The reality is that Smalltalk has a tiny userbase, regardless of how cool the language is.
Tiny as a percentage of all the people in the world, sure. It's nonetheless a pretty large number. The odd few tens of thousands of schoolkids are using Squeak in a dozen or so countries. Rather a lot of major banks (those that still exist today...) use Smalltalk for their most complex systems. It's pretty long list if you know where to look.
It's rather more interesting than that; it's free so why not spend a minute to download it and take a look?
The major differentiator is the timeline & trigger system. You can make graphic elements and movies and text boxes appear and disappear depending on time and triggers hit. Pages can turn automagically. Simple example - have movie running and small textboxes that appear as things happen in said movie that you want to point out.
The idea of using mechanical pressure instead of air pressure is not new; quite aside from the fantasies of SF writers through the years there have been serious attempts to make 'spandex spacesuits' before.
Major problems I've heard of include joint mobility (imagine a tight spandex sleeve - now imagine flexing your arm at the elbow against the resistance of the material) and the sheer unbelievability of the idea for most people. Of course, most of us would look like crap in a tight spandex bodystocking anyway.
Thermal and radiation protection could be handled much as they are now except that it wouldn't be tied to the pressure vessel aspects of the suit. Imagine rather chunky overalls, for example. I suppose the good news is that the outer parts would then be much more universal, making them easier to manufacture and maintain. You could even store them outside the rather cramped airlock and put them on outside in, say, the shuttle bay.
You're forgetting that Christians outright and publically denounced the IRA's methods and actions. Really? You must have missed the approval and support expressed by various nasty people then. Selective hearing is a depressingly common condition amongst religionists.
The IRA also gave several hours warning before attacks which allowed time to remove people from the vicinity of any explosions. Really? Funny, I seemed to have been left out of the advance warning on the two occasions the bastards bombed me....
It was purely for political reasons that the IRA did what they did. They wanted and want to be in control of Ireland independantly and without british intervention and presence. They resorted to seemingly terroristic tactics simply because they lacked the resources to wage a full scale war. Really? So the drug running, gun running, murder and torture, bank jobs etc were merely political expression. Hmm, try that one on the FBI or your local serious crime squad.
Get your students to read. Read technical books, technical articles, good manuals, bad manuals. Read short stories, novels - everything. Reading teaches you about what works and what doesn't work. Once they've read, talk about it. That will get them to realise what they now know about writing.
I never found bright colours or lights to make any difference. What *did* seem to work - 6 years commuting through south london to Kensington - is what I can only call 'projection of attitude'. If you can give off some sort of "I'm here, I want six foot each side and fifty in front and behind" signal it somehow works. Taxi drivers - *London* taxi drivers - would scoot aside to let me go by. Back then my bike was black, with black accenets and black highlights. My helmet and jacket were black, It continued to work when I moved to Silicon Valley and had to deal with california urban (well, calling them 'drivers' is to imply too much involvement, control, presence of mind, but it's the only commonly accepted word) 'drivers' and all those stupid Ford Valdez/ GM Monstro megatrucks, not to mention blinged-to-death riceboys. I think it involves appearing very calm and in control, moving precisely, just projecting utter self-confidence and complete expectation that of course they will obey. Pretty much like safely driving car.
My motorola flip-phone thingy has this delightful habit of starting to bleep (bleat) about the battery charge level and somehow it manages to work out the most annoying possible time at which to start. Say, 2am or so. It very rarely seems to bleat during tpical wake times.
Please, Mr Cellphone software developer, give me an option for a timerange when the phone will be silent. Yes, I'm sure I could turn it off but really, what are the odds of remembering? I know the odds of my wife remembering to turns hers back on are about 0 - from long experience.
> If anything, people want the foreigners to leave so we could actually get some work and decent pay raises around here.
OK, white man, where are you going to draw the line on what makes a foreigner? I say go back about 10,000 years and kick out anyone whose direct ancestors weren't here by then.
The pins for keyboard data and clock are definitely exposed. Jerry was showing them to me a couple of weekends ago. Disk drive conn.? MM, not sure but I wouldn't be surprised. She's _very_ good at this stuff.
She was chairbound for the last ten years of her life (bloody MS) and enjoyed hurtling about in her outdoor GT wheelchair at maybe 10-15mph(?) A jet propelled 60mph machine would have pleased her no end. Full speed ahead and damn the torpedos!
