Awesome. Thanks for posting. I miss my modula-2 so much I wrote a bunch of editor macros for Lazarus that allows me to write slightly modula-2 like code in the editor.
Also XDS has been freely available for a couple of years now.
What I miss is that there is no modern equivalent of formating keywords on save, I helped with one plugin for Sublime Text on Oberon, maybe need to do the same for VSCode.
One reason for this is when the big players move their business models over to taking your data and renting it back to you, there's no profit motive in pushing state-of-the-art ux when they just give their apps away to act like honeypots. MSFT gives their stuff away if you get on Azure. Atlassian charges 14 bucks a seat if you use their cloud. Lots of people who use this stuff have a laptop plus a bigger monitor their company bought to get their work done and it's like staring into an empty desert every day.
Yep, I'll have a major rich gui workstation client/server package with basic D365 functionality coming out in I hope about 8 months. Win, Linux, hopefully Mac, and browser. The browser version is definitely legacy gui compared to the native versions, just because it's browser.
In Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," the main character, a lawyer, described the line of prisoners going into the back of the courthouse as "chow," as in chow for the system. I'll never forget that.
Also, for anyone who grew up in Atl, Wolfe's book "A Man In Full" drips with the kind of delicious look-in-the-mirror satire home grown Southerners love.
Can confirm. Grew up in suburban Atlanta during the period depicted, including getting caught in the first big Freaknic blowout he describes. It’s so dead-on it made me homesick.
the most dead-on part of the latter is when the main character is feeling a bit out of place at some meeting/hunting retreat in south Georgia and suddenly he remembers the cheat code: just talk about college football!
My dad taught me this at an early age and it was 100% correct. If you pay attention to enough college football to hold a conversation, you can talk to just about any man in the southeast US.
My guess is people in mainland China don't care either, but in normal countries people are crazy about soccer. It was on my mind because I was in a hackathon [1] last weekend and before I started a bunch of international students were watching the highlight reel for the last world cup.
Soccer is picking up in interest in the US, slowly but surely. MLS games are worth going to and I enjoy a lot of soccer games.
(My own soccer story was that I had a terrible fight with a recommendation engine I built to convince it that I liked the NFL but didn't like the Premier League. I started thinking about feature engineering for sports and that got me reading soccer articles closely and I'd just read incredible things like games that went 7-0 or 1-0 and it was an own goal and such and next thing I know I am one of those people who wakes up at 9am on Saturday to watch soccer...)
[1] we won! (not because of my strength as a coder but because of my mvp obsession and demo/presentation skills from startup land)
so what percentage of these men can be talked to because, while not liking football, they pay enough attention to college football in order to be able to hold a conversation with just about any man in the southeast US?
Yeah, Delphi (and for me now, Lazarus) still provides a substantially richer desktop experience than the web framework of the day. After having written some beautiful, rich apps with this tool, tweaking css makes me want to puke.
Even thinking of css makes me want to puke. It’s just unbelieveable how far the DX has fallen, and everyone is okay with it! Imagine starting your project from implementing poor man’s TForm and TDBEdit. And all new devs actually believe that it’s completely normal.
Yeah that's what blows me away about the fpl/laz open source UI framework, along with the whole library from fpl/laz. Labor of love I guess...it is right up there with sqlite and and linux itself as one of the greatest open source projects in history.
Definitely, Delphi, C++ Builder, Qt, Windows Forms, WPF, heck even MFC.
On Web projects I happily focus on backend and devops, every time I touch CSS there is a new tool in town, apparently now everyone is supposed to be using Tailwind.
Great thread. Love DEC/VAX history. But as soon as I saw a pic of Robert Palmer with his hair product and 2k suits in 1990, I knew then end was near. I mean yeah Ellison at Oracle was similar at the time, but this was DEC!, not just a database engine.
I bought a rack-mount Alpha back in the early 90's running Symbolics on it. Probably all I need to say about that.
You can get arrested for walking around with a baseball bat. You can carry a Model M to walk to your car on a dark night and no one will raise an eyebrow.
"There is an huge junkyard of technologies that failed to gain broad acceptance, many of them far more revolutionary than Rust (e.g.: Lisp, Smalltalk). I don't see why those technologies' story can be avoided."
Yeah, but I think more importantly much of the value that Rust brings would have been available 30 years ago if language development/selection wasn't so siloed, full of biases, and driven by (often undeserved) popularity.
As someone who is fascinated with Smalltalk and to a lesser extent Lisp. I think the reason those didn't catch on more broadly is that they were too early and different.
Smalltalk I believe was designed to run on computers that wouldn't be around until the 90s and and when the 90s arrived it didn't have a big company pouring gobs of money into marketing it unlike Java. There are other factors that also contributed it's unpopularity. Like who wants to distribute a whole system for each smalltalk program they sell?
I think also Lisp and APL weren't designed to run on the weak PCs in their day. You needed to use a timesharing system to program in them.
> ... when the 90s arrived it didn't have a big company pouring gobs of money into marketing it unlike Java.
IBM not big enough? :-)
But of course IBM's consulting group were technology neutral and pivoted from Smalltalk to Java when the wind changed.
> Like who wants to distribute a whole system for each smalltalk program they sell?
Smalltalk was marketed to corporations as a 4GL replacement for green screen systems. So enterprise wide client-server apps for insurance/reinsurance, call center outsourcing, assembly line control, options/derivatives/reconciliation, ERP CRM TLA TLA, etc etc
I don't claim to have been in "The Room Where It Happens" meetings, so I'll just say that from my lowly perspective during that period Allen Wirfs-Brock's comment ring true.
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