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That would be Quorum's Mac compatibility library. I evaluated the Quorum library in 1991, for use in porting the Mac version of SimCity to Unix. But I decided it would be much better to do a completely native port of SimCity to Unix instead of using a Mac emulation library.

The application and Quorum library are compiled on Unix, and provided API level compatibility (not binary), layered on top of a lame-assed X11 toolkit (Motif). So the application would have to be ported the the native C compiler and recompiled on Unix, unlike the much more successful approach that Transgaming has taken with Wine and The Sims on DirectX.

The main appeal of using a Mac emulation library like Quorum was that it would not require changing (much of) the original SimCity source code (modulo compiler incompatibilities, which are numerous).

But there was really no point to that, because the code was already forked, and being able to compile the same code on multiple platforms was not an issue. The whole point of porting SimCity to Unix was to take advantage of Unix features that Quorum's emulation library could not support, like pie menus and the multi player ability.

Doing a native port required much work rewriting the user interface from scratch, but that was what I wanted to do. So I used HyperLook on NeWS (which is similar to NeXTStep and Cocoa in that it uses the PostScript imaging model), and then implemented Multi Player SimCity using TCL/Tk on X11.

Adobe used Quorum to port Photoshop 2.5 to the Sun Solaris and SGI Irix platforms. I still have my original CD and manual for Sun Photoshop 2.5, which was only ever useful as a coaster. It was totally unusable, because it was so slow, with many glitches in the user interface, and it would crash at the slightest misplaced mouse click.

Because of the way that the single tasking Mac-centric interruptable screen redisplay algorithm clashed with the asynchronous X-Windows protocol and bloated Motif toolkit, you had to take your hands off the keyboard and mouse and sit on them while you waited for Photoshop to finish drawing everything, before it was safe to use.

Of course there weren't any commercial plug-ins available on the Sun or SGI platforms, because porting Photoshop plug-ins to Suns or SGIs was extremely tricky, thanks to the Mac compatibility layer. (Plug-ins didn't have a dynamic linking mechanism to call back into X11 and Motif, to implement their control panel guis).

The Quorum library's approach is quite different from the more successful binary level compatibility approach that Transgaming is taking to run The Sims on Linux.

I've been harshly criticized by fanatic Loki supporters for justifying Transgaming's emulation approach, instead of native ports. But Loki had their chance to perform a native port of The Sims, and blew it. Don't blame Transgaming for figuring out a way to do it successfully after Loki failed to.

I'm not religiously beholden to one technique or another. I'm interested in getting the best results, so I've used many different approaches myself. An emulated port is far better than no port at all. And there are many different approaches to porting and emulation, some better than others.

The particular application as well as the particular platforms involved play extremely important roles in deciding how to best perform a port. There are also many economic issues. There is no one best approach that's right all the time. And porting software is always going to be a lot of work. If you're not willing to put enough effort into it, the results will always be horrible no matter which approach you take.

-Don

That would be Quorum's Mac compatibility library. I evaluated the Quorum library in 1991, for use in porting the Mac version of SimCity to Unix. But I decided it would be much better to do a completely native port of SimCity to Unix instead of using a Mac emulation library.

The application and Quorum library are compiled on Unix, and provided API level compatibility (not binary), layered on top of a lame-assed X11 toolkit (Motif). So the application would have to be ported the the native C compiler and recompiled on Unix, unlike the much more successful approach that Transgaming has taken with Wine and The Sims on DirectX.

The main appeal of using a Mac emulation library like Quorum was that it would not require changing (much of) the original SimCity source code (modulo compiler incompatibilities, which are numerous).

But there was really no point to that, because the code was already forked, and being able to compile the same code on multiple platforms was not an issue. The whole point of porting SimCity to Unix was to take advantage of Unix features that Quorum's emulation library could not support, like pie menus and the multi player ability.

Doing a native port required much work rewriting the user interface from scratch, but that was what I wanted to do. So I used HyperLook on NeWS (which is similar to NeXTStep and Cocoa in that it uses the PostScript imaging model), and then implemented Multi Player SimCity using TCL/Tk on X11.

Adobe used Quorum to port Photoshop 2.5 to the Sun Solaris and SGI Irix platforms. I still have my original CD and manual for Sun Photoshop 2.5, which was only ever useful as a coaster. It was totally unusable, because it was so slow, with many glitches in the user interface, and it would crash at the slightest misplaced mouse click.

Because of the way that the single tasking Mac-centric interruptable screen redisplay algorithm clashed with the asynchronous X-Windows protocol and bloated Motif toolkit, you had to take your hands off the keyboard and mouse and sit on them while you waited for Photoshop to finish drawing everything, before it was safe to use.

Of course there weren't any commercial plug-ins available on the Sun or SGI platforms, because porting Photoshop plug-ins to Suns or SGIs was extremely tricky, thanks to the Mac compatibility layer. (Plug-ins didn't have a dynamic linking mechanism to call back into X11 and Motif, to implement their control panel guis).

The Quorum library's approach is quite different from the more successful binary level compatibility approach that Transgaming is taking to run The Sims on Linux.

I've been harshly criticized by fanatic Loki supporters for justifying Transgaming's emulation approach, instead of native ports. But Loki had their chance to perform a native port of The Sims, and blew it. Don't blame Transgaming for figuring out a way to do it successfully after Loki failed to.

I'm not religiously beholden to one technique or another. I'm interested in getting the best results, so I've used many different approaches myself. An emulated port is far better than no port at all. And there are many different approaches to porting and emulation, some better than others.

The particular application as well as the particular platforms involved play extremely important roles in deciding how to best perform a port. There are also many economic issues. There is no one best approach that's right all the time. And porting software is always going to be a lot of work. If you're not willing to put enough effort into it, the results will always be horrible no matter which approach you take.

-Don

That would be Quorum's Mac compatibility library. I evaluated the Quorum library in 1991, for use in porting the Mac version of SimCity to Unix. But I decided it would be much better to do a completely native port of SimCity to Unix instead of using a Mac emulation library.

The application and Quorum library are compiled on Unix, and provided API level compatibility (not binary), layered on top of a lame-assed X11 toolkit (Motif). So the application would have to be ported the the native C compiler and recompiled on Unix, unlike the much more successful approach that Transgaming has taken with Wine and The Sims on DirectX.

The main appeal of using a Mac emulation library like Quorum was that it would not require changing (much of) the original SimCity source code (modulo compiler incompatibilities, which are numerous).

But there was really no point to that, because the code was already forked, and being able to compile the same code on multiple platforms was not an issue. The whole point of porting SimCity to Unix was to take advantage of Unix features that Quorum's emulation library could not support, like pie menus and the multi player ability.

Doing a native port required much work rewriting the user interface from scratch, but that was what I wanted to do. So I used HyperLook on NeWS (which is similar to NeXTStep and Cocoa in that it uses the PostScript imaging model), and then implemented Multi Player SimCity using TCL/Tk on X11.

Adobe used Quorum to port Photoshop 2.5 to the Sun Solaris and SGI Irix platforms. I still have my original CD and manual for Sun Photoshop 2.5, which was only ever useful as a coaster. It was totally unusable, because it was so slow, with many glitches in the user interface, and it would crash at the slightest misplaced mouse click.

Because of the way that the single tasking Mac-centric interruptable screen redisplay algorithm clashed with the asynchronous X-Windows protocol and bloated Motif toolkit, you had to take your hands off the keyboard and mouse and sit on them while you waited for Photoshop to finish drawing everything, before it was safe to use.

Of course there weren't any commercial plug-ins available on the Sun or SGI platforms, because porting Photoshop plug-ins to Suns or SGIs was extremely tricky, thanks to the Mac compatibility layer. (Plug-ins didn't have a dynamic linking mechanism to call back into X11 and Motif, to implement their control panel guis).

The Quorum library's approach is quite different from the more successful binary level compatibility approach that Transgaming is taking to run The Sims on Linux.

I've been harshly criticized by fanatic Loki supporters for justifying Transgaming's emulation approach, instead of native ports. But Loki had their chance to perform a native port of The Sims, and blew it. Don't blame Transgaming for figuring out a way to do it successfully after Loki failed to.

I'm not religiously beholden to one technique or another. I'm interested in getting the best results, so I've used many different approaches myself. An emulated port is far better than no port at all. And there are many different approaches to porting and emulation, some better than others.

The particular application as well as the particular platforms involved play extremely important roles in deciding how to best perform a port. There are also many economic issues. There is no one best approach that's right all the time. And porting software is always going to be a lot of work. If you're not willing to put enough effort into it, the results will always be horrible no matter which approach you take.

-Don

That would be Quorum's Mac compatibility library. I evaluated the Quorum library in 1991, for use in porting the Mac version of SimCity to Unix. But I decided it would be much better to do a completely native port of SimCity to Unix instead of using a Mac emulation library.

The application and Quorum library are compiled on Unix, and provided API level compatibility (not binary), layered on top of a lame-assed X11 toolkit (Motif). So the application would have to be ported the the native C compiler and recompiled on Unix, unlike the much more successful approach that Transgaming has taken with Wine and The Sims on DirectX.

The main appeal of using a Mac emulation library like Quorum was that it would not require changing (much of) the original SimCity source code (modulo compiler incompatibilities, which are numerous).

But there was really no point to that, because the code was already forked, and being able to compile the same code on multiple platforms was not an issue. The whole point of porting SimCity to Unix was to take advantage of Unix features that Quorum's emulation library could not support, like pie menus and the multi player ability.

Doing a native port required much work rewriting the user interface from scratch, but that was what I wanted to do. So I used HyperLook on NeWS (which is similar to NeXTStep and Cocoa in that it uses the PostScript imaging model), and then implemented Multi Player SimCity using TCL/Tk on X11.

Adobe used Quorum to port Photoshop 2.5 to the Sun Solaris and SGI Irix platforms. I still have my original CD and manual for Sun Photoshop 2.5, which was only ever useful as a coaster. It was totally unusable, because it was so slow, with many glitches in the user interface, and it would crash at the slightest misplaced mouse click.

Because of the way that the single tasking Mac-centric interruptable screen redisplay algorithm clashed with the asynchronous X-Windows protocol and bloated Motif toolkit, you had to take your hands off the keyboard and mouse and sit on them while you waited for Photoshop to finish drawing everything, before it was safe to use.

Of course there weren't any commercial plug-ins available on the Sun or SGI platforms, because porting Photoshop plug-ins to Suns or SGIs was extremely tricky, thanks to the Mac compatibility layer. (Plug-ins didn't have a dynamic linking mechanism to call back into X11 and Motif, to implement their control panel guis).

The Quorum library's approach is quite different from the more successful binary level compatibility approach that Transgaming is taking to run The Sims on Linux.