Already did that, moved, bought a house (no mortgage anymore:-) and started enjoying a more gentile, civilised lifestyle. Living costs are rated roughly half those of San Jose - where I used to live - and with property so much cheaper I don't need the mortgage. It's quieter, much much less traffic, cleaner air, negligable air traffic overhead and oddly enough I've seen more bikini babes in the last six months than I did in 12 years in silly-con valley.
Not 1/10th - more like 1/4. It _was_ 1/5th until odious george's brilliant handling of the us economy crashed the USD so badly.
It's still enough that I'm moving up to (near) Victoria tomorrow. No mortgage, no need to worry about making huge bux. No Ahnold, no george, no rude SFBA drivers.
I've known Alan for years. I don't think I know anyone that so regularly credits other people for important ideas, work, insights and papers - even when people are trying to credit him with said idea.
I try to follow his example, except of course I came up with the idea first:-)
I second this pretty much word for word. I cannot believe these ninnies suggesting java for kids!
Youngsters shouldn't be bothered with the syntax of something like C until they actually need to use it. eToys (get squeak, try it out) lets them learn about important things like control and iteration and intercation without al the crap.
It so happens that I know a bit about Smalltalk so perhaps I can help a little. Smalltalk was originally the entire system on the original hardware. Indeed, Dan Ingalls said back then (paraphrasing, I don't have the exact quote handy) "An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a programming language. There shouldn't be one". The reality of commercial machines caused those of us interested in using Smalltalk to accept the limitations (and it must be said, benefits) of OSs. Even so, there have been several occasions where an attempt has be made to use Smalltalk as the entire system: the Active Book and the Momenta machines for example and more recently the Interval Research MediaPad (where the RTOS was written in Smalltalk).
These days I'd be inclined to 'soften' Dan's statement to something like "An OS is a collection of things underneath the language. There shouldn't be any way to tell the difference". That is to say, the language ought to be able to make full use of anything available without having to burden the programmer with wierd crap.
RISC OS is a truly horrible operating system. It has loads of problems and annoyances and bugs. It's just that it has fewer and less annoying problems than the other OSs I have to cope with.
They at least got drag and drop right in the GUI, which might sound like a minor point but really can make life much simpler. Early on Acorn realised that they had to live in a world dominated by other OSs (unlike Apple, who try to pretend that only they matter) and so a good deal of work was done to make RISC OS machines able to cope with other kinds on floppy disc, image formats, networks etc. I have a fast Mac and a fast linux machine but I _still_ end up using my seven year old Acorn RPC for almost everything because it causes less pain. I want one of these new machines because it offers more speed, a PCI bus, USB and faster networking and discs than I have now. Yes, you can get faster PC type hardware for much less money. So what? I prefer to get quality cpu cycles over simply more cpu cycles.
RTFM dimwit. XScale is a version of ARM made by Intel and probably named so stupudly because Intel are embarrassed to have to rely on some body else's design to be able to make a low energy cpu. As is usual for Intel they've managed to make it a more complex part than really needed with a longer pipeline than other ARMs. They seem to have a hangup about 'my pipeline is longer than yours'.
Everybody and their dog makes assorted kinds of ARM. ARMs are everywhere; PDAs, cameras, printers, mp3 players, DVD players, radios, fax machines, routers, all that sort of thing. Even Motorola eventually caved in and licensed the ARM architecture. One day the secret feature will be enabled and control of the world will revert to the British Empire! You will all have to learn cricket and proper accents! So there!
The book never got written because Adele just didn't get around to it; at least that's what she told me.
MVC has been in use in Smalltalk systems for over 25 years. There are papers about using it, about the benefits and problems and alternatives; try looking up OOPSLA papers. If you don't know what OOPSLA is then wtf are you doing claiming to be involved in OOP? The code has been freely readable in the Smalltalk systems (just like all of it) ever since the very first implementations were created.
'spend money on Earth and not in space' Funny, but I've yet to see 'Alien Als Space Emporium'. All money spent on any space program is spent on Earth. It employs people - to run the program, build the craft, to make the machines that make the machines that make the craft, to sell food to those people, to farm in order to have food to sell to those people and on and on and on. It's absolutely the same as any other industrial activity.
And don't forget, queak includes StartSqueak, an implementation of the StarLogo stuff. Along with all theother good things already in Squeak, like music, speech synthesis, handwriting recognition, network access, web server(s) and on and on.
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The reality is that Smalltalk has a tiny userbase, regardless of how cool the language is.
