http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc hourly 1 1901-01-01T00:00+00:00 http://gmane.org/img/gmane-25t.png http://gmane.org http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4231 <pre>Some on this list may find this article interesting: http://dunkels.com/adam/dunkels06runtime.pdf concerning power consumption on tiny compute nodes. david </pre> David Girle 2013-05-07T23:56:13 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4205 <pre>If there truly is a universal language, is it a systems language? A logic language can describe hardware. What about things like pointers? Have they come up with self-referential logic? On Apr 20, 2013 11:18 PM, "John Carlson" &lt;yottzumm-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org&gt; wrote: </pre> John Carlson 2013-04-21T04:56:55 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4203 <pre>I think it's better to work from examples, ala JUnit and end-user programming than come up with a theory that solves nothing. One can compare EGGG to GDL in scope and expressiveness. One interesting part of gaming is arguing about rules. What computer systems do that? On Apr 20, 2013 11:09 PM, "John Carlson" &lt;yottzumm-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org&gt; wrote: </pre> John Carlson 2013-04-21T04:18:12 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4187 <pre>I wanted to send this message out after the final status report, but since that's indefinitely delayed (keep going!) I'm just going to do it now. Easy question: has keeping this dialogue open been useful to the folks at VPRI, or has it been more of a burden than anything else? I can definitely say that it's been very good for me, in that I learned a hell of a lot reading all of the lovely papers posters cited. It's also been a lot of fun meeting people who were interested in a lot of the same things that I was. I'm not so happy about my own contribution though. Did I do anything at all to advance the state of the art? Well, no. I mostly just flapped my lips. It's asymmetrical, I learned way more than I taught. The best I could do was play sounding board for some of Ian's ideas while dinking around with Maru's guts. BTW if you haven't looked at it, Maru is way cool. VPRI has done something pretty awesome and weird here, in that the dialogue was wide open the whole time. As I gather, it was in the spirit of ARPA. We've had our share of trolls, long-winded posters (raises hand) and just general chaos. I really enjoyed the guy who called us all a bunch of Alan Kay fanboys the other day by the way. That was just priceless. Like we can't think for ourselves! (Alan if I can get an autograph after this I think I'll be set.) So seriously, has this been worthwhile? I'm not just asking VPRI folks, though I'm DEFINITELY asking VPRI folks, I'm also asking everyone else on the list. I learned a lot, huge win for me, and we talked in circles a bunch, some of that was fun. I can also think of a few parts where I felt pretty strongly that it *was* worthwhile. To throw out an example, remember when Dale Schumacher asked pretty poignantly whether or not the original idea behind objects/messages was similar to the actor model? That was like a blockbuster for nerds it was so awesome. That totally rocked. That's me. Okay now talk amongst yourselves go! ? </pre> Casey Ransberger 2013-04-19T20:51:03 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4169 <pre>Does anyone have a fast API for getting/putting "the nth line of a file"? This would replace a relational way of storing strings, caching is acceptable. C++ is preferred. </pre> John Carlson 2013-04-18T15:21:35 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4143 <pre>(Forwarded from Layers thread) On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 1:44 PM, Gath-Gealaich &lt;gath.na.gealaich-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org&gt;wrote: I had another idea the other day that could profit from a domain-specific </pre> David Barbour 2013-04-14T23:20:41 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4134 <pre> Hypocrisy: "..pretending to have (...) principles, that one does not actually have". I'm not pretending. Preaching: "To advocate, especially to urge acceptance of or compliance with". I'm pretty sure I'm not "preaching." If you look at how actors were brought into the conversation, I explained which model I attempt first (not only) in order to think about a problem. And I was agreeing with you: I think in terms of actors/messages first, so no argument there :D The rest of the "preaching" resulted from me trying to communicate how *I* think about actors because we clearly have different views on this way of modeling computation, and I'm pretty careful to add "I think" and "in my opinion" where appropriate. I engaged with you because I'm interested as to how learning the issues you've had with implementing actor systems could help me build actor systems and address or maybe even avoid the problems, or perhaps even reach the same conclusions about actors that you've come to from your experiences. Actors are already an enormous simplification from physics. It even Despite what I perceive as hyperbole, it is a valid point indeed. It gives me a reason to consider if it is possible to somehow specify the communication media more precisely? However, I start to wonder how well have we specified the physical media for communication. What's our description of a photon traveling through space? Or a muon? Have physics agreed yet on what "space" is? I'm familiar with quantum foam being one of the latest hypothesis, as well as not being able to agree on how many dimensions there are (M/String theory, I think). Perhaps in implementations