I've been harshly criticized by fanatic Loki supporters for justifying Transgaming's emulation approach, instead of native ports. But Loki had their chance to perform a native port of The Sims, and blew it. Don't blame Transgaming for figuring out a way to do it successfully after Loki failed to.

I'm not religiously beholden to one technique or another. I'm interested in getting the best results, so I've used many different approaches myself. An emulated port is far better than no port at all. And there are many different approaches to porting and emulation, some better than others.

The particular application as well as the particular platforms involved play extremely important roles in deciding how to best perform a port. There are also many economic issues. There is no one best approach that's right all the time. And porting software is always going to be a lot of work. If you're not willing to put enough effort into it, the results will always be horrible no matter which approach you take.

-Don

That would be Quorum's Mac compatibility library. I evaluated the Quorum library in 1991, for use in porting the Mac version of SimCity to Unix. But I decided it would be much better to do a completely native port of SimCity to Unix instead of using a Mac emulation library.

The application and Quorum library are compiled on Unix, and provided API level compatibility (not binary), layered on top of a lame-assed X11 toolkit (Motif). So the application would have to be ported the the native C compiler and recompiled on Unix, unlike the much more successful approach that Transgaming has taken with Wine and The Sims on DirectX.

The main appeal of using a Mac emulation library like Quorum was that it would not require changing (much of) the original SimCity source code (modulo compiler incompatibilities, which are numerous).

But there was really no point to that, because the code was already forked, and being able to compile the same code on multiple platforms was not an issue. The whole point of porting SimCity to Unix was to take advantage of Unix features that Quorum's emulation library could not support, like pie menus and the multi player ability.

Doing a native port required much work rewriting the user interface from scratch, but that was what I wanted to do. So I used HyperLook on NeWS (which is similar to NeXTStep and Cocoa in that it uses the PostScript imaging model), and then implemented Multi Player SimCity using TCL/Tk on X11.

Adobe used Quorum to port Photoshop 2.5 to the Sun Solaris and SGI Irix platforms. I still have my original CD and manual for Sun Photoshop 2.5, which was only ever useful as a coaster. It was totally unusable, because it was so slow, with many glitches in the user interface, and it would crash at the slightest misplaced mouse click.

Because of the way that the single tasking Mac-centric interruptable screen redisplay algorithm clashed with the asynchronous X-Windows protocol and bloated Motif toolkit, you had to take your hands off the keyboard and mouse and sit on them while you waited for Photoshop to finish drawing everything, before it was safe to use.

Of course there weren't any commercial plug-ins available on the Sun or SGI platforms, because porting Photoshop plug-ins to Suns or SGIs was extremely tricky, thanks to the Mac compatibility layer. (Plug-ins didn't have a dynamic linking mechanism to call back into X11 and Motif, to implement their control panel guis).

The Quorum library's approach is quite different from the more successful binary level compatibility approach that Transgaming is taking to run The Sims on Linux.

I've been harshly criticized by fanatic Loki supporters for justifying Transgaming's emulation approach, instead of native ports. But Loki had their chance to perform a native port of The Sims, and blew it. Don't blame Transgaming for figuring out a way to do it successfully after Loki failed to.

I'm not religiously beholden to one technique or another. I'm interested in getting the best results, so I've used many different approaches myself. An emulated port is far better than no port at all. And there are many different approaches to porting and emulation, some better than others.

The particular application as well as the particular platforms involved play extremely important roles in deciding how to best perform a port. There are also many economic issues. There is no one best approach that's right all the time. And porting software is always going to be a lot of work. If you're not willing to put enough effort into it, the results will always be horrible no matter which approach you take.

-Don

That would be Quorum's Mac compatibility library. I evaluated the Quorum library in 1991, for use in porting the Mac version of SimCity to Unix. But I decided it would be much better to do a completely native port of SimCity to Unix instead of using a Mac emulation library.

The application and Quorum library are compiled on Unix, and provided API level compatibility (not binary), layered on top of a lame-assed X11 toolkit (Motif). So the application would have to be ported the the native C compiler and recompiled on Unix, unlike the much more successful approach that Transgaming has taken with Wine and The Sims on DirectX.

The main appeal of using a Mac emulation library like Quorum was that it would not require changing (much of) the original SimCity source code (modulo compiler incompatibilities, which are numerous).

But there was really no point to that, because the code was already forked, and being able to compile the same code on multiple platforms was not an issue. The whole point of porting SimCity to Unix was to take advantage of Unix features that Quorum's emulation library could not support, like pie menus and the multi player ability.

Doing a native port required much work rewriting the user interface from scratch, but that was what I wanted to do. So I used HyperLook on NeWS (which is similar to NeXTStep and Cocoa in that it uses the PostScript imaging model), and then implemented Multi Player SimCity using TCL/Tk on X11.

Adobe used Quorum to port Photoshop 2.5 to the Sun Solaris and SGI Irix platforms. I still have my original CD and manual for Sun Photoshop 2.5, which was only ever useful as a coaster. It was totally unusable, because it was so slow, with many glitches in the user interface, and it would crash at the slightest misplaced mouse click.

Because of the way that the single tasking Mac-centric interruptable screen redisplay algorithm clashed with the asynchronous X-Windows protocol and bloated Motif toolkit, you had to take your hands off the keyboard and mouse and sit on them while you waited for Photoshop to finish drawing everything, before it was safe to use.

Of course there weren't any commercial plug-ins available on the Sun or SGI platforms, because porting Photoshop plug-ins to Suns or SGIs was extremely tricky, thanks to the Mac compatibility layer. (Plug-ins didn't have a dynamic linking mechanism to call back into X11 and Motif, to implement their control panel guis).

The Quorum library's approach is quite different from the more successful binary level compatibility approach that Transgaming is taking to run The Sims on Linux.

I've been harshly criticized by fanatic Loki supporters for justifying Transgaming's emulation approach, instead of native ports. But Loki had their chance to perform a native port of The Sims, and blew it. Don't blame Transgaming for figuring out a way to do it successfully after Loki failed to.

I'm not religiously beholden to one technique or another. I'm interested in getting the best results, so I've used many different approaches myself. An emulated port is far better than no port at all. And there are many different approaches to porting and emulation, some better than others.

The particular application as well as the particular platforms involved play extremely important roles in deciding how to best perform a port. There are also many economic issues. There is no one best approach that's right all the time. And porting software is always going to be a lot of work. If you're not willing to put enough effort into it, the results will always be horrible no matter which approach you take.

-Don

-Don

Here. ;)

-Don

Date: Mon, 4 Mar 1991 22:48:01 PST
From: Mark_Weiser.PARC@xerox.com
Subject: Re: a rumor?
To: Don Hopkins <hopkins@Eng.sun.com>

Xerox has stopped testing summer student interns in the research labs only. The rest of Xerox still labors under its yoke. Its a win, for sure, but there's still more to win. Thanks for your help.

The information visualizer guys are into gestures, but not pies. They use a rubout motion to delete, and stuff like that. I think the gesturing left and right to close and open trees was more like that.

We ahve been playing with ways to use a stylus to get input without a keyboard and without handwritng recognition. I hacked up a sort of 26 quadrant pie menu, so that each word is a shape (letter-letter-letter, all connected together, and drop ink as you move among the letters: you get a shape. Xerox is a kind of lopsided "X"), and each letter is selected as you move through it, and when you lift up and click down the stylus again you get a space. It has some potential, but 26 quadrants is just to many.

Another possiblity is to put 13 inside 13, and use a state machine so you get the inner circle letter unless you travel all the way through to the outside circle, in which case you get that letter instead, etc. I haven't hack this together yet, maybe tonight.

-mark

Date: Wed, 6 Mar 91 06:43:09 PST
From: hopkins@Eng.sun.com (Don Hopkins)
To: Mark_Weiser.PARC@xerox.com
Cc: hopkins
Subject: alphabetic pies

Have you tried two level 6x6 item pie menu tree for inputting the alphabet (and then some)?

abc ghi mno
def jkl pqr

-X-

stu yz_ ___
vwx ___ ___

You could hang more submenus off of the _'s for numerics, less common glyphs, etc. The SouthEast menu that's all _ could have any number of items, and the South menu might have some special glyphs or submenus in it. The important thing is that the glyphs are chunked in groups of 6, which fits comfortably in your head.

You might also try a two level 6x8 item pies menu tree:

abc ijk qrs
d e l m t u
fgh nop vwx

-X-

yz_012etc
_ _ 9 3 . .
___ 8 4 etc
567

I was thinking about how to do a decimal pie menu tree. The obvious thing is a 10 item pie. But what direction should 0 be, and should the numbers go CW or CCW? But a 10 item menu is only really good for inputting a single digit, or a fixed number of digits, not an arbitrary string of digits (you need a way to terminate the string, and using another mouse button is cheating). Well, most people are familiar with a phone dial, so maybe that's one way to line it up. If you lined the 10 digits up in the same direction as the numbers on the phone dial, you would have a few extra directions to put extra menu items, where there are not holes in the dial. (Hey, how many is that? All the phones in my life have buttons! I guess I'm not as familiar with the phone dial as I thought, but maybe my fingers would remember. Let's say 13.) You could use the extra 3 directions for a decimal point, and/or input editing commands, or commands that consume the number you gestured as input. Or you could just keep selecting digits deeper and deeper, and the system could be smart about only popping up menus that would only allow you to select a number in range (e.g. 0-9999). Much better to disable menu items by dimming them than removing them from the menu, because that would change the numbers items in the menu, and ruin everything.

In a phone dial context, when you needed to input letters, it might be nice to arrange an alphabetic pie like the letters on a phone dial, with submenus of 3 menus items. But it probably wouldn't be as easy to use or remember as the 6x6 alphabetic menu.

-Don

Some times, "design" is 100% equivalent to "a programmer's mistake".

That is obviously the case with X-Windows, the world's first fully modular software disaster. It was a mistake to even design it. A mistake carried out to perfection. The defecto standard. Flaky and built to stay that way. Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems. Form follows malfunction. Ignorance is our most important resource. It could be worse, but it'll take time. More than enough rope. Power tools for power fools. Putting new limits on productivity. The cutting edge of obsolescence. The art of incompetence. The defacto substandard. You'll envy the dead. Even your dog won't like it.

-Don

Symbolics is actually extremely relevant as one of the organizations indirectly responsible for the creation of the Free Software Foundation; Richard Stallman points to Symbolics hiring away nearly all of the hackers from the AI lab , this being one of the events that led to RMS' later actions.

A number of projects have since tried to build environments with tightly-integrated Lisps; none have been much more than curiosities.