Tiny as a percentage of all the people in the world, sure. It's nonetheless a pretty large number. The odd few tens of thousands of schoolkids are using Squeak in a dozen or so countries. Rather a lot of major banks (those that still exist today...) use Smalltalk for their most complex systems. It's pretty long list if you know where to look.
It's rather more interesting than that; it's free so why not spend a minute to download it and take a look?
The major differentiator is the timeline & trigger system. You can make graphic elements and movies and text boxes appear and disappear depending on time and triggers hit. Pages can turn automagically. Simple example - have movie running and small textboxes that appear as things happen in said movie that you want to point out.
The idea of using mechanical pressure instead of air pressure is not new; quite aside from the fantasies of SF writers through the years there have been serious attempts to make 'spandex spacesuits' before.
Major problems I've heard of include joint mobility (imagine a tight spandex sleeve - now imagine flexing your arm at the elbow against the resistance of the material) and the sheer unbelievability of the idea for most people. Of course, most of us would look like crap in a tight spandex bodystocking anyway.
Thermal and radiation protection could be handled much as they are now except that it wouldn't be tied to the pressure vessel aspects of the suit. Imagine rather chunky overalls, for example. I suppose the good news is that the outer parts would then be much more universal, making them easier to manufacture and maintain. You could even store them outside the rather cramped airlock and put them on outside in, say, the shuttle bay.
You're forgetting that Christians outright and publically denounced the IRA's methods and actions.
Really? You must have missed the approval and support expressed by various nasty people then. Selective hearing is a depressingly common condition amongst religionists.
The IRA also gave several hours warning before attacks which allowed time to remove people from the vicinity of any explosions.
Really? Funny, I seemed to have been left out of the advance warning on the two occasions the bastards bombed me....
It was purely for political reasons that the IRA did what they did. They wanted and want to be in control of Ireland independantly and without british intervention and presence. They resorted to seemingly terroristic tactics simply because they lacked the resources to wage a full scale war.
Really? So the drug running, gun running, murder and torture, bank jobs etc were merely political expression. Hmm, try that one on the FBI or your local serious crime squad.
Get your students to read. Read technical books, technical articles, good manuals, bad manuals. Read short stories, novels - everything. Reading teaches you about what works and what doesn't work.
Once they've read, talk about it. That will get them to realise what they now know about writing.
I never found bright colours or lights to make any difference. What *did* seem to work - 6 years commuting through south london to Kensington - is what I can only call 'projection of attitude'. If you can give off some sort of "I'm here, I want six foot each side and fifty in front and behind" signal it somehow works. Taxi drivers - *London* taxi drivers - would scoot aside to let me go by. Back then my bike was black, with black accenets and black highlights. My helmet and jacket were black,
It continued to work when I moved to Silicon Valley and had to deal with california urban (well, calling them 'drivers' is to imply too much involvement, control, presence of mind, but it's the only commonly accepted word) 'drivers' and all those stupid Ford Valdez/ GM Monstro megatrucks, not to mention blinged-to-death riceboys.
I think it involves appearing very calm and in control, moving precisely, just projecting utter self-confidence and complete expectation that of course they will obey. Pretty much like safely driving car.
My motorola flip-phone thingy has this delightful habit of starting to bleep (bleat) about the battery charge level and somehow it manages to work out the most annoying possible time at which to start. Say, 2am or so. It very rarely seems to bleat during tpical wake times.
Please, Mr Cellphone software developer, give me an option for a timerange when the phone will be silent. Yes, I'm sure I could turn it off but really, what are the odds of remembering? I know the odds of my wife remembering to turns hers back on are about 0 - from long experience.
> If anything, people want the foreigners to leave so we could actually get some work and decent pay raises around here.
OK, white man, where are you going to draw the line on what makes a foreigner? I say go back about 10,000 years and kick out anyone whose direct ancestors weren't here by then.
"Bush is going to be the Reagan of the 21st century" ? You say that like it would be something to be proud of.
Not to mention that there's an awful lot of 21st century left for still more awful people to get their bid in.
The pins for keyboard data and clock are definitely exposed. Jerry was showing them to me a couple of weekends ago. Disk drive conn.? MM, not sure but I wouldn't be surprised. She's _very_ good at this stuff.
She was chairbound for the last ten years of her life (bloody MS) and enjoyed hurtling about in her outdoor GT wheelchair at maybe 10-15mph(?) A jet propelled 60mph machine would have pleased her no end. Full speed ahead and damn the torpedos!
Already did that, moved, bought a house (no mortgage anymore :-) and started enjoying a more gentile, civilised lifestyle.
