When running a program, it is very likely that you will want to create new objects as you go along. You have some alternatives:
call a magic constructor fucntion (C++ and friends)
send a message like "new" to a factory object (like a class in Smalltalk)
send a message like "copy" or "clone" to an object that is like the one you want to create
In the third case you might find out that you can get by with a set of "prototype" objects to copy from and you don't need classes at all. But to actually eliminate classes you will have to find solutions to the other things they do for you like hold the behaviors for the objects (you can put them in the objects themselves, for example) and reflection (Self uses special "mirror objects" for that).
Self is a concept language, as far as I can determine, and the prototype concept has made its way into Prothon.
And NewtonScript, Kevo, JavaScript, Lua, Io and many others.
Please note that while Sun froze the development of Self in 1995 to focus on Java, it was restarted in 2000 and now runs on Macs and Linux PC as well as Sun machines.
The Alto was a neat machine. I've programmed one in Mesa, and I visited PARC in 1975, long before Jobs.
I wasn't there, but I don't think your facts are entirely correct.
Alan Kay referred to the Alto as the "Interim Dynabook". What he had in mind was a laptop. The original Dynabook paper has a picture of a woman sitting on grass using a laptop. It's a cardboard mockup. Todays laptops are less bulky and about a thousand times more powerful than what Kay had in mind. Cheaper, too; Kay wanted to reach the price point of a grand piano. He had a clear vision on the hardware front.
No laptop on the market is as thin and light as the cardboard model, though they are often smaller in the other dimensions since they fold. Kay was thinking about the early 1980s, so the fact that they are much faster than his estimates is to be expected. About cost, if you read his original papers he claimed that in the future it was likely that companies would give away the hardware for free to sell content. The Alto of the early 1970s was, of course, very expensive.
The first attempt to turn this technology into a product was the 8086 based Notetaker in 1978, which I doubt would have cost as much as a piano (or the 1981 Xerox Star).
What wasn't right was the emphasis on closed systems. The PARC idea was that it all should just work, and the end user shouldn't have to worry about how it works. Just like Xerox copiers. Out of this mindset came the Xerox Star, Xerox's commercial product. The Star was a networked word processor/office computer networked to file servers and printers. Think of a computer that runs nothing but Microsoft Office and you'll have the right picture. No user-serviceable parts inside.
Smalltalk came with all the sources. I agree that this was because the main company didn't care about it (just like early releases of Unix by Bell Labs). My point is that the people receiving this award can't be blamed for this "feature".
The Macintosh initially only came with MacPaint and MacWrite. They didn't want to scare away third party developers like the Lisa and Star had.
That wasn't the way things went. The CP/M - Apple DOS - PCDOS end of computing won out over PARC elegance. Mostly for cost reasons.
The machine I am typing this on (Linux+KDE) sure looks far more like an Alto than CP/M.
For those interested in a more informed opinion of what happened back then than they are likely to read in Slashdot, check out what Alan Kay said at the Prize ceremony.
You might be thinking of the Lilith by N. Wirth. Modula-2 was created for this graphical machine, which was inspired by actually using the Xerox Alto for a year (so it is a later development).
No - as I pointed out that is a myth. The 1903 flights used no external support at all. The catapult was added the next year but it was not needed: using it just reduced the risk of damage to their ski-like landing gear.
Their October 4, 1905 flight did not use a catapult and lasted 38 minutes
Never dug inside the story properly to know who's right and who's wrong.
I have. Just consider that the Americans will be celebrating 100 years of flight next year while we (in Brazil but also possibly a few people in Europe) will have to wait until 2006.
The usual claims that the Wrights faked it (since they didn't have a crowd of witnesses for their first flight. Yet before Dumont's flight the US Army had bought a few of their planes and hired them to train new pilots) or cheated (since they used a catapult for launching. But they only built that in 1904 and so didn't used it for their first flights) are plain silly.
On the other hand, did US aviation matter at all in WW1? It seems to me that all famous planes from that era were German, French or English.
I don't know if the Athlon uses flip chip encapsulation, but it is very likely. In that case you were looking at the back of the chip and would be unable to see anything interesting no matter how big the transistors were.
This is of course a huge burden, and requires a completely different way
of doing things to be effective. But it is cheaper than lawyers. And it is
pretty much the only way to convince a judge that you really did develop
an idea yourself, and before the other patent was disclosed.