The other major linkage is that the bulk of the members of the Unix Haters "cabal" were folks that hated Unix not simply in abstract, but rather in comparison to Lisp environments like Symbolics/Genera.

I'm not sure how this all would connect to the "Anti-Lisp" notions of the Anonymous Coward. Just as the Unix Haters Handbook presents very little about what they would propose as a preferable alternative to Unix, the AC doesn't present any information as to what he would prefer to Lisp.

Symbolics is actually extremely relevant as one of the organizations indirectly responsible for the creation of the Free Software Foundation; Richard Stallman points to Symbolics hiring away nearly all of the hackers from the AI lab , this being one of the events that led to RMS' later actions.

A number of projects have since tried to build environments with tightly-integrated Lisps; none have been much more than curiosities.

The other major linkage is that the bulk of the members of the Unix Haters "cabal" were folks that hated Unix not simply in abstract, but rather in comparison to Lisp environments like Symbolics/Genera.

I'm not sure how this all would connect to the "Anti-Lisp" notions of the Anonymous Coward. Just as the Unix Haters Handbook presents very little about what they would propose as a preferable alternative to Unix, the AC doesn't present any information as to what he would prefer to Lisp.

I received the following email message from the CFO of a company called LabBook, about my Bull Shit Markup Language (BSML) web page.

Appearently, they would prefer that people searching for "BSML" did not turn up my web page. I wonder if they've tried to get the Boston School for Modern Languages to change their name, too?

Now isn't the whole point of properly using XML and namespaces to disambiguate coincidental name clashes like this? If LabBook thinks there's a problem with more than one language named BSML, then they obviously have no understanding of XML, and aren't qualified to be using it to define any kind of a standard.

Maybe LabBook should put some meta-tags on their web pages to decrease their relevence when people are searching for "Bull Shit" or "Modern Language".

-Don

========

From: "Gene Van Slyke" <gene.vanslyke@labbook.com>
To: <don@toad.com>; <dhopkins@maxis.com>
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 10:36 AM
Subject: BSML Trademark

Don,

While reviewing the internet for uses of BSML, we noted your use of BSML on http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html.
While we find your use humorous, we have registed the BSML name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and would appreciate you removing the reference to BSML from your website.

Thanks for your cooperation,

Gene Van Slyke
CFO LabBook

========

Here's the page I published years ago at http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html:

========

BSML: Bull Shit Markup Language

Bull Shit Markup Language is designed to meet the needs of commerce, advertising, and blatant self promotion on the World Wide Web.

New BSML Markup Tags

CRONKITE Extension

This tag marks authoritative text that the reader should believe without question.

SALE Extension

This tag marks advertisements for products that are on sale. The browser will do everything it can to bring this to the attention of the user.

COLORMAP Extension

This tag allows the html writer complete control over the user's colormap. It supports writing RGB values into the system colormap, plus all the usual crowd pleasers like rotating, flashing, fading and degaussing, as well as changing screen depth and resolution.

BLINK Extension

The blinking text tag has been extended to apply to client side image maps, so image regions as well as individual pixels can now be blinked arbitrarily.

The RAINBOW parameter allow you to specify a sequence of up to 48 colors or image texture maps to apply to the blinking text in sequence.

The FREQ and PHASE parameters allow you to precisely control the frequence and phase of blinking text. Browsers using Apple's QuickBlink technology or MicroSoft's TrueFlicker can support up to 65536 independently blinking items per page.

Java applets can be downloaded into the individual blinkers, to blink text and graphics in arbitrarily programmable patterns.

See the Las Vegas and Times Square home pages for some excellent examples.

I received the following email message from the CFO of a company called LabBook, about my Bull Shit Markup Language (BSML) web page.

Appearently, they would prefer that people searching for "BSML" did not turn up my web page. I wonder if they've tried to get the Boston School for Modern Languages to change their name, too?

Now isn't the whole point of properly using XML and namespaces to disambiguate coincidental name clashes like this? If LabBook thinks there's a problem with more than one language named BSML, then they obviously have no understanding of XML, and aren't qualified to be using it to define any kind of a standard.

Maybe LabBook should put some meta-tags on their web pages to decrease their relevence when people are searching for "Bull Shit" or "Modern Language".

-Don

========

From: "Gene Van Slyke" <gene.vanslyke@labbook.com>
To: <don@toad.com>; <dhopkins@maxis.com>
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 10:36 AM
Subject: BSML Trademark

Don,

While reviewing the internet for uses of BSML, we noted your use of BSML on http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html.
While we find your use humorous, we have registed the BSML name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and would appreciate you removing the reference to BSML from your website.

Thanks for your cooperation,

Gene Van Slyke
CFO LabBook

========

Here's the page I published years ago at http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html:

========

BSML: Bull Shit Markup Language

Bull Shit Markup Language is designed to meet the needs of commerce, advertising, and blatant self promotion on the World Wide Web.

New BSML Markup Tags

CRONKITE Extension

This tag marks authoritative text that the reader should believe without question.

SALE Extension

This tag marks advertisements for products that are on sale. The browser will do everything it can to bring this to the attention of the user.

COLORMAP Extension

This tag allows the html writer complete control over the user's colormap. It supports writing RGB values into the system colormap, plus all the usual crowd pleasers like rotating, flashing, fading and degaussing, as well as changing screen depth and resolution.

BLINK Extension

The blinking text tag has been extended to apply to client side image maps, so image regions as well as individual pixels can now be blinked arbitrarily.

The RAINBOW parameter allow you to specify a sequence of up to 48 colors or image texture maps to apply to the blinking text in sequence.

The FREQ and PHASE parameters allow you to precisely control the frequence and phase of blinking text. Browsers using Apple's QuickBlink technology or MicroSoft's TrueFlicker can support up to 65536 independently blinking items per page.

Java applets can be downloaded into the individual blinkers, to blink text and graphics in arbitrarily programmable patterns.

See the Las Vegas and Times Square home pages for some excellent examples.

I received the following email message from the CFO of a company called LabBook, about my Bull Shit Markup Language (BSML) web page.

Appearently, they would prefer that people searching for "BSML" did not turn up my web page. I wonder if they've tried to get the Boston School for Modern Languages to change their name, too?

Now isn't the whole point of properly using XML and namespaces to disambiguate coincidental name clashes like this? If LabBook thinks there's a problem with more than one language named BSML, then they obviously have no understanding of XML, and aren't qualified to be using it to define any kind of a standard.

Maybe LabBook should put some meta-tags on their web pages to decrease their relevence when people are searching for "Bull Shit" or "Modern Language".

-Don

========

From: "Gene Van Slyke" <gene.vanslyke@labbook.com>
To: <don@toad.com>; <dhopkins@maxis.com>
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 10:36 AM
Subject: BSML Trademark

Don,

While reviewing the internet for uses of BSML, we noted your use of BSML on http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html.
While we find your use humorous, we have registed the BSML name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and would appreciate you removing the reference to BSML from your website.

Thanks for your cooperation,

Gene Van Slyke
CFO LabBook

========

Here's the page I published years ago at http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html:

========

BSML: Bull Shit Markup Language

Bull Shit Markup Language is designed to meet the needs of commerce, advertising, and blatant self promotion on the World Wide Web.

New BSML Markup Tags

CRONKITE Extension

This tag marks authoritative text that the reader should believe without question.

SALE Extension

This tag marks advertisements for products that are on sale. The browser will do everything it can to bring this to the attention of the user.

COLORMAP Extension

This tag allows the html writer complete control over the user's colormap. It supports writing RGB values into the system colormap, plus all the usual crowd pleasers like rotating, flashing, fading and degaussing, as well as changing screen depth and resolution.

BLINK Extension

The blinking text tag has been extended to apply to client side image maps, so image regions as well as individual pixels can now be blinked arbitrarily.

The RAINBOW parameter allow you to specify a sequence of up to 48 colors or image texture maps to apply to the blinking text in sequence.

The FREQ and PHASE parameters allow you to precisely control the frequence and phase of blinking text. Browsers using Apple's QuickBlink technology or MicroSoft's TrueFlicker can support up to 65536 independently blinking items per page.

Java applets can be downloaded into the individual blinkers, to blink text and graphics in arbitrarily programmable patterns.

See the Las Vegas and Times Square home pages for some excellent examples.

The wheels of government and commerce would grind to a halt were they not well lubricated with Bull Shit. So I created the Bull Shit Markup Language and published the BSML web page years ago, putting it on the public domain for the good of mankind. Now somebody has finally taken it seriously, and is trying to monopolise BSML!

He who controls BSML controls the Bull Shit... and he who controls the Bull Shit controls the Universe!

http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html

Does anyone know of any prior art pertaining to Bull Shit and Markup Languages? What about VRML -- Maybe I could get Mark Pesche to testify on my behalf? c(-;

Here's a list of the huge faceless multinational corporations I'm up against:
http://www.labbook.com
"IBM, NetGenics, Apocom, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Wiley and other leaders of the life sciences industry support LabBook's BSML as the standard for biological information".

To paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they patented the Anthrax Vaccine
and I did not speak out
because I did not have Anthrax.
Then they patented the AIDS Drugs
and I did not speak out
because I did not have AIDS.
Then they patented Viagra
and I did not speak out
because I already had an erection.
Then they came for the Bull Shitters
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

-Don

The wheels of government and commerce would grind to a halt were they not well lubricated with Bull Shit. So I created the Bull Shit Markup Language and published the BSML web page years ago, putting it on the public domain for the good of mankind. Now somebody has finally taken it seriously, and is trying to monopolise BSML!

He who controls BSML controls the Bull Shit... and he who controls the Bull Shit controls the Universe!

http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html

Does anyone know of any prior art pertaining to Bull Shit and Markup Languages? What about VRML -- Maybe I could get Mark Pesche to testify on my behalf? c(-;

Here's a list of the huge faceless multinational corporations I'm up against:
http://www.labbook.com
"IBM, NetGenics, Apocom, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Wiley and other leaders of the life sciences industry support LabBook's BSML as the standard for biological information".

To paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they patented the Anthrax Vaccine
and I did not speak out
because I did not have Anthrax.
Then they patented the AIDS Drugs
and I did not speak out
because I did not have AIDS.
Then they patented Viagra
and I did not speak out
because I already had an erection.
Then they came for the Bull Shitters
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

-Don

The wheels of government and commerce would grind to a halt were they not well lubricated with Bull Shit. So I created the Bull Shit Markup Language and published the BSML web page years ago, putting it on the public domain for the good of mankind. Now somebody has finally taken it seriously, and is trying to monopolise BSML!