of actor messaging, we'll further discover a simpler principle at work by making it work in the real world (hard for me to imagine it right now), hence providing an existence proof. On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 1:29 PM, David Barbour &lt;dmbarbour-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org&gt; wrote: </pre> Tristan Slominski 2013-04-14T17:50:40 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4133 <pre> I don't know the answer to that yet. You've highlighted really good questions that a "pure" actor model system would have to answer (and I added a few). I believe they were: - composition - decomposition - consistency - discovery - persistence - runtime update - garbage collection - process control - configuration partitioning - partial failure - inlining? (optimization) - mirroring? (optimization) - interactions - safety - security - progress - extensibility - antifragility - message reliability - actor persistence Did I miss any? On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 1:29 PM, David Barbour &lt;dmbarbour-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org&gt; wrote: </pre> Tristan Slominski 2013-04-14T16:55:51 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4132 <pre> How is it privileged? A mechanic is a poor example because frame of reference is almost irrelevant in Newtonian view of physics. Obvious things in Newtonian view become very wrong in Einsteinian take on physics once we get into extremely large masses or extremely fast speeds. In my opinion, the pattern of information distribution in actor systems via messages resembles the Einsteinian view much more closely than the Newtonian view. When an actor sends messages, there is an information "light cone" that spreads from that actor to whatever actors it will reach. Newtonian view is not helpful in this environment. Within an actor system, after a creation event, an actor is limited to knowing the world through messages it receives. This seems to me to be a purely empirical knowledge (i.e. coming only from sensory experience). This goes back to what you highlighted about my point of view: That only matters to people who want "as close to the Universe as So yes, you're right, I agree. I would probably remove "only" from the above statement, but otherwise, I accept your assertion. On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 1:29 PM, David Barbour &lt;dmbarbour-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org&gt; wrote: </pre> Tristan Slominski 2013-04-14T16:46:12 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4120 <pre>Is the holy grail of FONC to create an environment where you can use command line, text editor, IDE, and end-user programming to program the same program? Are there any other ways to program? Circuit boards? I believe FONC includes this. Speech and gestures? Does FONC provide a way to use speech and gestures to program? Is this a bit like Intentional Software? This reminds me a bit of Tcl/Tk as well, where programming command line, program and GUI were integrated. What else out there is trying to encompass all kinds of programming in a cross media way? John </pre> John Carlson 2013-04-13T13:34:34 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4119 <pre>So I think the original thread drifted a bit. I'm curious about what folks think of the research involved here. I read the paper. A few things stuck out. The thing I'd mention is that it seemed to work (at least superficially) with getting 12 year olds to (begin to) tackle a programming language which by my own (prejudiced) standards is a rather difficult choice for *adults* who want to program casually. I guess I also identified with the whole set of things they identified as common among kids who learned to code in a quiet hole without any real support. They say that Java wasn't trying to convert the Lisp crowd, so much as the C++ crowd. Lisp, so far, seems a lot more learnable than C++ but that's beside my interest here. Since one of the things I think we ought to be arguing about in this context is "how do we scale things like Scratch or Etoys up to the sky and down to the metal?" I do think the study is relevant. It maybe helps explain how to deal with the trip to the metal end. Or maybe not. OTOH I didn't feel like there were enough numbers in there. It felt very very soft-science, and maybe there's no way around that. And maybe I have a prejudice about soft science. I got the general sense that the smell meant it was working, though, so I'm really interested in seeing what these folks do next. At the end of the day, what works, works, right? Does anyone here know these researchers? Any chance we might be able to pull them into the dialogue? At risk of wasting time on BS troll threads. I get the sense these are the kind of people I'd like to see posting here. Anyway they've got some *very* relevant experience now, and I think it would be cool to hear about what they're planning to do next. Just a thought. </pre> Casey Ransberger 2013-04-13T11:56:27 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4104 <pre> This is just like open source software. A bunch of feelgood people hangin' out and messin' around, not ever doing anything, but pretending they are getting somewhere by indulging themselves. No one on here is probably working on the Fundamentals of New Computing. This is just a trash bin for people who don't want to do anything. The real work is probably on noise-free mailing list. This is the fanboy list for Alan Kay. </pre> John Pratt 2013-04-12T20:18:02 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4097 <pre>http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=1347 </pre> John