Inventing something independently or inventing it first is no defense in a patent case. If you can prove that you had made your idea public before the other guy applied for this patent, then you have a defense.
You might want to reconsider saving the lawyer's fees...
I have written to some webmasters when their site has:
unmatched table tags. Since IE renders tables as the HTML streams in, it isn't bothered by this. But Netscape will just show you a blank page.
backslashes in URLs. This causes problems for all non Windows browsers, including IE for the Mac. IE Windows will convert them to regular slashes so that relative URLs will work just fine, but the other browsers will act as if the backslashes were part of the file name.
missing css files. IE and Konquerer will just ignore it, but Netscape will show a missing file error instead of the main page.
Sage, a 68000 computer from the early 1980s that was later renamed Stride, was available with this kind of input device. The exact same silver dot and IR "camera". There was a review or two in Byte Magazine around 1986...
Just look up "Brazil" and "Proalcool" in Google and you can find plenty of information about this.
Starting in the mid 1970s, the program was so successful that in 1988 nearly 100% of the cars sold here (made by Ford, Fiat, VW and GM) ran on hydrated Ethanol.
But since diesel based transport wasn't converted and since the chemical industry's need for oil continued the same, the result was more an oversupply of gasoline than a reduction in oil related imports. The extra gasoline was sold really cheap to neighboring countries, which combined with the subsidies to sugar cane farmers resulted in the program having very negative economic results.
In 1990 president Collor, a political enemy of the sugar cane farmers, made a serious attack on Pró-Alcool and while there are still many used cars running on Ethanol it is nearly impossible to buy a new one that does so.
Actually, Sun has the most "Open Source" hardware out there. I was, for example, able to download the full Verilog sources for the PicoJava II microprocessor and could make my own chips or program a FPGA with it. The MicroSparc is also available.
It isn't totally open in that there are three licenses depending on what you are going to do with it. Selling a product requires compatibility testing and paying royalties.
At least somebody thought of FPGAs instead of billion dollar plants (and the future ink jet ICs!).
But you can get free software from Xilinx that will program the Spartan 2 series and the Virtex 300. I'll bet that the LEON could fit in a US$20 Spartan 2 150...
You might be interested in a long post I sent to two email lists where I develop the same application twice in the on the fly programming style. First in a pseudo Prolog and then in Self (a Smalltalk dialect). This is what Smalltalk is specially good at, so it seems strange that you feel it can't do it.
little demand for Smalltalk programmers:
This is probably true, but it is likely that the supply is even smaller so that it might be a good career move for someone to learn Smalltalk. Over the past few years three different US companies have contacted me asking if I wouldn't be interested in moving up there to work for them. In case you are thinking that they were just after cheap labor, I made it very clear that I would be expensive and they were still wanted me so there might be a genuine shortage.
I don't think that the perception that Smalltalk is slow is correct. Back in the old Linux 0.99pl17 days I used a 40MHz 386 machine with 4MB of RAM. I used X Window and OpenLook running stuff like Netscape, so you can imagine I have a good idea of when things are sloooow.
I then downloaded Smalltalk/X, but it was not really usable. So I upgraded to 12MB and that made a huge difference. In fact, using its graphical text editor (which could read and write RTF files) become so much nicer than vi in xterm (it scrolled faster!) that it was worth loading ST/X to do mundane chores like editing shell scripts.
Don't forget that Self (a Smalltalk dialect that Sun killed to help boost Java) was able to run intensely numerical benchmarks at 50% of the speed of C (while fully checking array bounds, integer overflow and a bunch of other stuff). Self's adaptive compilation technologies now show up in Java HotSpot and Transmeta CodeMorphing products.
This doesn't agree with my memory of how things happened. In 1987 Apple came out with Hypercard and its XCMDs (external commands) were the first component system that I saw widely used.
That same year Bill Gates wrote an interesting article in a special issue of Byte magazine saying that the software industry should make all applications "scriptable". Naturally he proposed Basic as the scripting language.
If I remember correctly, OLE was the major difference between Windows 3.0 and 3.1, which would place its introduction at around 1990. VisualBasic and the future COM followed soon after.
The first few versions of Windows didn't even have DLLs, which were first introduced in MS OS/2.
Slashdot Mirror
People interested in this should also check out Eiffel and Sather as well.
In the third case you might find out that you can get by with a set of "prototype" objects to copy from and you don't need classes at all. But to actually eliminate classes you will have to find solutions to the other things they do for you like hold the behaviors for the objects (you can put them in the objects themselves, for example) and reflection (Self uses special "mirror objects" for that).