He who controls BSML controls the Bull Shit... and he who controls the Bull Shit controls the Universe!

http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html

Does anyone know of any prior art pertaining to Bull Shit and Markup Languages? What about VRML -- Maybe I could get Mark Pesche to testify on my behalf? c(-;

Here's a list of the huge faceless multinational corporations I'm up against:
http://www.labbook.com
"IBM, NetGenics, Apocom, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Wiley and other leaders of the life sciences industry support LabBook's BSML as the standard for biological information".

To paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they patented the Anthrax Vaccine
and I did not speak out
because I did not have Anthrax.
Then they patented the AIDS Drugs
and I did not speak out
because I did not have AIDS.
Then they patented Viagra
and I did not speak out
because I already had an erection.
Then they came for the Bull Shitters
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

-Don

Appearently, they would prefer that people searching for "BSML" did not turn up my web page. I wonder if they've tried to get the Boston School for Modern Languages to change their name, too?

Now isn't the whole point of properly using XML and namespaces to disambiguate coincidental name clashes like this? If LabBook thinks there's a problem with more than one language named BSML, then they obviously have no understanding of XML, and aren't qualified to be using it to define any kind of a standard.

Maybe LabBook should put some meta-tags on their web pages to decrease their relevence when people are searching for "Bull Shit" or "Modern Language".

-Don

========

From: "Gene Van Slyke" <gene.vanslyke@labbook.com>
To: <don@toad.com>; <dhopkins@maxis.com>
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 10:36 AM
Subject: BSML Trademark

Don,

While reviewing the internet for uses of BSML, we noted your use of BSML on http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html.
While we find your use humorous, we have registed the BSML name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and would appreciate you removing the reference to BSML from your website.

Thanks for your cooperation,

Gene Van Slyke
CFO LabBook

========

Here's the page I published years ago at http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html:

========

BSML: Bull Shit Markup Language

Bull Shit Markup Language is designed to meet the needs of commerce, advertising, and blatant self promotion on the World Wide Web.

New BSML Markup Tags

CRONKITE Extension

This tag marks authoritative text that the reader should believe without question.

SALE Extension

This tag marks advertisements for products that are on sale. The browser will do everything it can to bring this to the attention of the user.

COLORMAP Extension

This tag allows the html writer complete control over the user's colormap. It supports writing RGB values into the system colormap, plus all the usual crowd pleasers like rotating, flashing, fading and degaussing, as well as changing screen depth and resolution.

BLINK Extension

The blinking text tag has been extended to apply to client side image maps, so image regions as well as individual pixels can now be blinked arbitrarily.

The RAINBOW parameter allow you to specify a sequence of up to 48 colors or image texture maps to apply to the blinking text in sequence.

The FREQ and PHASE parameters allow you to precisely control the frequence and phase of blinking text. Browsers using Apple's QuickBlink technology or MicroSoft's TrueFlicker can support up to 65536 independently blinking items per page.

Java applets can be downloaded into the individual blinkers, to blink text and graphics in arbitrarily programmable patterns.

See the Las Vegas and Times Square home pages for some excellent examples.

Appearently, they would prefer that people searching for "BSML" did not turn up my web page. I wonder if they've tried to get the Boston School for Modern Languages to change their name, too?

Now isn't the whole point of properly using XML and namespaces to disambiguate coincidental name clashes like this? If LabBook thinks there's a problem with more than one language named BSML, then they obviously have no understanding of XML, and aren't qualified to be using it to define any kind of a standard.

Maybe LabBook should put some meta-tags on their web pages to decrease their relevence when people are searching for "Bull Shit" or "Modern Language".

-Don

========

From: "Gene Van Slyke" <gene.vanslyke@labbook.com>
To: <don@toad.com>; <dhopkins@maxis.com>
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 10:36 AM
Subject: BSML Trademark

Don,

While reviewing the internet for uses of BSML, we noted your use of BSML on http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html.
While we find your use humorous, we have registed the BSML name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and would appreciate you removing the reference to BSML from your website.

Thanks for your cooperation,

Gene Van Slyke
CFO LabBook

========

Here's the page I published years ago at http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html:

========

BSML: Bull Shit Markup Language

Bull Shit Markup Language is designed to meet the needs of commerce, advertising, and blatant self promotion on the World Wide Web.

New BSML Markup Tags

CRONKITE Extension

This tag marks authoritative text that the reader should believe without question.

SALE Extension

This tag marks advertisements for products that are on sale. The browser will do everything it can to bring this to the attention of the user.

COLORMAP Extension

This tag allows the html writer complete control over the user's colormap. It supports writing RGB values into the system colormap, plus all the usual crowd pleasers like rotating, flashing, fading and degaussing, as well as changing screen depth and resolution.

BLINK Extension

The blinking text tag has been extended to apply to client side image maps, so image regions as well as individual pixels can now be blinked arbitrarily.

The RAINBOW parameter allow you to specify a sequence of up to 48 colors or image texture maps to apply to the blinking text in sequence.

The FREQ and PHASE parameters allow you to precisely control the frequence and phase of blinking text. Browsers using Apple's QuickBlink technology or MicroSoft's TrueFlicker can support up to 65536 independently blinking items per page.

Java applets can be downloaded into the individual blinkers, to blink text and graphics in arbitrarily programmable patterns.

See the Las Vegas and Times Square home pages for some excellent examples.

Appearently, they would prefer that people searching for "BSML" did not turn up my web page. I wonder if they've tried to get the Boston School for Modern Languages to change their name, too?

Now isn't the whole point of properly using XML and namespaces to disambiguate coincidental name clashes like this? If LabBook thinks there's a problem with more than one language named BSML, then they obviously have no understanding of XML, and aren't qualified to be using it to define any kind of a standard.

Maybe LabBook should put some meta-tags on their web pages to decrease their relevence when people are searching for "Bull Shit" or "Modern Language".

-Don

========

From: "Gene Van Slyke" <gene.vanslyke@labbook.com>
To: <don@toad.com>; <dhopkins@maxis.com>
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 10:36 AM
Subject: BSML Trademark

Don,

While reviewing the internet for uses of BSML, we noted your use of BSML on http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html.
While we find your use humorous, we have registed the BSML name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and would appreciate you removing the reference to BSML from your website.

Thanks for your cooperation,

Gene Van Slyke
CFO LabBook

========

Here's the page I published years ago at http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/bsml.html:

========

BSML: Bull Shit Markup Language

Bull Shit Markup Language is designed to meet the needs of commerce, advertising, and blatant self promotion on the World Wide Web.

New BSML Markup Tags

CRONKITE Extension

This tag marks authoritative text that the reader should believe without question.

SALE Extension

This tag marks advertisements for products that are on sale. The browser will do everything it can to bring this to the attention of the user.

COLORMAP Extension

This tag allows the html writer complete control over the user's colormap. It supports writing RGB values into the system colormap, plus all the usual crowd pleasers like rotating, flashing, fading and degaussing, as well as changing screen depth and resolution.

BLINK Extension

The blinking text tag has been extended to apply to client side image maps, so image regions as well as individual pixels can now be blinked arbitrarily.

The RAINBOW parameter allow you to specify a sequence of up to 48 colors or image texture maps to apply to the blinking text in sequence.

The FREQ and PHASE parameters allow you to precisely control the frequence and phase of blinking text. Browsers using Apple's QuickBlink technology or MicroSoft's TrueFlicker can support up to 65536 independently blinking items per page.

Java applets can be downloaded into the individual blinkers, to blink text and graphics in arbitrarily programmable patterns.

See the Las Vegas and Times Square home pages for some excellent examples.

It's not Lisp in general. Lisp integrates just fine with lots of environments. Lisp can integrate very well with UNIX if you let it (Elk Scheme and Bigloo are an excellent examples). And traditional Lisp implementations had everything from the assembler on up built-in and written in Lisp.

I think many of the people who developed CommonLisp and the Lisp machine just had a deep disdain for anything UNIX-related and therefore couldn't care less whether CommonLisp integrated well with UNIX or the kinds of things people were doing on UNIX. Just read the UNIX Hater's Handbook, contributed to by many vocal Lisp users in the the 1980's. As a result, CommonLisp has endless provisions allowing for pathname syntax on TENEX or oddball byte sizes, but few of the things that make systems like Perl, Python, or even Java so useful on UNIX and Windows. Other essential facilities didn't make it into the standard probably because many CL vendors thought they could use essential proprietary functionality as a way of binding users to their product.

I hope future Lisp implementations will learn from these past mistakes. CMU CommonLisp, in my opinion one of the best implementations around right now, might do well to just forget going for ANSI CL compatibility and instead come up with a more useful, more complete, and more streamlined feature set.

The ScriptX parser allowed you to type in a straightforward javascript-like syntax, with traditional infix notation, precedence rules and other additional syntactic sugar.

The parser transformed text into a parse tree, that was like Lisp s-expressions. ScriptX macros operated in terms of those parse trees, not the surface syntax. So internally it even had "downward passing" continuations (that you couldn't pass outside of the scope they were created), but the parse trees were compiled into a byte code, not unlike the Java virtual machine (which explains why it didn't support fully general continuations).

So you could implement any number of different surface syntaxes for ScriptX, by writing different parsers. My trusty Kaleida colleague DanFuzz wrote a traditional Scheme parser for ScriptX.

ScriptX was a lot like Dylan with a cross platform multimedia class library. It was essentially a Lisp-like language, designed around an object system and class library, more dynamic like CLOS than static like Java. Unlike Java, all data types including integers and arrays are first class objects.

ScriptX had a rich set of polymorphic container classes, much more dynamic than STL, that made heavy use of multiple inheritance.

The container classes (like arrays and maps) were supported by the language sytax, and mixed into many system classes, so you could easily treat windows as arrays, looping over their subwindows, filtering collections of objects through functions and type conversions with "pipes", mix collections into your own classes so they're easy to use through well supported interfaces, etc.

ScriptX had built-in high level time synchronization and graphics classes, including QuickTime movies, sprite graphics like Director, and vector graphics similar to Flash.

One of the great things about ScriptX, which also applies to CLOS and Dylan which inspired it, is its wonderful dynamic objects system. Programming in C++ and STL is totally miserable after having been exposed to ScriptX and CLOS.

For example, I subclassed ScriptX container classes like Array to implement ScriptX Classes for automatically generating HTML, that macros can plug together like legos and dynamically expand into complex web pages.

The ScriptX Tracking Service is a good example of using multiple inheritance with the container and presentation classes.

There's an abstract class called Tracker (that inherits only from RootObject): "This mixin class gives an object the ability to track the mouse, by participating in the tracking service protocol. You can mix Tracker in with presentation and model objects to implement all kinds of direct manipulation interfaces.".

