8850-7df8-c480-38c0-5fc08acc2593@xeny.net> IMO, there are many factors that determine whether overlapping or non-overlapping windows are best.  One example of a factor that people often don't mention is what position your monitor is in. In some monitor positions, I want to be looking mainly at the centre of the monitor, and in others looking at the edges of the monitor is okay.  I find it very difficult to place non-overlapping windows in ways that respect changes of monitor position.  I say this with sadness - I tried hard to like non-overlapping windows, for years, because they would have given me a better choice of OS window managers. My conclusion is that the Self way is the best thing to have as a default. Jason From drdpharris at gmail.com Thu Nov 26 02:05:13 2020 From: drdpharris at gmail.com (David Harris) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 18:05:13 -0800 Subject: [Self-interest] slow systems (was: OurSelf trial nowwithout invite!) In-Reply-To: <8B9CFF5128E4442FBB66830C03E4AAC9@001PC> References: <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> <20201125214732.DC33E12412CE@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> <55186399-B242-4A49-A1CB-EB610DDFBFE4@mac.com> <8B9CFF5128E4442FBB66830C03E4AAC9@001PC> Message-ID: Paul -- Very interesting. Is the I-APL code available anywhere, such as github? Thanks David On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 4:56 PM Paul Chapman wrote: > David, > > Five years before I saw Smalltalk, I built a windowed IDE in C for a > FORTH-like language (called DE before I’d heard the term IDE) of my own > design, which rendered on a 25x80 monochrome text screen. Exactly six > resizable and maximizable/restorable, non-overlapping windows; no icons; no > menus; no mouse. Each window could display any of: selectable list of > global functions; editable function source with settable breakpoints; > function symbolic object code; contents of RAM (heap); contents of call > stack; contents of value stack; contents of local variable; source trace; > object trace; application I/O console. Where a value referenced something > else symbolically, the symbol was shown; eg READ_LINE+0014H, RAM+1210H. The > IDE ran entirely in RAM on a 128K IBM PC clone. The output was a symbolic > object-code file. An STSC APL*PLUS program then compiled this to binary – > eventually taking 5 hours. > > It took me 9 months to use this language and IDE to implement I-APL, a > complete, standard-conforming APL interpreter which compiled to 26K of > object code which ran under a VM. The VM was then implemented on a number > of platforms (by other members of the I-APL project), including CP-M, Apple > II, IBM PC, BBC Micro, etc. > > It took me one month (1st-30th September 1987) to design the language and > implement the IDE. On schedule! > > My take-away? > > Overlapping windows are overrated, and maybe even counterproductive to dev > (see most IDEs of the past 20+ years: they use minimizable-in-place windows > and docking). I do love my mouse now, but tabbing through the windows was > easy in my IDE. My Smalltalk/V dev setup was always 3 non-overlapping > windows: Transcript, Workbench (my idea: ListBox+TextEdit where I could > define & run small pieces of code), and one CHB for the app. A second, > overlapping, CHB, usually minimized, was used for browsing non-app classes. > Of course walkback windows and inspectors overlapped (but when I get around > to writing a Smalltalk dev environment, they won’t.) > > Menus *might* be a design choice left over from when graphics displays had > much lower resolutions, to save on real estate. (Look at the welcome > proliferation of toolbars.) > In those days, IBM keyboards had 10 function keys arranged in 2 columns on > the left. I stole WordStar’s 2-function-key commands (one from the left > column, one from the right) allowing 25 commands at my fingertips without > having to hit CTRL or ALT. These were my ‘menu shortcuts’ and all I needed. > > And I still find icons annoying: they’re not scalable, ie eventually they > all look like a multicoloured splodge. Same with emojis. Okay, maybe my > eyesight isn’t as good as it used to be. > > As you can probably tell, I’m still resting on this particular laurel. > > Cheers, Paul > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mail at russell-allen.com Thu Nov 26 09:23:27 2020 From: mail at russell-allen.com (Russell Allen) Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 20:23:27 +1100 Subject: [Self-interest] OurSelf trial now without invite! In-Reply-To: <28A01498-4550-4A00-B111-69D23BD42AB6@mac.com> References: <20201125180635.5183BEE0285@proxy.email-ssl.com.br> <9BE96BB0-47F5-41F1-B4AC-8321EC252794@mac.com> <28A01498-4550-4A00-B111-69D23BD42AB6@mac.com> Message-ID: <723C52E3-7929-4B92-96E1-FDE930BA8476@russell-allen.com> I looked into what to do with the current VM but it was too big a job for my available time and skills. To get back on Apple we need both 64 bit and ARM. Other options were to move to another VM (Truffle looks really promising - there is a TruffleSqueak which is very fast, but suffers the same compilation pauses as Self 3 - or Cog, the Squeak VM), which was feasible but a bit sad :( or to do a Klein style VM using Self, which would be great fun but also too big a project. Of course no matter what VM, I won’t be able to run Self on my iPad because Apple