There are several different styles of prototype based languages.
Been hard at work on any Self projects lately?
Yes, thank you for asking.
Been using any Self-written software?
Mostly things I have written myself.
Self is a concept language, as far as I can determine, and the prototype concept has made its way into Prothon.
And NewtonScript, Kevo, JavaScript, Lua, Io and many others.
Please note that while Sun froze the development of Self in 1995 to focus on Java, it was restarted in 2000 and now runs on Macs and Linux PC as well as Sun machines.
The Alto was a neat machine. I've programmed one in Mesa, and I visited PARC in 1975, long before Jobs.
I wasn't there, but I don't think your facts are entirely correct.
Alan Kay referred to the Alto as the "Interim Dynabook". What he had in mind was a laptop. The original Dynabook paper has a picture of a woman sitting on grass using a laptop. It's a cardboard mockup. Todays laptops are less bulky and about a thousand times more powerful than what Kay had in mind. Cheaper, too; Kay wanted to reach the price point of a grand piano. He had a clear vision on the hardware front.
No laptop on the market is as thin and light as the cardboard model, though they are often smaller in the other dimensions since they fold. Kay was thinking about the early 1980s, so the fact that they are much faster than his estimates is to be expected. About cost, if you read his original papers he claimed that in the future it was likely that companies would give away the hardware for free to sell content. The Alto of the early 1970s was, of course, very expensive.
The first attempt to turn this technology into a product was the 8086 based Notetaker in 1978, which I doubt would have cost as much as a piano (or the 1981 Xerox Star).
What wasn't right was the emphasis on closed systems. The PARC idea was that it all should just work, and the end user shouldn't have to worry about how it works. Just like Xerox copiers. Out of this mindset came the Xerox Star, Xerox's commercial product. The Star was a networked word processor/office computer networked to file servers and printers. Think of a computer that runs nothing but Microsoft Office and you'll have the right picture. No user-serviceable parts inside.
Smalltalk came with all the sources. I agree that this was because the main company didn't care about it (just like early releases of Unix by Bell Labs). My point is that the people receiving this award can't be blamed for this "feature".
The Macintosh initially only came with MacPaint and MacWrite. They didn't want to scare away third party developers like the Lisa and Star had.
That wasn't the way things went. The CP/M - Apple DOS - PCDOS end of computing won out over PARC elegance. Mostly for cost reasons.
The machine I am typing this on (Linux+KDE) sure looks far more like an Alto than CP/M.
For those interested in a more informed opinion of what happened back then than they are likely to read in Slashdot, check out what Alan Kay said at the Prize ceremony.
You might be thinking of the Lilith by N. Wirth. Modula-2 was created for this graphical machine, which was inspired by actually using the Xerox Alto for a year (so it is a later development).
Something like this?
After all, they have spent a lot on the project already and it is optimized for use in Japan.
No - as I pointed out that is a myth. The 1903 flights used no external support at all. The catapult was added the next year but it was not needed: using it just reduced the risk of damage to their ski-like landing gear.
Their October 4, 1905 flight did not use a catapult and lasted 38 minutes
Never dug inside the story properly to know who's right and who's wrong.
I have. Just consider that the Americans will be celebrating 100 years of flight next year while we (in Brazil but also possibly a few people in Europe) will have to wait until 2006.
The usual claims that the Wrights faked it (since they didn't have a crowd of witnesses for their first flight. Yet before Dumont's flight the US Army had bought a few of their planes and hired them to train new pilots) or cheated (since they used a catapult for launching. But they only built that in 1904 and so didn't used it for their first flights) are plain silly.
On the other hand, did US aviation matter at all in WW1? It seems to me that all famous planes from that era were German, French or English.
I don't know if the Athlon uses flip chip encapsulation, but it is very likely. In that case you were looking at the back of the chip and would be unable to see anything interesting no matter how big the transistors were.
How about the 1898 wireless robot boat demo? Even though the focus is on power, it seems to me like he is transmitting information.
No, it was a special page (which you could view from any OS) that limited the search to Linux related pages.
See for yourself what it was like.
This is of course a huge burden, and requires a completely different way of doing things to be effective. But it is cheaper than lawyers. And it is pretty much the only way to convince a judge that you really did develop an idea yourself, and before the other patent was disclosed.