The abstract Tracker class is subclassed by the concrete leaf class TrackerCachedPresenter, and also by another abstract class, TrackerMulti, which implement the recursive tracking protocol. TrackerMulti is then mixed down into concrete with the various container presentation classes TrackerMultiPresenter, TrackerGroupPresenter and TrackerTwoDSpace.

ScriptX was great fun to think and program in. It was an ideal language for developing an open ended platform for plugging together dynamically loaded interactive multimedia objects like Legos.

At the time (1995), Java was no nowhere near capable of doing anything like that on the Mac, Windows and OS/2. With regard to more modern languages, Python is most exciting dynamic and practical programming language around.

The best thing about Python, is that it's completely open source.

It's not tightly controled by a short sighted company that only intends to use it in their religious Jihad against Microsoft, like Java.

And it's not proprietary, jointly developed by strange bedfellows Apple and IBM, and swept under the rug, like Kaleida's ScriptX was.

So Python will be around forever, while quickly and naturally evolving, because it has earnestly learned so many lessons from Lisp and other languages.

Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?

A: IBM.

-Don

The ScriptX parser allowed you to type in a straightforward javascript-like syntax, with traditional infix notation, precedence rules and other additional syntactic sugar.

The parser transformed text into a parse tree, that was like Lisp s-expressions. ScriptX macros operated in terms of those parse trees, not the surface syntax. So internally it even had "downward passing" continuations (that you couldn't pass outside of the scope they were created), but the parse trees were compiled into a byte code, not unlike the Java virtual machine (which explains why it didn't support fully general continuations).

So you could implement any number of different surface syntaxes for ScriptX, by writing different parsers. My trusty Kaleida colleague DanFuzz wrote a traditional Scheme parser for ScriptX.

ScriptX was a lot like Dylan with a cross platform multimedia class library. It was essentially a Lisp-like language, designed around an object system and class library, more dynamic like CLOS than static like Java. Unlike Java, all data types including integers and arrays are first class objects.

ScriptX had a rich set of polymorphic container classes, much more dynamic than STL, that made heavy use of multiple inheritance.

The container classes (like arrays and maps) were supported by the language sytax, and mixed into many system classes, so you could easily treat windows as arrays, looping over their subwindows, filtering collections of objects through functions and type conversions with "pipes", mix collections into your own classes so they're easy to use through well supported interfaces, etc.

ScriptX had built-in high level time synchronization and graphics classes, including QuickTime movies, sprite graphics like Director, and vector graphics similar to Flash.

One of the great things about ScriptX, which also applies to CLOS and Dylan which inspired it, is its wonderful dynamic objects system. Programming in C++ and STL is totally miserable after having been exposed to ScriptX and CLOS.

For example, I subclassed ScriptX container classes like Array to implement ScriptX Classes for automatically generating HTML, that macros can plug together like legos and dynamically expand into complex web pages.

The ScriptX Tracking Service is a good example of using multiple inheritance with the container and presentation classes.

There's an abstract class called Tracker (that inherits only from RootObject): "This mixin class gives an object the ability to track the mouse, by participating in the tracking service protocol. You can mix Tracker in with presentation and model objects to implement all kinds of direct manipulation interfaces.".

The abstract Tracker class is subclassed by the concrete leaf class TrackerCachedPresenter, and also by another abstract class, TrackerMulti, which implement the recursive tracking protocol. TrackerMulti is then mixed down into concrete with the various container presentation classes TrackerMultiPresenter, TrackerGroupPresenter and TrackerTwoDSpace.

ScriptX was great fun to think and program in. It was an ideal language for developing an open ended platform for plugging together dynamically loaded interactive multimedia objects like Legos.

At the time (1995), Java was no nowhere near capable of doing anything like that on the Mac, Windows and OS/2. With regard to more modern languages, Python is most exciting dynamic and practical programming language around.

The best thing about Python, is that it's completely open source.

It's not tightly controled by a short sighted company that only intends to use it in their religious Jihad against Microsoft, like Java.

And it's not proprietary, jointly developed by strange bedfellows Apple and IBM, and swept under the rug, like Kaleida's ScriptX was.

So Python will be around forever, while quickly and naturally evolving, because it has earnestly learned so many lessons from Lisp and other languages.

Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?

A: IBM.

-Don

The ScriptX parser allowed you to type in a straightforward javascript-like syntax, with traditional infix notation, precedence rules and other additional syntactic sugar.

The parser transformed text into a parse tree, that was like Lisp s-expressions. ScriptX macros operated in terms of those parse trees, not the surface syntax. So internally it even had "downward passing" continuations (that you couldn't pass outside of the scope they were created), but the parse trees were compiled into a byte code, not unlike the Java virtual machine (which explains why it didn't support fully general continuations).

So you could implement any number of different surface syntaxes for ScriptX, by writing different parsers. My trusty Kaleida colleague DanFuzz wrote a traditional Scheme parser for ScriptX.

ScriptX was a lot like Dylan with a cross platform multimedia class library. It was essentially a Lisp-like language, designed around an object system and class library, more dynamic like CLOS than static like Java. Unlike Java, all data types including integers and arrays are first class objects.

ScriptX had a rich set of polymorphic container classes, much more dynamic than STL, that made heavy use of multiple inheritance.

The container classes (like arrays and maps) were supported by the language sytax, and mixed into many system classes, so you could easily treat windows as arrays, looping over their subwindows, filtering collections of objects through functions and type conversions with "pipes", mix collections into your own classes so they're easy to use through well supported interfaces, etc.

ScriptX had built-in high level time synchronization and graphics classes, including QuickTime movies, sprite graphics like Director, and vector graphics similar to Flash.

One of the great things about ScriptX, which also applies to CLOS and Dylan which inspired it, is its wonderful dynamic objects system. Programming in C++ and STL is totally miserable after having been exposed to ScriptX and CLOS.

For example, I subclassed ScriptX container classes like Array to implement ScriptX Classes for automatically generating HTML, that macros can plug together like legos and dynamically expand into complex web pages.

The ScriptX Tracking Service is a good example of using multiple inheritance with the container and presentation classes.

There's an abstract class called Tracker (that inherits only from RootObject): "This mixin class gives an object the ability to track the mouse, by participating in the tracking service protocol. You can mix Tracker in with presentation and model objects to implement all kinds of direct manipulation interfaces.".

The abstract Tracker class is subclassed by the concrete leaf class TrackerCachedPresenter, and also by another abstract class, TrackerMulti, which implement the recursive tracking protocol. TrackerMulti is then mixed down into concrete with the various container presentation classes TrackerMultiPresenter, TrackerGroupPresenter and TrackerTwoDSpace.

ScriptX was great fun to think and program in. It was an ideal language for developing an open ended platform for plugging together dynamically loaded interactive multimedia objects like Legos.

At the time (1995), Java was no nowhere near capable of doing anything like that on the Mac, Windows and OS/2. With regard to more modern languages, Python is most exciting dynamic and practical programming language around.

The best thing about Python, is that it's completely open source.

It's not tightly controled by a short sighted company that only intends to use it in their religious Jihad against Microsoft, like Java.

And it's not proprietary, jointly developed by strange bedfellows Apple and IBM, and swept under the rug, like Kaleida's ScriptX was.

So Python will be around forever, while quickly and naturally evolving, because it has earnestly learned so many lessons from Lisp and other languages.

Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?

A: IBM.

-Don

The ScriptX parser allowed you to type in a straightforward javascript-like syntax, with traditional infix notation, precedence rules and other additional syntactic sugar.

The parser transformed text into a parse tree, that was like Lisp s-expressions. ScriptX macros operated in terms of those parse trees, not the surface syntax. So internally it even had "downward passing" continuations (that you couldn't pass outside of the scope they were created), but the parse trees were compiled into a byte code, not unlike the Java virtual machine (which explains why it didn't support fully general continuations).

So you could implement any number of different surface syntaxes for ScriptX, by writing different parsers. My trusty Kaleida colleague DanFuzz wrote a traditional Scheme parser for ScriptX.

ScriptX was a lot like Dylan with a cross platform multimedia class library. It was essentially a Lisp-like language, designed around an object system and class library, more dynamic like CLOS than static like Java. Unlike Java, all data types including integers and arrays are first class objects.

ScriptX had a rich set of polymorphic container classes, much more dynamic than STL, that made heavy use of multiple inheritance.

The container classes (like arrays and maps) were supported by the language sytax, and mixed into many system classes, so you could easily treat windows as arrays, looping over their subwindows, filtering collections of objects through functions and type conversions with "pipes", mix collections into your own classes so they're easy to use through well supported interfaces, etc.

ScriptX had built-in high level time synchronization and graphics classes, including QuickTime movies, sprite graphics like Director, and vector graphics similar to Flash.

One of the great things about ScriptX, which also applies to CLOS and Dylan which inspired it, is its wonderful dynamic objects system. Programming in C++ and STL is totally miserable after having been exposed to ScriptX and CLOS.

For example, I subclassed ScriptX container classes like Array to implement ScriptX Classes for automatically generating HTML, that macros can plug together like legos and dynamically expand into complex web pages.

The ScriptX Tracking Service is a good example of using multiple inheritance with the container and presentation classes.

There's an abstract class called Tracker (that inherits only from RootObject): "This mixin class gives an object the ability to track the mouse, by participating in the tracking service protocol. You can mix Tracker in with presentation and model objects to implement all kinds of direct manipulation interfaces.".

The abstract Tracker class is subclassed by the concrete leaf class TrackerCachedPresenter, and also by another abstract class, TrackerMulti, which implement the recursive tracking protocol. TrackerMulti is then mixed down into concrete with the various container presentation classes TrackerMultiPresenter, TrackerGroupPresenter and TrackerTwoDSpace.

ScriptX was great fun to think and program in. It was an ideal language for developing an open ended platform for plugging together dynamically loaded interactive multimedia objects like Legos.

At the time (1995), Java was no nowhere near capable of doing anything like that on the Mac, Windows and OS/2. With regard to more modern languages, Python is most exciting dynamic and practical programming language around.

The best thing about Python, is that it's completely open source.

It's not tightly controled by a short sighted company that only intends to use it in their religious Jihad against Microsoft, like Java.

And it's not proprietary, jointly developed by strange bedfellows Apple and IBM, and swept under the rug, like Kaleida's ScriptX was.

So Python will be around forever, while quickly and naturally evolving, because it has earnestly learned so many lessons from Lisp and other languages.

Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?

A: IBM.

-Don

First, not that it matters really, but you're just wrong about source level debugging. It was present in Lisp Machines much earlier (two or three major releases and a half dozen years) than you realize. It wasn't turned on for Lisp for unknown reasons"

Seems like you are confirming what I'm saying: the Lisp machine did not have source level debugging until Genera 8. Whether it was hidden somewhere in the source code where your customers couldn't get at it hardly matters.

