jonjacky

Alloy, mostly used for modeling and analysis but see the program verification section about halfway down this very long page:

https://alloytools.org/citations/case-studies.html

Linked at the top of that page is a book about Alloy. There is also a book about TLA, mentioned in another comment here.

I see this is from Andreas Kling, the creator of SerenityOS.

(1974). This helped launch interest in logic programming and Prolog.

Thanks for making this. I saw it back then and thought it hit the nail on the head. It still does -- if you hadn't put (2012) readers would think it was made today.

von Foerster, Maturana, and Brun were all active in cybernetics and early computing - see their Wikipedia articles.

So it is surprising/disappointing that this document - which is apparently a sort of catalog of advice and helpful information for students at the University of Illinois at Champagne/Urbana around 1969-70 - doesn't say anything about the computing activities going on there at that time. The experimental ILLIAC computers were being built and used, and the PLATO timesharing system was being developed and used (again, see Wikipedia). PLATO was built to support computer-aided instruction, so it seems some students would have encountered it.

This looks very impressive! I am surprised not to see more points and comments -- this kind of project often gets more attention here. Get this:

The “OS” of the computer itself is Python. It’s not running something else with a shell on top. You write and execute programs on the device itself. You have access to the entire hardware ... Under the hood, Tulip is a (complicated!) “port” of the great MicroPython project running on the Espressif ESP32-S3 – a cheap (and in stock!) MCU with 8 or 32MB flash storage and 8MB of SPI-attached RAM. ... Tulip comes with a built in text editor, and soon a music editor. ...

Maybe this would have gotten more attention with a different subject line, something like:

"MicroPython-based OS running standalone on ESP32 with network, keyboard, color video, and sound"

Compare this project to Snakeware – Linux distro with Python userspace inspired by Commodore 64 https://github.com/joshiemoore/snakeware

Snakeware discussed here previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23391380 3 years ago, 158 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33003245 5 months ago, 26 comments

The original Futurist Manifesto (1909) [1] is indeed over-the-top and out-there. Much more about them in Wikipedia [2]. I don't see the connection between those original Futurists and the linked Futurist Programming article, maybe none was intended.

1. https://www.societyforasianart.org/sites/default/files/manif...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism

The Common Lisp standard was completed in 1994.

I am surprised this article does not mention Polya, who studied and taught heuristics in mathematics. His little classic How To Solve It -- from 1945! -- makes recommendations that overlap a lot with the ones here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It

There is a recent (2021) Japanese movie of The Door Into Summer. Other than being set in Japan, it was pretty faithful to the book, as I remember it: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13757540/

The famous Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) does this, in the Scheme language. The whole book is online here, with the table of contents right at the front:

https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf

In his book Class, Paul Fussel wrote that really rich people don't have dishwashers or many other mechanized conveniences: "Why put up with those noisy things when a silent servant can do everything they do?"

Here are the Yardbirds with Page and Beck together in the classic 1966 film Blow Up. Beck smashes his guitar while Page looks on smiling and keeps playing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSJGEn4FDys

Ask physical therapists. There is a whole subspecialty there about Gait and Balance. They would be familiar with devices and technology.

Canes and walkers, obviously. And, if the user begins to fall, they can often stop the fall. It's hard to see how a less obtrusive wearable device could do that.

You are very much appreciated, for your well-informed comments on this topic and many others on HN. Most HN readers don't reply to comments they appreciate, only the ones they disagree with. And many don't understand about upvoting, or don't bother.

It is fun and instructive to identify the strategies other developers have used. I thought of a few more:

combination - The World Wide Web is a combination of hypertext documents and the Internet, which had both been around for a long time when Tim Berners-Lee thought of combining them.

change one thing - Almost every week, several new text editors are announced on Hacker News. Most have one unique feature that distinguishes it from all the others. It might be internal - a new data struture for storing text buffers. Or it might be in the user interface or appearance - a new method for sizing and placing windows when another buffer is opened.

change the programming language - A variation on the above. How can you do X in language Y? Can you get an improvement by using a particular language feature?

make it smaller - How small can you make a text editor, language compiler, chess playing program, ray tracer ... ?

> everything has been done.

In computing and engineering, almost all "new" developments are actually variations or recombinations of things that have already been done.

BUT it's not just computing! That is also true of all the other arts, crafts, literature, music, ....

There is nothing wrong with this! It can be fun and rewarding to experiment this way, and some of the variations and recombinations are sufficiently novel and/or valuable that they are taken up by others. You just have to try the experiment and see where it goes.

An interesting form of variation is to remove something, or revert to something that was almost abandoned years ago. There have been a number of interesting projects recently that do this - the uxn virtual machine, the Gemini internet protocol, even the SerenityOS operating system. All three of these projects have attracted many developers besides their original authors.

Another form of variation is scale. Pick something insanely ambitious -- that seems to require a huge corporation -- and scale it down so you can do it all by yourself. The marginalia search engine is created and operated by one guy and runs on a computer in his living room.

> Never bored, and yet never really entertained or satisfied.

"Nobody is bored, everything is boring." -- K-Punk

A few classics cited in one comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29771594

Recommendations by many, 154 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692281

"MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels for secure, high-performance network applications across a variety of cloud computing and mobile platforms. ...

MirageOS uses the OCaml language, with libraries that provide networking, storage and concurrency support that work under Unix during development, but become operating system drivers when being compiled for production deployment. ...

MirageOS 4.0 was released in March 2022, preceded by ... MirageOS 1.0 in December 2013. All the infrastructure you see here is self-hosted. ..."

https://mirage.io/

So this has been going on for 9 years, I presume someone is using it.

A friend in the book business once told me that publishers like big thick programming books because they take up space on bookstore shelves and deny that space to rival books!

CogNos was supposed to be a mostly Smalltalk OS - as I understand it, the C and assembler code is just for booting and catching interrupts. The device drivers, file system, and network stack are all in Smalltalk. In addition to the repository, there is this conference paper:

https://charig.github.io/assets/papers/SCDE-DLS.pdf

The paper says "there would certainly be much more work needed before one could consider deploying our system." The project seems to be inactive now.

grugbrain.dev is wonderful. Also, it is an example of the simplicity it advocates: One file, simple HTML with a bit of simple CSS inline at the start of the file. That's all! Simple and effective.

Previously, 2+ years ago, similar title and theme but a completely different article, 6 comments:

Why Is the Modern World So Ugly? (theschooloflife.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23557284

The book Arithmetic by Paul Lockart from 2017 is about number systems, calculation methods, and devices from several historical periods and cultures, including Egypt, Rome, China, Japan, India and Europe.

This is the paper that introduced 'The Wheel of Reincarnation' to describe how the same ideas keep recurring in computer science.

This side of Von Neumann is discussed in the dual biography, John Von Neumann and Norbert Weiner: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death by Steve Heims, published in 1982.

The MIT Press page says it's now out of print, but it gained a lot of notice when it appeared, and must be in many libraries.

My own conclusion from Von Neumann's opinions about this is that genius in science and mathematics does not provide any special insight into other kinds of problems, such as arise in politics, military strategy, social issues, or ethics.

Here is an advertising brochure for DG's first product, the Nova minicomputer, when it appeared in 1968. A weird mix of technical information and full-page close up photos of DG executives trying to look tough:

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Data_Gener...

This memoir about working at DG in the 70s was linked on HN yesterday:

Data General History: The Fair Bastards http://www.teamfoster.com/billteamfostercom

via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33793837 - no comments