doesn’t allow third party JITs or reflective systems which can save and load code... In a sense OurSelf is my attempt at an end run around all of this. There’s only a couple of things on my radar to do with the current Self VM: (1) port to FreeBSD, because OurSelf is currently running the VM in Linux emulation mode and I’d love to be able to ditch that as a requirement (2) merge and update the work I did a few years back allowing on the fly primitives to be created in Self, because that opens up a lot of possibilities in respect of talking to OS libraries and so on Russell > On 26 Nov 2020, at 12:29 pm, David Ungar wrote: > > Well, no snow in Berkeley, just sea breezes, and very cheap, questionable quality Chinese food. And volleyball atop a nuclear reactor. Ah, the good times! > > I'm not sure if Russel was working on such. It's a serious undertaking, but would be nice to have. Since I've been an Apple fan for a century, if I do one, it might be to see what performance can be gotten from Apple Silicon. OTOH, I might rather do a Korz VM. (Korz published with Ossher and Kimelman, inspired by Us, published with, you guessed it, Randy.)) > >> On Nov 25, 2020, at 4:26 PM, Kyle Hayes > wrote: >> >> >> >> On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 3:26 PM David Ungar > wrote: >> Well, we did have to walk up a good hill to get to the CS building from the BART station. >> >> Uphill both ways, in the snow? >> >> On a different note, wasn't there someone working on a 64-bit x86-64 port? Or am I making that up? >> >> Best, >> Kyle >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Self-interest mailing list >> Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org >> http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tzh9741mq402 at sneakemail.com Sun Nov 29 14:50:49 2020 From: tzh9741mq402 at sneakemail.com (Jack Waugh) Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2020 09:50:49 -0500 Subject: [Self-interest] orthogonal persistence, single-level store, transparent persistence In-Reply-To: <75a9860c1ee0d962cf556308793f4439d997772a.camel@gmail.com> References: <1EB19BC1-368A-4B98-9C31-0E22604AAE7A@gmail.com> <52086CC6-902C-47C1-AD2D-273FA0054459@russell-allen.com> <75a9860c1ee0d962cf556308793f4439d997772a.camel@gmail.com> Message-ID: <27626-1606661460-471234@sneakemail.com> In response to http://lists.selflanguage.org/pipermail/self-interest/2020-November/004754.html I am fairly convinced that the Self language and all other imperative languages are inappropriate for orthogonal persistence (a. k. a. single-level store, transparent persistence). I'm (very slowly and haltingly) pursuing a concurrent-constraint language for that environment. Not many people seem to be working toward the single-level store. There is the Hoon language, but I find it hard to read. Also, the way Hoon is used is supposed to be, and I'm sure is, deterministic. The approach I favor would be deterministic by default, but could pass around an authority to conduct races. On Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 8:10 AM Baltasar García Perez-Schofield baltasarq-at-gmail.com |pub yahoo| wrote: > Hi, > > > What do you mean by a true persistent system? > > An orthogonal persistence system determines the orthogonal roots of > persistence, calculates their persistent closure (the set of objects > needed for the former to make sense), and stores and retrieves them > on/from disk in a transparent way. > > A memory snapshot more or less does the trick, but, as happens in the > case of Self, involves a much bigger memory size to deal with. It also > makes it more difficult to share a set of objects (data), with other > people, which I guess that is the transporter is for. > > -- Baltasar > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From yang.liu at dbvisit.com Thu Nov 19 00:47:11 2020 From: yang.liu at dbvisit.com (Yang Liu) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 00:47:11 -0000 Subject: [Self-interest] Self + Kids + iPad In-Reply-To: <75a9860c1ee0d962cf556308793f4439d997772a.camel@gmail.com> References: <75a9860c1ee0d962cf556308793f4439d997772a.camel@gmail.com> Message-ID: <10F6AC78-370E-4948-8AAA-3083E9AC8225@dbvisit.com> Hi, Snapshot is the base concept of Self and the Transporter can import/export object from/to files. Is there possible to introduce a proxy or router to transparently get/set objects from the remote snapshots. So each snapshot can work as the node in a p2p network. It’s easier for sharing and no big changes to the Self system itself. — Yang > On 19/11/2020, at 2:10 AM, Baltasar García Perez-Schofield wrote: > > Hi, > >> What do you mean by a true persistent system? > > An orthogonal persistence system determines the orthogonal roots of > persistence, calculates their persistent closure (the set of objects > needed for the former to make sense), and stores and retrieves them > on/from disk in a transparent way. > > A memory snapshot more or less does the trick, but, as happens in the > case of Self, involves a much bigger memory size to deal with. It also > makes it more difficult to share a set of objects (data), with other > people, which I guess that is the transporter is for. > > -- Baltasar > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Self-interest mailing list > Self-interest at lists.selflanguage.org > http://lists.selflanguage.org/mailman/listinfo/self-interest