Second, you're also wrong about what killed Lisp Machines. [...] The Lisp language did not cause the problem.

I didn't claim that Lisp caused the problem. I claimed that poor business decisions, i.e., delivering an overly expensive niche market product, killed Symbolics and LMI and gave Lisp a reputation for being expensive and complex, something you, again, seem to confirm.

To be honest, I don't really understand why it's important to someone to declare a language or community dead while there are people using the language and happy with it. [...] destructive to take a posture of such definitive negativity that can't possibly aid you in any way and can, by confusing people with misinformation, injure others.

You are still operating under the mistaken assumption that Lisp has become marginalized because I or others have an irrational dislike of it. Quite to the contrary. I think Lisp is the greatest thing since sliced bread. That is why it has been so painful to see its decline over the last two decades, a decline I attribute to greedy and poor management at various Lisp vendors and a poorly conceived standard for CommonLisp.

I hope a new generation of researchers and programmers will learn from this history and that over this decade, Lisp will make a comeback. But that's why it is important to understand what went wrong in the first place.

Another interesting link about the history of Lisp and the Lisp machine is here, which basically reaches the same conclusion that I did.

Oh, and if you would like to experience a little more the sensitivity and humility with which many in the Lisp machine community have criticized other systems, just take a look here.

Dick deserves the "blame" for that letter as much as he deserves the "credit" for everything else he wrote during the time that he was insane. If you don't hold him responsible for that letter, you can't hold him responsible for the other stories he wrote, either. I think he deserves credit for everything he wrote.

Here are some refreshingly harsh quotes from Lem about science fiction. I have to agree with him that most science fiction is trash. But I love trash, and reading his essays helps me better appreciate the trash I read.

From http://www.geocities.com/bill_testerman/LemQuotesP art1.html:

"American science fiction, exploiting its exceptional status, lays claim to occupy the pinnacles of art and thought. One is annoyed by the pretentiousness of a genre that fends off accusations of primitivism by pleading its entertainment character and then, once such accusations have been silenced, renews its overweening claims." (from his essay "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans" - Lem was once a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, but was expelled in 1976)

"Science fiction became a vulgar mythology of technological civilization. I wrote its monograph without the intention of creating a crushing critique....I think that this monograph is an expression of my personal utopia: a longing for a better science fiction - one that should exist." (writing about his Fantastyka i futurologia)

"Some time ago crime was modest - take Al Capone and his mere two dozens of victims. Now we have the Independence Day movie, where alien spaceships murder almost the entire mankind. Some American producer claims now that his next picture will be even stronger. But what can be stronger? To murder an entire biosphere? This is so disgusting for me, that I decided to leave the street-car of science fiction on a stop of essay writing." (from 1996 Orlinski interview)

-Don

Author of The Cyberiad, starring Trurl and Klapaucius, which inspired the game SimCity.

A articulate Polish universal fiction writer, who thinks that Philip K Dick is a Visionary Among the Charlatans.

Nobody can figure out how he writes in Polish, yet the English translations of his books are full of brilliant poetic puns and neological phonetic jokes. He's got a great translator, Michael Kandel, to say the least.

His son Tomasz Lem created and maintains his father's official Stanislaw Lem Web Site.

-Don

PS: But here's what Philip K Dick, another great writer, had to say about Stanislaw Lem to the FBI:

Philip K. Dick to the FBI, September 2, 1974

I am enclosing the letterhead of Professor Darko Suvin, to go with information and enclosures which I have sent you previously. This is the first contact I have had with Professor Suvin. Listed with him are three Marxists whom I sent you information about before, based on personal dealings with them: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner who is Stanislaw Lem's official Western agent. The text of the letter indicates the extensive influence of this publication, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES.

What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA. "

Their main successes would appear to be in the fields of academic articles, book reviews and possibly through our organization the control in the future of the awarding of honors and titles. I think, though, at this time, that their campaign to establish Lem himself as a major novelist and critic is losing ground; it has begun to encounter serious opposition: Lem's creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated).

It is a grim development for our field and its hopes to find much of our criticism and academic theses and publications completely controlled by a faceless group in Krakow, Poland. What can be done, though, I do not know.

-Philip K Dick

From Stanislaw Lem Questions and Answers.

Author of The Cyberiad, starring Trurl and Klapaucius, which inspired the game SimCity.

A articulate Polish universal fiction writer, who thinks that Philip K Dick is a Visionary Among the Charlatans.

Nobody can figure out how he writes in Polish, yet the English translations of his books are full of brilliant poetic puns and neological phonetic jokes. He's got a great translator, Michael Kandel, to say the least.

His son Tomasz Lem created and maintains his father's official Stanislaw Lem Web Site.

-Don

PS: But here's what Philip K Dick, another great writer, had to say about Stanislaw Lem to the FBI:

Philip K. Dick to the FBI, September 2, 1974

I am enclosing the letterhead of Professor Darko Suvin, to go with information and enclosures which I have sent you previously. This is the first contact I have had with Professor Suvin. Listed with him are three Marxists whom I sent you information about before, based on personal dealings with them: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner who is Stanislaw Lem's official Western agent. The text of the letter indicates the extensive influence of this publication, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES.

What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA. "

Their main successes would appear to be in the fields of academic articles, book reviews and possibly through our organization the control in the future of the awarding of honors and titles. I think, though, at this time, that their campaign to establish Lem himself as a major novelist and critic is losing ground; it has begun to encounter serious opposition: Lem's creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated).

It is a grim development for our field and its hopes to find much of our criticism and academic theses and publications completely controlled by a faceless group in Krakow, Poland. What can be done, though, I do not know.

-Philip K Dick

From Stanislaw Lem Questions and Answers.

Author of The Cyberiad, starring Trurl and Klapaucius, which inspired the game SimCity.

A articulate Polish universal fiction writer, who thinks that Philip K Dick is a Visionary Among the Charlatans.

Nobody can figure out how he writes in Polish, yet the English translations of his books are full of brilliant poetic puns and neological phonetic jokes. He's got a great translator, Michael Kandel, to say the least.

His son Tomasz Lem created and maintains his father's official Stanislaw Lem Web Site.

-Don

PS: But here's what Philip K Dick, another great writer, had to say about Stanislaw Lem to the FBI:

Philip K. Dick to the FBI, September 2, 1974

I am enclosing the letterhead of Professor Darko Suvin, to go with information and enclosures which I have sent you previously. This is the first contact I have had with Professor Suvin. Listed with him are three Marxists whom I sent you information about before, based on personal dealings with them: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner who is Stanislaw Lem's official Western agent. The text of the letter indicates the extensive influence of this publication, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES.

What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA. "

Their main successes would appear to be in the fields of academic articles, book reviews and possibly through our organization the control in the future of the awarding of honors and titles. I think, though, at this time, that their campaign to establish Lem himself as a major novelist and critic is losing ground; it has begun to encounter serious opposition: Lem's creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated).

It is a grim development for our field and its hopes to find much of our criticism and academic theses and publications completely controlled by a faceless group in Krakow, Poland. What can be done, though, I do not know.

-Philip K Dick

From Stanislaw Lem Questions and Answers.

Author of The Cyberiad, starring Trurl and Klapaucius, which inspired the game SimCity.

A articulate Polish universal fiction writer, who thinks that Philip K Dick is a Visionary Among the Charlatans.

Nobody can figure out how he writes in Polish, yet the English translations of his books are full of brilliant poetic puns and neological phonetic jokes. He's got a great translator, Michael Kandel, to say the least.

His son Tomasz Lem created and maintains his father's official Stanislaw Lem Web Site.

-Don

PS: But here's what Philip K Dick, another great writer, had to say about Stanislaw Lem to the FBI:

Philip K. Dick to the FBI, September 2, 1974

I am enclosing the letterhead of Professor Darko Suvin, to go with information and enclosures which I have sent you previously. This is the first contact I have had with Professor Suvin. Listed with him are three Marxists whom I sent you information about before, based on personal dealings with them: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner who is Stanislaw Lem's official Western agent. The text of the letter indicates the extensive influence of this publication, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES.

What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA. "

Their main successes would appear to be in the fields of academic articles, book reviews and possibly through our organization the control in the future of the awarding of honors and titles. I think, though, at this time, that their campaign to establish Lem himself as a major novelist and critic is losing ground; it has begun to encounter serious opposition: Lem's creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated).

It is a grim development for our field and its hopes to find much of our criticism and academic theses and publications completely controlled by a faceless group in Krakow, Poland. What can be done, though, I do not know.

-Philip K Dick

From Stanislaw Lem Questions and Answers.

Author of The Cyberiad, starring Trurl and Klapaucius, which inspired the game SimCity.

A articulate Polish universal fiction writer, who thinks that Philip K Dick is a Visionary Among the Charlatans.

Nobody can figure out how he writes in Polish, yet the English translations of his books are full of brilliant poetic puns and neological phonetic jokes. He's got a great translator, Michael Kandel, to say the least.

His son Tomasz Lem created and maintains his father's official Stanislaw Lem Web Site.

-Don

PS: But here's what Philip K Dick, another great writer, had to say about Stanislaw Lem to the FBI:

Philip K. Dick to the FBI, September 2, 1974

I am enclosing the letterhead of Professor Darko Suvin, to go with information and enclosures which I have sent you previously. This is the first contact I have had with Professor Suvin. Listed with him are three Marxists whom I sent you information about before, based on personal dealings with them: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner who is Stanislaw Lem's official Western agent. The text of the letter indicates the extensive influence of this publication, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES.

What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA. "

Their main successes would appear to be in the fields of academic articles, book reviews and possibly through our organization the control in the future of the awarding of honors and titles. I think, though, at this time, that their campaign to establish Lem himself as a major novelist and critic is losing ground; it has begun to encounter serious opposition: Lem's creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated).

It is a grim development for our field and its hopes to find much of our criticism and academic theses and publications completely controlled by a faceless group in Krakow, Poland. What can be done, though, I do not know.

-Philip K Dick

From Stanislaw Lem Questions and Answers.

Author of The Cyberiad, starring Trurl and Klapaucius, which inspired the game SimCity.

A articulate Polish universal fiction writer, who thinks that Philip K Dick is a Visionary Among the Charlatans.

Nobody can figure out how he writes in Polish, yet the English translations of his books are full of brilliant poetic puns and neological phonetic jokes. He's got a great translator, Michael Kandel, to say the least.

His son Tomasz Lem created and maintains his father's official Stanislaw Lem Web Site.

