mhd

On the same page (for me): "Silicon Valley needs to get God"

Well, seems it already did.

Beowulf cluster time for old Pixels?

I love that there are compilers beside the big 2

Whatever happened to Tendra?

Surprised that this isn't part of a "journey"…

One interesting predecessor were the versioned files of time-sharing systems. You can still access Donald Knuth's directory tree for example, and see that a lot of files have different revisions.

Knuth's Tex directory: https://www.saildart.org/%5BTEX,DEK%5D/

I once had some Norwegian room mates in Ireland, and whenever we collectively couldn't find the proper English word, we usually got lucky with our native tongues. When listening to Scandi TV series, I'm still surprised more than I should be by the occasional match (recently: suddenly -> "plutselig", similar to German "plötzlich").

Now, as for the Danish room mate, he might as well have been speaking Greek.

Like a more devious Lingua::Romana::Perligata?

https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-Romana-Perligata/view/lib/L...

No mention of Algol? Or Mesa?

Why is everyone compelled to write one of these articles?

LinkedIn clout.

Enlightenment always had a pretty weird value proposition. In the very beginning, there was "fvwm-xpm" and early "E" prototypes. They were graphically crazy with a heavy focus on shaped Windows. There's still nothing quite like that weird steampunk/Brazil-ish theme they had. Probably for a reason.

Then they went both visually rather tame and scope-creepy (own graphical libraries etc.). At the beginning I was hoping that we'd get some kind of Amiga-influenced design sensibilities on X (basically a more "artsy" MUI), but that never manifested.

Teapot is pretty great, it's too bad there is close to zero room for real innovation in the spreadsheet domain.

One issue is that this is hard to do while still retaining backwards compatibility. Lotus Improv basically gave you no other choice, something that Excel The Next Version can't do. And I doubt that we're getting a third MS app, no Multiplan -> Excel -> NewSpreadsheetThingProbablyCalledCopilotAnyway.

I know a lot of people that don't even use Excel's tables, introduced almost 20 years ago. But instead they painstakingly recreate most of its built-in features. It's just an easy shortcut away, and has plenty of GUI support hidden in the ribbon morass, but it's not the default state…

Way back in the days, I always thought that Tcl/Tk had a pretty good packaging story compared to the P-languages, given the presence of Starkits-/packs[1], and (somewhat sadly) the absence of dependencies.

1: https://www.tcl-lang.org/starkits/

Maybe it's time to get out my Cowlishaw Rexx book again…

I'd say most people run Emacs in the GUI mode, not in a terminal. So these days, you're pretty much on the same level as most rivals.

Sadly, "these days" is a low bar. The days of consistent platform-specific "Human Interface Guidelines" are over, it's all just a browser wrapped in a top-level window or something that simulates that, with most interaction patterns being a cargo cult of how it's remembered from the 90s. So "GUI" means that some unique overlays can be drawn without a fixed width character grid and that you might get the original file requester now and then.

I remember playing at least one game without the mouse, to save those precious KBs…

People doing DTP with Calamus on their Ataris stuck around for a long time after the systems weren't used for much else – MIDI tooling excepted, of course.

On the other hand, there you didn't have that many powerful packages on any system, besides Quark & the various Adobe tools du jour everything paled in comparison.

For word processing, being forced to use Word was/is usually worse than for DTP, though. But feature-wise, everything seemed to converge during the 90s, so "having" to use Word instead of e.g. WordPerfect was less and less of an issue.

With some exceptions of course, most famously GRRM and other people who got into things very early sticking with the first thing they learned (i.e. WordStar), or apparently some journalists being really into XyWrite.

One thing I always liked about some older languages was being able to have blanks in identifiers. Although I see that they actually managed to invent a new stropping variant that doesn't work with that… For the "kids"…

So Copilot in Office is the new "Hall of Tortured Souls"?

motif had the opposite of versionitis

I basically meant that we could've avoided the (needless) versionitis of gtk, the toolkit once introduced to rewrite a Motif-based application. (Never understand why they did have to reinvent the Xt part, too, but, well…)

That's a cruel alternate universe, I would've hoped that Motif being in use by more people than just the devs of one homebrew Unix desktop would mean that we wouldn't have suffered through that much versionitis.

I'm also pretty sure that there was an "Elixir" in IT before there was the language said framework is written in… I mean, given that the letter "X" is in both Unix and X11, I'm pretty sure most words containing it have already been used once or twice.

(I still think they should've stuck with "Firebird", little danger of confusing a browser with a database system mostly used by Delphi devs)

Don't a lot of courts use/mandate Century? Just use that. Better than TNR. If you can't afford a custom font…

Seems everyone has. Which is weird, given how bad everything looks despite this focus.

I'm not sure what's going on in the design world. I mean, of course there's the influence of the web design spheres. The web didn't have the GUI standards that e.g. Macs were known for. In the beginning, they couldn't emulate the desktops. Toolkits like ExtJS tried, but you stated with the basic problem that you didn't know what desktop you wanted to emulate. Windows? Mac?

By the time the browser caught up, the damage already had been done, and the stop-gap solutions and styles more suitable for ads created a "web style". Flashy, flat, deserts of whitespace. The aesthetic stranglehold this had then not only persisted, but crossed over first into mobile (the somewhat standardized look & feel of early iOS quickly vanished), then the desktop.

And now nobody knows where they're going, despite having more people solely focused on "UX" than ever before. But you need to do something to justify your position/salary, and that's how we get the Microsoft/Apple designs of the last decade or so. And not having any ideas beyond type systems or init replacements, the open source world just emulates that.

Next step, programmming and RPG with RPGs in RPG.

When I read about Pancake, for a very short moment I was hoping for some Elan[1] influences…

1: https://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/L4/l3elan.html

A lot of C# and Java code is oriented towards web backends, too. Which are quite big and complex. So it seems natural that languages in the same design space (trad OO) converge on similar features. I think the only exception these days is Go.

I think these days you could change "You can write Fortran in any language" to "You can structure your code like Spring in any language"…

Perl? Are there existing modules for the Linux KMS interface? Otherwise this would also be an off-beat language choice, and these days with only marginally more developers… (And I say that as a Perl fan)

Personally, I'm glad that this isn't yet another Rust post ;)

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

Any good cases for that? I’d be afraid of ending up with a lump of duct-taped SATA SSDs around the PCB…

I'm voting for Cold Fusion on top of Golang.