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Re:Legendary by swillden · 2017-05-22 23:59 · Score: 1 · on Java Creator James Gosling Joins Amazon Web Services (geekwire.com)

You can actually look at the Gosling source code here. It was a library for drawing updates to the screen (with a dynamic programming library), and actually the source code got shared and was being used in a lot of places, not just emacs. That was the main thing Stallman had to rewrite, and when he did, he ended up making it more efficient.

This description understates the EMACS-related achievements of both.

RMS was the primary creator of the original EMACS, written in TECO macros and PDP-10 assembly (though note that EMACS itself was an extension of earlier work by others, and Guy Steele also contributed a huge amount to EMACS). Gosling reimplemented EMACS in C, including his own extension language called Mocklisp, which looked like LISP, but lacked key features of LISP, like lists.

The most clever part of Gosling EMACS (Gosmacs) was the drawing library, but calling it a "drawing library" kind of trivializes it. At the time, "drawing" meant updating a display terminal's character display. Because data connections to terminals were often slow, it was important to do this in the most efficient way possible. So this was an instance of the classic "string to string" problem, which is taking string A (what's already in the terminal display buffer) and string B (what needs to be displayed) and find the most efficient way of changing A into B with a sequence of cursor movement and write commands. These days, of course, it would never occur to us even to care; we're just rewrite the entire display 120 times per second. Oh, and because computers were slow, finding the efficient edit sequence had to be done efficiently. Gosling's implementation was clever, and novel, and very complex, so much so that he put a skull and crossbones in the comment and warned people against changing it because they probably didn't understand it, even after they thought they did. That displays some hubris, but it was an impressive piece of work. Go read the code and see if you understand it.

RMS wrote GNU EMACS. He did use Gosmacs as a starting point but he replaced Mocklisp with a proper(ish) LISP interpreter, which required essentially a full rewrite of the editor, though some bits of Gosmacs stuck around, including the clever drawing functions. Gosling sold Gosmacs to Unipress, who commercialized it and attempted to stop all other use of the code they had purchased, which caused Stallman to rewrite the remaining bits of Gosmacs, including the scary display routines. In the process he made the already very-efficient code more efficient as well as simpler and cleaner.

The experience with Unipress, along with similar experiences with Symbolics, led RMS to invent the notion of copyleft as a sort of legal judo to prevent copyright being used to restrict access to GNU software.

Re:Legendary by phantomfive · 2017-05-22 18:02 · Score: 5, Informative · on Java Creator James Gosling Joins Amazon Web Services (geekwire.com)

You can actually look at the Gosling source code here. It was a library for drawing updates to the screen (with a dynamic programming library), and actually the source code got shared and was being used in a lot of places, not just emacs. That was the main thing Stallman had to rewrite, and when he did, he ended up making it more efficient.

Micropolis by pan_sapiens · 2008-12-15 14:03 · Score: 1 · on Great Games To Put On a Free PC?

(aka Sim City[tm]) would be a nice addition. The source is available under the GPL, but a bit of Googling didn't find me any pre-compiled Windows version. Anyone know where one might be ? There are certainly deb packages for Debian/Ubuntu around.

XCalc.gif : State of the art X-Windows calculator by SimHacker · 2008-11-04 04:11 · Score: 1 · on Wayland, a New X Server For Linux

Uglier than goatse.cx:
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-windows/XCalc.gif

That's what used to happen when you resize XCalc several times in a row. No wonder they call it the X-Stoolkit!

-Don

Re:NeWS was good and bad by SimHacker · 2008-11-04 03:31 · Score: 1 · on Wayland, a New X Server For Linux

PostScript is more like Lisp with three stacks: operand, return and dictionary (scope). And as you point out, it's easy to use the dictionary stack to implement an object oriented programming system, like Smalltalk.

Owen Densmore wrote "object.ps" in about two pages of code, which implemented Smalltalk's object oriented programming model in PostScript.

It was eventually extended to support multiple inheritance and other features, and used to implement several user interface toolkits and many applications, utilities and components.

-Don

GoodNeWS / HyperNeWS / HyperLook by SimHacker · 2008-05-25 00:43 · Score: 4, Informative · on HyperCard, What Could Have Been

In 1989, Arthur van Hoff developed a HyperCard-inspired system called GoodNeWS, written in PostScript, for James Gosling's NeWS window system. Arthur later went on to work at Sun on Java, wrote the Java compiler in Java, the AWT gui toolkit, and the HotJava web browser.

GoodNeWS was later renamed HyperNeWS, then later HyperLook. I went to Glasgow to work with Arthur at the Turing Institute, to develop HyperLook into a product, and I used it to develop the first Unix version of SimCity.

HyperLook was really wonderful, because it combined the strengths of HyperCard with the superior graphics and programmability of PostScript, and the network communication model currently known as AJAX.

I've written down some Ideas for Sugar development environment from HyperLook SimCity, with lots of links and illustrations, relating it with many different programming languages, user interface systems and applications that have inspired me.

Here is just the stuff about HyperLook -- the article goes on further to discuss and compare other technologies I think are interesting and applicable to the OLPC's constructionist education project.

Ideas for Sugar development environment from HyperLook SimCity

I love the ideas behind Smalltalk, EToys and HyperCard, and would like to combine them with ideas from visual programming languages like Robot Odyssey, KidSim, Klik-and-Play, SimAntics, Body Electric/Bounce, Max/MSP/Jitter, etc.

Here are some ideas about HyperLook and other systems, that could be applied to Sugar:

HyperLook was a PostScript-based user interface development environment for the NeWS window system, which Arthur van Hoff created at the Turing Institute in Glasgow. http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/

I helped develop HyperLook into a commercial product, with a editable user interface development environment, as well as a redistributable non-editable runtime, and I used it to port SimCity to Unix, and develop other components and applications . http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/ http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/HyperLook-SimCity.gif

HyperLook was inspired by HyperCard, but it additionally provided a client/server programming model, and more powerful graphics and scripting based on NeWS's object oriented dialect of PostScript. http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/TalkInterfacing.gif

The NeWS window system was like AJAX, but with:
1) PostScript code instead of JavaScript code
2) PostScript graphics instead of DHTML graphics, and
3) PostScript data instead of XML data.

It had a unified programming/graphics/data/networking model based on NeWS's extended multi-threaded object-oriented dialect of PostScript, instead of a hodge-podge of accidental technologies. (Although I will be the first to admit the X11/NeWS merge was quite a hodge-podge and huge-kludge!) NeWS had an object system based on the simple dynamic ideas of Smalltalk, implemented with the PostScript dictionary stack, supporting multiple inheritance and runtime modification of objects and classes. http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/HyperLookInfo10.g