Living costs are rated roughly half those of San Jose - where I used to live - and with property so much cheaper I don't need the mortgage. It's quieter, much much less traffic, cleaner air, negligable air traffic overhead and oddly enough I've seen more bikini babes in the last six months than I did in 12 years in silly-con valley.
It's well worth serious consideration.
Not 1/10th - more like 1/4. It _was_ 1/5th until odious george's brilliant handling of the us economy crashed the USD so badly.
It's still enough that I'm moving up to (near) Victoria tomorrow. No mortgage, no need to worry about making huge bux. No Ahnold, no george, no rude SFBA drivers.
I've known Alan for years. I don't think I know anyone that so regularly credits other people for important ideas, work, insights and papers - even when people are trying to credit him with said idea.
:-)
I try to follow his example, except of course I came up with the idea first
I second this pretty much word for word. I cannot believe these ninnies suggesting java for kids!
Youngsters shouldn't be bothered with the syntax of something like C until they actually need to use it. eToys (get squeak, try it out) lets them learn about important things like control and iteration and intercation without al the crap.
There's plenty of reason;
a) other languages are a waste of space and effort
b) Croquet is written in Squeak. Live with it.
It so happens that I know a bit about Smalltalk so perhaps I can help a little.
Smalltalk was originally the entire system on the original hardware. Indeed, Dan Ingalls said back then (paraphrasing, I don't have the exact quote handy) "An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a programming language. There shouldn't be one".
The reality of commercial machines caused those of us interested in using Smalltalk to accept the limitations (and it must be said, benefits) of OSs. Even so, there have been several occasions where an attempt has be made to use Smalltalk as the entire system: the Active Book and the Momenta machines for example and more recently the Interval Research MediaPad (where the RTOS was written in Smalltalk).
These days I'd be inclined to 'soften' Dan's statement to something like "An OS is a collection of things underneath the language. There shouldn't be any way to tell the difference". That is to say, the language ought to be able to make full use of anything available without having to burden the programmer with wierd crap.
RISC OS is a truly horrible operating system. It has loads of problems and annoyances and bugs. It's just that it has fewer and less annoying problems than the other OSs I have to cope with.
They at least got drag and drop right in the GUI, which might sound like a minor point but really can make life much simpler. Early on Acorn realised that they had to live in a world dominated by other OSs (unlike Apple, who try to pretend that only they matter) and so a good deal of work was done to make RISC OS machines able to cope with other kinds on floppy disc, image formats, networks etc. I have a fast Mac and a fast linux machine but I _still_ end up using my seven year old Acorn RPC for almost everything because it causes less pain. I want one of these new machines because it offers more speed, a PCI bus, USB and faster networking and discs than I have now. Yes, you can get faster PC type hardware for much less money. So what? I prefer to get quality cpu cycles over simply more cpu cycles.
RTFM dimwit. XScale is a version of ARM made by Intel and probably named so stupudly because Intel are embarrassed to have to rely on some body else's design to be able to make a low energy cpu. As is usual for Intel they've managed to make it a more complex part than really needed with a longer pipeline than other ARMs. They seem to have a hangup about 'my pipeline is longer than yours'.
Everybody and their dog makes assorted kinds of ARM. ARMs are everywhere; PDAs, cameras, printers, mp3 players, DVD players, radios, fax machines, routers, all that sort of thing. Even Motorola eventually caved in and licensed the ARM architecture. One day the secret feature will be enabled and control of the world will revert to the British Empire! You will all have to learn cricket and proper accents! So there!
The book never got written because Adele just didn't get around to it; at least that's what she told me.
MVC has been in use in Smalltalk systems for over 25 years. There are papers about using it, about the benefits and problems and alternatives; try looking up OOPSLA papers. If you don't know what OOPSLA is then wtf are you doing claiming to be involved in OOP? The code has been freely readable in the Smalltalk systems (just like all of it) ever since the very first implementations were created.
'spend money on Earth and not in space'
Funny, but I've yet to see 'Alien Als Space Emporium'. All money spent on any space program is spent on Earth. It employs people - to run the program, build the craft, to make the machines that make the machines that make the craft, to sell food to those people, to farm in order to have food to sell to those people and on and on and on. It's absolutely the same as any other industrial activity.
And don't forget, queak includes StartSqueak, an implementation of the StarLogo stuff.
Along with all theother good things already in Squeak, like music, speech synthesis, handwriting recognition, network access, web server(s) and on and on.