-Don

PS: But here's what Philip K Dick, another great writer, had to say about Stanislaw Lem to the FBI:

Philip K. Dick to the FBI, September 2, 1974

I am enclosing the letterhead of Professor Darko Suvin, to go with information and enclosures which I have sent you previously. This is the first contact I have had with Professor Suvin. Listed with him are three Marxists whom I sent you information about before, based on personal dealings with them: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner who is Stanislaw Lem's official Western agent. The text of the letter indicates the extensive influence of this publication, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES.

What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA. "

Their main successes would appear to be in the fields of academic articles, book reviews and possibly through our organization the control in the future of the awarding of honors and titles. I think, though, at this time, that their campaign to establish Lem himself as a major novelist and critic is losing ground; it has begun to encounter serious opposition: Lem's creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated).

It is a grim development for our field and its hopes to find much of our criticism and academic theses and publications completely controlled by a faceless group in Krakow, Poland. What can be done, though, I do not know.

-Philip K Dick

From Stanislaw Lem Questions and Answers.

Author of The Cyberiad, starring Trurl and Klapaucius, which inspired the game SimCity.

A articulate Polish universal fiction writer, who thinks that Philip K Dick is a Visionary Among the Charlatans.

Nobody can figure out how he writes in Polish, yet the English translations of his books are full of brilliant poetic puns and neological phonetic jokes. He's got a great translator, Michael Kandel, to say the least.

His son Tomasz Lem created and maintains his father's official Stanislaw Lem Web Site.

-Don

PS: But here's what Philip K Dick, another great writer, had to say about Stanislaw Lem to the FBI:

Philip K. Dick to the FBI, September 2, 1974

I am enclosing the letterhead of Professor Darko Suvin, to go with information and enclosures which I have sent you previously. This is the first contact I have had with Professor Suvin. Listed with him are three Marxists whom I sent you information about before, based on personal dealings with them: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner who is Stanislaw Lem's official Western agent. The text of the letter indicates the extensive influence of this publication, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES.

What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA. "

Their main successes would appear to be in the fields of academic articles, book reviews and possibly through our organization the control in the future of the awarding of honors and titles. I think, though, at this time, that their campaign to establish Lem himself as a major novelist and critic is losing ground; it has begun to encounter serious opposition: Lem's creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated).

It is a grim development for our field and its hopes to find much of our criticism and academic theses and publications completely controlled by a faceless group in Krakow, Poland. What can be done, though, I do not know.

-Philip K Dick

From Stanislaw Lem Questions and Answers.

Author of The Cyberiad, starring Trurl and Klapaucius, which inspired the game SimCity.

A articulate Polish universal fiction writer, who thinks that Philip K Dick is a Visionary Among the Charlatans.

Nobody can figure out how he writes in Polish, yet the English translations of his books are full of brilliant poetic puns and neological phonetic jokes. He's got a great translator, Michael Kandel, to say the least.

His son Tomasz Lem created and maintains his father's official Stanislaw Lem Web Site.

-Don

PS: But here's what Philip K Dick, another great writer, had to say about Stanislaw Lem to the FBI:

Philip K. Dick to the FBI, September 2, 1974

I am enclosing the letterhead of Professor Darko Suvin, to go with information and enclosures which I have sent you previously. This is the first contact I have had with Professor Suvin. Listed with him are three Marxists whom I sent you information about before, based on personal dealings with them: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner who is Stanislaw Lem's official Western agent. The text of the letter indicates the extensive influence of this publication, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES.

What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA. "

Their main successes would appear to be in the fields of academic articles, book reviews and possibly through our organization the control in the future of the awarding of honors and titles. I think, though, at this time, that their campaign to establish Lem himself as a major novelist and critic is losing ground; it has begun to encounter serious opposition: Lem's creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated).

It is a grim development for our field and its hopes to find much of our criticism and academic theses and publications completely controlled by a faceless group in Krakow, Poland. What can be done, though, I do not know.

-Philip K Dick

From Stanislaw Lem Questions and Answers.

I think you'd find it lacking. Maybe you'd end up a Unix hater, though.

noah

First of all, I started porting SimCity to Unix in back in 1991, and DUX published multi player X11 SimCity for Unix 1993, which is reviewed here. Before that, I released HyperLook SimCity for NeWS in 1992, which was awarded "Product of the year 1992" from Unix World magazine (in the Jan 1993 issue).

Secondly, you have the price wrong -- it wasn't $80. Single Player Node Locked License: $49. Multi Player Node Locked License: $89. Single Player Floating License: $129. Multi Player Floating License: $149. Such prices for Unix workstation software were unheard of at the time, and there were hardly any other commercial games available for Unix. (Despite their bluster, Loki wasn't the first Unix game company.)

For comparison: In May 1991, Curtis Priem's and Bruce Factor's "Aviator" flight simulator for the Sun workstation from Artificial Horisons sold for $150.

The authors worked for Sun designing the GX graphics accelerator board, wrote Aviator in their spare time to demonstrate the hardware, and published one of the first commercially available real time 3D games for the Sun. Good thing they had a day job.

Because right after they published it, some butt-head Sun employee posted a crack to defeat the licensing scheme to the tstech alias at Sun. They had to send around a message begging people to please delete the crack and pay for it.

I haven't made a penny off of Unix SimCity for years, because you can't buy it any more. Loki didn't exist for years after I saw my last penny from porting SimCity to Unix.

I don't know where you got your unattributed misinformation that the networking in Multi Player SimCity Classic didn't work. I first demonstrated it at the Interactive Experience of the 1993 InterCHI conference in Amsterdam. It worked just fine then, and even better now that computers and networks are faster.

Just recently in May 2001 I showed it to the MIT Media Lab sponsors and researchers, at the Digital Life confence. I demonstrated the colaborative multi player game user interface and voting dialogs, running over the network between two linux laptops, and it worked just fine. It's just not available as a product any more, and hasn't been for a long time.

I am not "repeating the market speak of native ports being bad". I am making a point, based on my own experience as well as talking with other people who I trust, like Will Wright and John Gilmore.

My point is that Wine solves many more problems than it causes, and that native ports to Linux aren't worth it, unless you put a lot of time, energy and creativity into improving the game so it substantially takes advantage of the platform.

Even then, there's no guarantee that it'll be worthwhile. There are many more important economic issues that totally override trivial technical implementation details like porting versus emulation.

On the other hand, I think that any effort put into improving Wine is well spent, that will truly benefit many people over the long term. If it can run games, then it can do a lot more. Double duh.

It's much more productive to practically solve real problems right now, than to argue over how you would solve imaginary political problems in the ideal world, if only the Supreme Court appointed you Dictator and Congress burned the Constitution in your honor. That job's already taken.

-Don

First of all, I started porting SimCity to Unix in back in 1991, and DUX published multi player X11 SimCity for Unix 1993, which is reviewed here. Before that, I released HyperLook SimCity for NeWS in 1992, which was awarded "Product of the year 1992" from Unix World magazine (in the Jan 1993 issue).

Secondly, you have the price wrong -- it wasn't $80. Single Player Node Locked License: $49. Multi Player Node Locked License: $89. Single Player Floating License: $129. Multi Player Floating License: $149. Such prices for Unix workstation software were unheard of at the time, and there were hardly any other commercial games available for Unix. (Despite their bluster, Loki wasn't the first Unix game company.)

For comparison: In May 1991, Curtis Priem's and Bruce Factor's "Aviator" flight simulator for the Sun workstation from Artificial Horisons sold for $150.

The authors worked for Sun designing the GX graphics accelerator board, wrote Aviator in their spare time to demonstrate the hardware, and published one of the first commercially available real time 3D games for the Sun. Good thing they had a day job.

Because right after they published it, some butt-head Sun employee posted a crack to defeat the licensing scheme to the tstech alias at Sun. They had to send around a message begging people to please delete the crack and pay for it.

I haven't made a penny off of Unix SimCity for years, because you can't buy it any more. Loki didn't exist for years after I saw my last penny from porting SimCity to Unix.

I don't know where you got your unattributed misinformation that the networking in Multi Player SimCity Classic didn't work. I first demonstrated it at the Interactive Experience of the 1993 InterCHI conference in Amsterdam. It worked just fine then, and even better now that computers and networks are faster.

Just recently in May 2001 I showed it to the MIT Media Lab sponsors and researchers, at the Digital Life confence. I demonstrated the colaborative multi player game user interface and voting dialogs, running over the network between two linux laptops, and it worked just fine. It's just not available as a product any more, and hasn't been for a long time.

I am not "repeating the market speak of native ports being bad". I am making a point, based on my own experience as well as talking with other people who I trust, like Will Wright and John Gilmore.

My point is that Wine solves many more problems than it causes, and that native ports to Linux aren't worth it, unless you put a lot of time, energy and creativity into improving the game so it substantially takes advantage of the platform.

Even then, there's no guarantee that it'll be worthwhile. There are many more important economic issues that totally override trivial technical implementation details like porting versus emulation.

On the other hand, I think that any effort put into improving Wine is well spent, that will truly benefit many people over the long term. If it can run games, then it can do a lot more. Double duh.

It's much more productive to practically solve real problems right now, than to argue over how you would solve imaginary political problems in the ideal world, if only the Supreme Court appointed you Dictator and Congress burned the Constitution in your honor. That job's already taken.

-Don

First of all, I started porting SimCity to Unix in back in 1991, and DUX published multi player X11 SimCity for Unix 1993, which is reviewed here. Before that, I released HyperLook SimCity for NeWS in 1992, which was awarded "Product of the year 1992" from Unix World magazine (in the Jan 1993 issue).

Secondly, you have the price wrong -- it wasn't $80. Single Player Node Locked License: $49. Multi Player Node Locked License: $89. Single Player Floating License: $129. Multi Player Floating License: $149. Such prices for Unix workstation software were unheard of at the time, and there were hardly any other commercial games available for Unix. (Despite their bluster, Loki wasn't the first Unix game company.)

For comparison: In May 1991, Curtis Priem's and Bruce Factor's "Aviator" flight simulator for the Sun workstation from Artificial Horisons sold for $150.

The authors worked for Sun designing the GX graphics accelerator board, wrote Aviator in their spare time to demonstrate the hardware, and published one of the first commercially available real time 3D games for the Sun. Good thing they had a day job.

Because right after they published it, some butt-head Sun employee posted a crack to defeat the licensing scheme to the tstech alias at Sun. They had to send around a message begging people to please delete the crack and pay for it.

I haven't made a penny off of Unix SimCity for years, because you can't buy it any more. Loki didn't exist for years after I saw my last penny from porting SimCity to Unix.