Inventing something independently or inventing it first is no defense in a patent case. If you can prove that you had made your idea public before the other guy applied for this patent, then you have a defense.
You might want to reconsider saving the lawyer's fees...
I have written to some webmasters when their site has:
Sage, a 68000 computer from the early 1980s that was later renamed Stride, was available with this kind of input device. The exact same silver dot and IR "camera". There was a review or two in Byte Magazine around 1986...
Interesting, the last time I had looked at Alice it was still at Virginia Tech.
There is a free (as in speech) version of Alice in Squeak Smalltalk which runs not only in Linux, but also Windows, Macs, PDAs and so on.
The above site seems to be having some problems, so check SqueakLand instead.
Just look up "Brazil" and "Proalcool" in Google and you can find plenty of information about this.
Starting in the mid 1970s, the program was so successful that in 1988 nearly 100% of the cars sold here (made by Ford, Fiat, VW and GM) ran on hydrated Ethanol.
But since diesel based transport wasn't converted and since the chemical industry's need for oil continued the same, the result was more an oversupply of gasoline than a reduction in oil related imports. The extra gasoline was sold really cheap to neighboring countries, which combined with the subsidies to sugar cane farmers resulted in the program having very negative economic results.
In 1990 president Collor, a political enemy of the sugar cane farmers, made a serious attack on Pró-Alcool and while there are still many used cars running on Ethanol it is nearly impossible to buy a new one that does so.
Actually, Sun has the most "Open Source" hardware out there. I was, for example, able to download the full Verilog sources for the PicoJava II microprocessor and could make my own chips or program a FPGA with it. The MicroSparc is also available.
It isn't totally open in that there are three licenses depending on what you are going to do with it. Selling a product requires compatibility testing and paying royalties.
of Ghostscript fame is always worth listening to. Check out his OOPSLA2001 comments.
That sounds slow compared to Chuck Moore's new design.
I don't doubt that it will work as he says since his previous designs ran at up to 800 MHz with a 0.8 micron process (see the middle of this page).
> i'm pretty sure that's never been seen before
You could get these for the old Sage (later Stride) computers. These were 68000 machines running the UCSD system back in the early 1980s
At least somebody thought of FPGAs instead of billion dollar plants (and the future ink jet ICs!).
But you can get free software from Xilinx that will program the Spartan 2 series and the Virtex 300. I'll bet that the LEON could fit in a US$20 Spartan 2 150...
You might be interested in a long post I sent to two email lists where I develop the same application twice in the on the fly programming style. First in a pseudo Prolog and then in Self (a Smalltalk dialect). This is what Smalltalk is specially good at, so it seems strange that you feel it can't do it.
little demand for Smalltalk programmers:
This is probably true, but it is likely that the supply is even smaller so that it might be a good career move for someone to learn Smalltalk. Over the past few years three different US companies have contacted me asking if I wouldn't be interested in moving up there to work for them. In case you are thinking that they were just after cheap labor, I made it very clear that I would be expensive and they were still wanted me so there might be a genuine shortage.
I don't think that the perception that Smalltalk is slow is correct. Back in the old Linux 0.99pl17 days I used a 40MHz 386 machine with 4MB of RAM. I used X Window and OpenLook running stuff like Netscape, so you can imagine I have a good idea of when things are sloooow.
I then downloaded Smalltalk/X, but it was not really usable. So I upgraded to 12MB and that made a huge difference. In fact, using its graphical text editor (which could read and write RTF files) become so much nicer than vi in xterm (it scrolled faster!) that it was worth loading ST/X to do mundane chores like editing shell scripts.
Don't forget that Self (a Smalltalk dialect that Sun killed to help boost Java) was able to run intensely numerical benchmarks at 50% of the speed of C (while fully checking array bounds, integer overflow and a bunch of other stuff). Self's adaptive compilation technologies now show up in Java HotSpot and Transmeta CodeMorphing products.
This doesn't agree with my memory of how things happened. In 1987 Apple came out with Hypercard and its XCMDs (external commands) were the first component system that I saw widely used.
That same year Bill Gates wrote an interesting article in a special issue of Byte magazine saying that the software industry should make all applications "scriptable". Naturally he proposed Basic as the scripting language.
If I remember correctly, OLE was the major difference between Windows 3.0 and 3.1, which would place its introduction at around 1990. VisualBasic and the future COM followed soon after.
The first few versions of Windows didn't even have DLLs, which were first introduced in MS OS/2.