Rochus

> Olimex esp32-p4-pc, the flagship product: new, powerful

That's a very cool board, but pretty tricky. Great idea to run an old Mac OS on it. I try on and off to port the Oberon System 3 to this board since I received it in February. The display already works pretty good, but still a lot of road blocks.

There are many potential explanations, including the policy changes in 2018. LLMs are definitely a concurrence to the service, but since the decline started years before they were really useful, other reasons might be relevant. I don't know to what degree. I just wondered why some of the forums had significant peaks after the GPT line.

That's interesting, thanks! The peak for most topics was around 2015-2020 apparently, and then came a "continuous" decline. If it really was a major event that caused the decline, wouldn't we expect to see a volatile plunge, like on the stock market?

> I used the AI assistant because I had a headache and there were a lot of errors and problems

That's a great excuse, one I'll have to remember ;-)

Looks like time is flying much faster than I'm aware of; most of the languages I have in mind are indeed older than 2013. At least a few are younger, e.g. Strudel, which is more ergonomic than Common Lisp for the use case.

Interesting, but the video is from 2013 and there was a lot of progress since with a lot of more ergonomic "live coding" languages.

I'm still in business myself and I see the problems. But the article was not about what you suggest. It was about contributing open-source to a community and whether it is still worthwhile and fun, even if some community exponents started to use LLMs.

> I still program on the weekends because it is fun

Fully agree. It's still (or even more than ever) more entertaining than watching Netflix. Why should I care if other people use agents to do the programming?

Well, it might be a rational view for the author, but for me that's like saying "I no longer like cooking, because there are companies providing the recipes I like as ready-made meals", or "I no longer play my instruments and make music, because there are machines which can create the music I like"; both topic apply to me personally, and I wouldn't agree to the statements. I still like to design and implement systems, make clever architectures and solve tricky problems. Why should I care if other people use LLMs to do so?

> we no longer allow submissions which are code repositories

Well, writing a brief article about the code, what it does, why it exists, why it is interesting, is feasible and better than the common "I implemented this" with little additional description. I would rather be concerned that whenever I look at the lobsters front page I don't see anything interesting.

There is another one, which is not a transpiler: https://github.com/rochus-keller/luon

Why didn't they consider Smalltalk? Interlisp is there, also Ada and Pascal, even CLU.

> Unfortunately, and horrifyingly, this response is [dead].

That's strange. I didn't do anything and it still appears on the site in my browser. Did they add "shadow bans" to HN? That was one reason for me to turn my back on Facebook (and the fact that interesting discussions suddenly disappeared later on). I took me more than half an hour to re-check all sources; I (we) probably shouldn't spend that much time on comments anymore.

Thanks. Your quotes are not about the Alto system software. The Star paper is about Star (1981) and itself warns that people "wrongly believe that Star was written in Smalltalk"; your first Sweet quote credits Tajo's window contexts to Lisp property lists, not Smalltalk.

The Alto OS, Bravo (1974) and Gypsy (1975) were written in BCPL by CSL/POLOS people (Lampson, Sproull, Simonyi, Tesler, Mott); the June 1975 Alto OS manual and Alto Packages contain nothing from Smalltalk, and they had no overlapping windows or pop-up menus.

Mesa the language (MPS 1971, named 1974, self-hosting 1976) owes nothing to Smalltalk either. Sweet's "patterned after those of Smalltalk [Kay76]" refers to the Dec 1976 Mesa 1.0 debugger's optional, "experimental" window manager. It never touched compiler, binder or OS and was dropped/replaced in Mesa 4.0.

Smalltalk influence is documented for Star and for Cedar's environment goals, both 1980s. For the Alto software of 1973–75 there is none; for Mesa 1976–77 it is BitBlt plus an experimental debugger add-on. BitBlt and overlapping windows were specifically Ingalls' work, which he internally demonstrated in 1975.

Paul McJones has a nice Mesa History Collection with a lot of primary sources from the time: https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/mesa

Mesa and Cedar are both programming languages which have nothing in common with Smalltalk. Cedar is also a later development environment. The original post was about Smalltalk vs. Objective-C, i.e. a language comparison, and then mentioning some graphic tools as well. Thus the comment I responded to was ambiguous in different respects. That's why I asked. It has nothing to do with the discussion you referenced.

> I spent hours telling you about it

I hope not.

And please note that this is again a different topic.

Last time I was talking about Wirth's OO vs. Simula OO, and the similarity of Wirth's implementation with Kay's vision. You then first extended this discussion to whether Kay directly influenced Wirth, which I responded. Then you extended the topic even more to the question whether and to what degree Cedar was influenced by Smalltalk. That was far off my interest and irrelevant for the discussion given that Wirth just took the tiling window manager, which none of the Smalltalk versions had.

Now I'm talking about the development of the Alto computer which included an OS with a GUI and two groundbreaking applications, Bravo and Gypsy (implemented on top of Bravo), all in BCPL, implementing their own interaction and presentation concepts.