I don't know where you got your unattributed misinformation that the networking in Multi Player SimCity Classic didn't work. I first demonstrated it at the Interactive Experience of the 1993 InterCHI conference in Amsterdam. It worked just fine then, and even better now that computers and networks are faster.

Just recently in May 2001 I showed it to the MIT Media Lab sponsors and researchers, at the Digital Life confence. I demonstrated the colaborative multi player game user interface and voting dialogs, running over the network between two linux laptops, and it worked just fine. It's just not available as a product any more, and hasn't been for a long time.

I am not "repeating the market speak of native ports being bad". I am making a point, based on my own experience as well as talking with other people who I trust, like Will Wright and John Gilmore.

My point is that Wine solves many more problems than it causes, and that native ports to Linux aren't worth it, unless you put a lot of time, energy and creativity into improving the game so it substantially takes advantage of the platform.

Even then, there's no guarantee that it'll be worthwhile. There are many more important economic issues that totally override trivial technical implementation details like porting versus emulation.

On the other hand, I think that any effort put into improving Wine is well spent, that will truly benefit many people over the long term. If it can run games, then it can do a lot more. Double duh.

It's much more productive to practically solve real problems right now, than to argue over how you would solve imaginary political problems in the ideal world, if only the Supreme Court appointed you Dictator and Congress burned the Constitution in your honor. That job's already taken.

-Don

Why do you say Scott Draeker is not the person to talk to about porting The Sims to Linux? Is there someone else at Loki I should have been talking to instead? Or some other company than Loki I should have approached instead?

Please clarify just what you mean by "...not to mention the fact that Hopkin's previous work is enough to get him dismissed out of hand by any Unix user or game company employee."? What previous work do you mean?

Are you refering to my work writing The X-Windows Disaster chapter for The Unix-Haters Handbook? I wrote that AFTER porting SimCity to X11 with TCL/Tk, compared with my previous experience porting SimCity to NeWS with HyperLook.

Or has my work with pie menus for ActiveX, Internet Explorer and other crass commercial products tainted me as Politically Incorrect?

I hope you at least appreciate that I'm taking the time to personally answer your message and directly address all of your accusations, instead of copping a "go away kid, you're bothering me" attitude.

-Don

Why do you say Scott Draeker is not the person to talk to about porting The Sims to Linux? Is there someone else at Loki I should have been talking to instead? Or some other company than Loki I should have approached instead?

Please clarify just what you mean by "...not to mention the fact that Hopkin's previous work is enough to get him dismissed out of hand by any Unix user or game company employee."? What previous work do you mean?

Are you refering to my work writing The X-Windows Disaster chapter for The Unix-Haters Handbook? I wrote that AFTER porting SimCity to X11 with TCL/Tk, compared with my previous experience porting SimCity to NeWS with HyperLook.

Or has my work with pie menus for ActiveX, Internet Explorer and other crass commercial products tainted me as Politically Incorrect?

I hope you at least appreciate that I'm taking the time to personally answer your message and directly address all of your accusations, instead of copping a "go away kid, you're bothering me" attitude.

-Don

Why do you say Scott Draeker is not the person to talk to about porting The Sims to Linux? Is there someone else at Loki I should have been talking to instead? Or some other company than Loki I should have approached instead?

Please clarify just what you mean by "...not to mention the fact that Hopkin's previous work is enough to get him dismissed out of hand by any Unix user or game company employee."? What previous work do you mean?

Are you refering to my work writing The X-Windows Disaster chapter for The Unix-Haters Handbook? I wrote that AFTER porting SimCity to X11 with TCL/Tk, compared with my previous experience porting SimCity to NeWS with HyperLook.

Or has my work with pie menus for ActiveX, Internet Explorer and other crass commercial products tainted me as Politically Incorrect?

I hope you at least appreciate that I'm taking the time to personally answer your message and directly address all of your accusations, instead of copping a "go away kid, you're bothering me" attitude.

-Don

Why do you say Scott Draeker is not the person to talk to about porting The Sims to Linux? Is there someone else at Loki I should have been talking to instead? Or some other company than Loki I should have approached instead?

Please clarify just what you mean by "...not to mention the fact that Hopkin's previous work is enough to get him dismissed out of hand by any Unix user or game company employee."? What previous work do you mean?

Are you refering to my work writing The X-Windows Disaster chapter for The Unix-Haters Handbook? I wrote that AFTER porting SimCity to X11 with TCL/Tk, compared with my previous experience porting SimCity to NeWS with HyperLook.

Or has my work with pie menus for ActiveX, Internet Explorer and other crass commercial products tainted me as Politically Incorrect?

I hope you at least appreciate that I'm taking the time to personally answer your message and directly address all of your accusations, instead of copping a "go away kid, you're bothering me" attitude.

-Don

In interpreted languages that allow procedures to be treated as data values, it is very easy to write an interpreter for those languages in the language itself, because the language has features that make it easy to write code that manipulates other code, evaluate expressions, and so on. The same is not true for writing a language like, say, C, since C itself doesn't contain any particular features oriented towards such tasks. Writing a C compiler in C has to be done "the hard way". Writing a Lisp interpreter in Lisp is trivial by comparison.

Saying that a language is capable of implementing itself in a metacircular fashion implies that the language has capabilities which go beyond those in traditional languages like C, Basic, or Java, none of which can really be said to be metacircular. An important implication is the ability of a language to operate on its own code at runtime, which is why metacircular languages usually support higher order functions. Metacircular languages are also good at implementing other languages with minimum effort.

Smalltalk is another language with metacircular features. For something more unusual, here's a brief mention of an implementation of Postscript in Postscript. I picked this link because it contains some clues to some of what a metacircular interpreter can buy you; I'm not sure I can explain it any better without getting into code samples in Scheme, and SICP does that better than I could.

Based on Sassenrath's description, it sounds as though REBOL has some features which can validly be described as metacircular. If he's trying to dazzle people with his language, he's at least doing so in a way which communicates something meaningful to those familiar with the terminology, as opposed to making completely gratuitous claims.

He says his customers demand more than Windows software can offer, but how can he deliver that if Loki is only porting games straight across, but not putting much effort into substantially redesigning them to take real advantage of Linux, or even developing a new games from the ground up, unlike anything that's ever been seen on Windows?

Native ports certainly benefit from the robust, efficient Linux virtual memory and file system, but so do games running under Wine.

Perhaps Loki should try putting more original creative development effort into the games they port, to really take substantial advantage of Linux features that you can't get through emulation.

When I ported SimCity Classic to Unix from 1991 to 1993, I took the time to rewrite all of the graphics code and user interface from scratch (twice: first in PostScript, then in TCL), and added unix-specific features to the game like scalable graphics using NeWS PostScript, and multi-player support using X11 networking.

Maybe Loki should change their approach, take some of their single player games, and really exploit Linux by turning them into networked multi player games, like I did with SimCity classic. Then they might have an argument against Transgaming's assertion that Wine makes their current approach to porting obsolete.

-Don

He says his customers demand more than Windows software can offer, but how can he deliver that if Loki is only porting games straight across, but not putting much effort into substantially redesigning them to take real advantage of Linux, or even developing a new games from the ground up, unlike anything that's ever been seen on Windows?

Native ports certainly benefit from the robust, efficient Linux virtual memory and file system, but so do games running under Wine.

Perhaps Loki should try putting more original creative development effort into the games they port, to really take substantial advantage of Linux features that you can't get through emulation.

When I ported SimCity Classic to Unix from 1991 to 1993, I took the time to rewrite all of the graphics code and user interface from scratch (twice: first in PostScript, then in TCL), and added unix-specific features to the game like scalable graphics using NeWS PostScript, and multi-player support using X11 networking.

Maybe Loki should change their approach, take some of their single player games, and really exploit Linux by turning them into networked multi player games, like I did with SimCity classic. Then they might have an argument against Transgaming's assertion that Wine makes their current approach to porting obsolete.

-Don

He says his customers demand more than Windows software can offer, but how can he deliver that if Loki is only porting games straight across, but not putting much effort into substantially redesigning them to take real advantage of Linux, or even developing a new games from the ground up, unlike anything that's ever been seen on Windows?

Native ports certainly benefit from the robust, efficient Linux virtual memory and file system, but so do games running under Wine.

Perhaps Loki should try putting more original creative development effort into the games they port, to really take substantial advantage of Linux features that you can't get through emulation.

When I ported SimCity Classic to Unix from 1991 to 1993, I took the time to rewrite all of the graphics code and user interface from scratch (twice: first in PostScript, then in TCL), and added unix-specific features to the game like scalable graphics using NeWS PostScript, and multi-player support using X11 networking.

Maybe Loki should change their approach, take some of their single player games, and really exploit Linux by turning them into networked multi player games, like I did with SimCity classic. Then they might have an argument against Transgaming's assertion that Wine makes their current approach to porting obsolete.

-Don

He says his customers demand more than Windows software can offer, but how can he deliver that if Loki is only porting games straight across, but not putting much effort into substantially redesigning them to take real advantage of Linux, or even developing a new games from the ground up, unlike anything that's ever been seen on Windows?

Native ports certainly benefit from the robust, efficient Linux virtual memory and file system, but so do games running under Wine.

Perhaps Loki should try putting more original creative development effort into the games they port, to really take substantial advantage of Linux features that you can't get through emulation.

When I ported SimCity Classic to Unix from 1991 to 1993, I took the time to rewrite all of the graphics code and user interface from scratch (twice: first in PostScript, then in TCL), and added unix-specific features to the game like scalable graphics using NeWS PostScript, and multi-player support using X11 networking.

Maybe Loki should change their approach, take some of their single player games, and really exploit Linux by turning them into networked multi player games, like I did with SimCity classic. Then they might have an argument against Transgaming's assertion that Wine makes their current approach to porting obsolete.

-Don

He says his customers demand more than Windows software can offer, but how can he deliver that if Loki is only porting games straight across, but not putting much effort into substantially redesigning them to take real advantage of Linux, or even developing a new games from the ground up, unlike anything that's ever been seen on Windows?

Native ports certainly benefit from the robust, efficient Linux virtual memory and file system, but so do games running under Wine.

Perhaps Loki should try putting more original creative development effort into the games they port, to really take substantial advantage of Linux features that you can't get through emulation.

When I ported SimCity Classic to Unix from 1991 to 1993, I took the time to rewrite all of the graphics code and user interface from scratch (twice: first in PostScript, then in TCL), and added unix-specific features to the game like scalable graphics using NeWS PostScript, and multi-player support using X11 networking.

Maybe Loki should change their approach, take some of their single player games, and really exploit Linux by turning them into networked multi player games, like I did with SimCity classic. Then they might have an argument against Transgaming's assertion that Wine makes their current approach to porting obsolete.

-Don