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Slide Bite: Survival of the Fittest
The first ten or fifteen years of a computing era is a period of chaotic experimentation. Early product concepts rapidly evolve via both incremental and disruptive innovations. Radical ideas are...
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How to Invent the Future
Alan Kay famously said “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” But how do we go about inventing a future that isn’t a simple linear extrapolation of the present? Kay and his colleagues at...
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Some ECMAScript Explanations and Stories for Dave
Dave Winer recently blogged about his initial thoughts after dipping his toes into using some modern JavaScript features . He ends by suggesting that I might have some explanations and stories about...
View ArticleTeaser—JavaScript: The First 20 Years
Our HOPL paper is done—all 190 pages of it. The preprint will be posted this week. In the meantime, here’s a little teaser. JavaScript: The First 20 Years By Allen Wirfs-Brock and Brendan Eich...
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JavaScript: The First 20 Years
JavaScript: The First 20 Years by Allen Wirfs-Brock and Brendan Eich Our HOPL paper is done and submitted to the ACM for June 2020 publication in PACMPL (Proceedings of the ACM on Programming...
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The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
Relics Gilad Bracha recently posted an article “Bits of History, Words of Advice” that talks about the incredible influence of Smalltalk but bemoans the fact that: …today Smalltalk is relegated to a...
View ArticleSoftware Diagrams Aren’t Always Correct and That’s OK
This morning I saw an interesting twitter thread: Sorry, this makes no sense. Most valuable architectural depictions are high-level and abstract and can't be auto-generated from code, for example;...
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Personal Digital Habitats
In early 2013 I wrote the blog post Ambient Computing Challenge: Please Abstract My Digital Life. In it I lamented about the inessential complexity we all encounter living with a multitude of weakly...
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Personal Digital Habitats: Get Started!
In my previous post, I introduced the concept of a Personal Digital Habitat (PDH) which I defined as: a federated multi-device information environment within which a person routinely dwells. If you...
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How Smalltalk Became a AI Language
This post is based upon a Twitter thread that was originally published on December 2. 2018. There is a story behind how Tektronix Smalltalk became branded as an AI language in 1984. In the 1960s-70s,...
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