If you want to do historical research, you have to go to the primary sources (e.g. https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xe..., https://xeroxparcarchive.computerhistory.org/Xerox_PARC_sour..., or e.g. https://archive.org/details/Xerox_PARC_Gypsy_Demonstration_T...), not to stories written down from memory twenty years later.

We should not forget that the original Alto operating system(s) had a GUI already and was the basis of well known applications like Bravo or Gypsy; the original OS and the said applications were implemente in BCPL; and all were operational before Smalltalk-76. By Wirth's first PARC visit in 1976–77, Mesa had already become a self-hosting systems-development tool (small operating system and symbolic debugger); I'm not aware of any substantial Smalltalk influence at that time.

MPS/MPL began in 1971; the Mesa name was adopted in June 1974; an Alto cross-compiler worked in spring 1975. Cedar is both a language (an extension of Mesa, e.g. by a GC, but the OO features proposed by Lampson were never implemented to my knowledge) and a development environment. I assume your claim is about the latter. The programming language doesn't have anything in common with Smalltalk, and the fundamental work even predated the latter.

> Which then influenced Mesa, Cedar

In what respect? What sources for this claim do you have?

An another lot of people doesn't know that Smalltalk-76 onwards implemented the Simula 67 object model (as the first language in the given completeness), which represented a fundamental departure from Smalltalk-72. See the Ingalls 1978 and 2020 papers for more information (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/512760.512762 and https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386335, both more interesting and relevant than the one in the title, written by the person who invented most of the technology we today know as Smalltalk-80).

This is amazing. I like very much that the approach is using symbolic music information instead of audio. It might help to better understand music some day (i.e. "really understand", not the helper projections the traditional music science works with). It's also interesting to notice the slight time jitter, likely due to the more discrete and limited "information density", or possibly round-off errors due to limited resolution of the weights. Maybe the paper answers it.

I don't think the conclusions of the article are actually supported by the arguments and evidence, and several of the technical claims seem pretty questionable (e.g. fast redefinition is not fast verification, entering a debugger is not guaranteed recovery, generated code is not automatically a validated library). With the same argumentation, Smalltalk (particularly Pharo), Racket, Julia, Elixir or even Forth would be equally credible candidates for "best programming language".

Cool. You could run it on the Olimex ESP32-P4-PC board, which even has a HDMI socket.

This has moved well beyond my point. I’ll leave it there.

> I think that my claim that Mesa's GUI was inspired by Smalltalk

That was not my topic.

I was (obviously) talking about the influence of Smalltalk to Oberon, and only that.

And don't forget that the Smalltalk 76 and 80 GUI (and language) we know today was Ingalls' work, not Kay's.

> Wirth didn't know Kay well enough to recognize him

The popularity and influence of Kay is generally overstated. And not to forget that he received the Turing award much later, and what he published was not really the kind of topics Wirth was interested in. At least we have access to all relevant documents today and can check ourselves instead of taking the many tales at face value.

> the problem was that they weren't interested in, or capable of, building digital synths^1

Didn't the Synclavier have FM and was on the market even before Yamaha? So I would assume that at least NED must have been interested and have the capabilities of implementing FM.

> Quite an incredible story the whole thing.

Even more with Chowning's background as a musician, not an engineer.

> Multiplying sounds just sounded too ridiculous

Is this really the "official" reason, or your interpretation?

> John Chowning actually first licensed his FM synthesis patent to Yamaha

Did he? Wasn't there New England Digital (NED) with the Synclavier which had FM on the market before Yamaha? Are you sure Chowning gave licenses? I would rather expect that this was the Standford administration's business, not Chowning's.

Yes, the first two of them.

> a sabbatical year at PARC in 01976 and 01977, where Kay was then the director of the Learning Research Group

Well, PARC was quite big and Wirth was focussed on the work the Mesa people with Buttler Lampson did. If you watch the Q&A session of his 1993 HOPL talk you may notice that Kay asked a question, and it is obvious that Wirth didn't know him in person. And I'm not aware of any Wirth publication before 1987 mentioning Smalltalk. The only publication where Kay appears by name at all (as "Smalltalk (Goldberg and Kay, 1980)") is Wirth's 2008 IEEE paper.

> However, Wirth's style was more influenced by the Smalltalk-inspired GUI being written in Mesa, which would officially give rise to Cedar in 01980

Pretty adventurous claims. Wirth adopted Cedar’s tiled-viewer approach; I'm not aware of any features he adopted from the Smalltalk GUI. Instead he considered Smalltalk an anti-pattern in several respects, which you confirm.

> Smalltalk-76 already had compiled virtual methods and table-based polymorphic dispatch like SIMULA

Right. That's what Ingalls published in his 1978 paper, where he explicitly quotes the 1973 "SIMULA Begin" version and discusses its features.