Carlson 2013-04-12T16:30:54 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4094 <pre> It doesn't matter that I am inexperienced in the annals of computer science because the reason why I wrote on this mailing list in the first place is that I share a similar, albeit smaller, experience as Alan Kay setting the conceptual foundation for an industry and then watching people, ignorant of it, start hitting walls because they are only concerned with the direct gains they can glean from the concept rather than its underpinnings as well. In this case, it was smaller than an entire world of computers-- it was just a concept for "all-or-nothing" collection, by way of collective action. It is also called other names, but the general idea is that people set a goal and if everyone agrees to participate, their participation token (money) is taken from them; if not everyone agrees to participate, their participation never takes place and the token evaporates or is returned to them. At the time we started this, there were certainly people who had thought of it before, but no one had put it into practice or worked out all of the practical realities. It also was founded as a result of studying political science, not playing around with web pages and web programming, strictly speaking. Yet, people today believe that just having the concept and then buying a book on web programming is what allowed us to establish the foundation for an entire Internet phenomenon, for which we get little or no credit (or money, if you are interested in that!). In fact, it took a unique set of backgrounds, unlike those who wish to become the next Facebook. So I am sympathetic to Alan Kay on a number of levels, and while I would never equate myself professionally or academically in terms of university position, I do understand the experience he has gone through more than almost anyone. I also know, more than most, what it is like to witness an entire environment that is totally empty of the concept you are trying to implement, and then just a few short years later witnessing its emergence across the world, to my personal astonishment. It is why I am so confident that people will practice Falun Dafa even though I am one of the first people in the United States to recognize this. I have seen an entire environment go from voidspace on top of the foundation I started, to a total flourishing of what people now deem "crowdfunding." But like Kay, I am not mentioned very often, if at all on this topic, even though I drove it. </pre> John Pratt 2013-04-10T23:54:45 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4071 <pre>Here's my example. Siri: Intruders detected on the tenth floor. Me: Okay Siri, seal off decks six through twelve. Open the airlocks. Number one! Arrange a security detatchment, let's light a fire under their asses! Siri: Aye captain. Retracting cooling rods from primary and secondary reactors. Fire should commence within minutes. Me: No no no no! Put the cooling rods back into the reactors, Siri! What the [explitive deleted] were you thinking?? Siri: Got it. I've made an appointment with your dentist for Monday. Approximately three minutes fourteen seconds to meltdown in primary and secondary reactors. Your dentist says hello, by the way. (etcetera) The computer is going to keep getting smaller. How do you program a phone? It would be nice to be able to just talk to it, but it needs to be able -- in a programming context -- to eliminate ambiguity by asking me questions about what I meant. Or *something.* It's tragic that Siri can't tell me what you get when you multiply six by nine. I think it's been crippled, based on stuff Woz has said about what Apple did when they bought it up. So there are some really interesting angles without well understood solutions wrt NLP (and of course the group is welcomed to slap me in the face with my ignorance because I know there's stuff I don't know.) The best thing I've found to a natural language programming system is Inform 7 which leaves things to be desired. At least it is unambiguous, but I think that in natural language, what we need are ways to cope with disambiguation. Anyone want to point me at cool stuff to read? :D </pre> Casey Ransberger 2013-04-09T08:48:49 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/4070 <pre>What started off (at least ostensibly) as a conversation about NLP ended up being a conversation about the actor model, and the subject did change once, but to something not AFAIK related to actors. If I was less patient about wading though blah blah I might have missed interesting thoughts about actors, which is relevant to my interests. I'm not referring to the off topic origin of the thread so much as the fact that the subject line didn't track the context as it shifted. Trying not to be too much of a complainer, and I kind of have to applaud the community for trying patiently to bring a thread kicking and screaming back into the topical, as well as Kim Rose for putting the official foot down about what's too far off topic for discussion on this list, so thank you and thank you. </pre> Casey Ransberger 2013-04-09T08:05:27 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/3994 <pre>The main source of invention is not "math wins" as described on http://www.vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm since the world would be speaking math if it were really the source of inspiring more inventions that improve the world's standard of living. Math helps add precision to tasks that involve counting. Attempting to move from counting to logic such as in statistics sometimes leads to false conclusions, especially if logic is not given priority over the tools of math. For human value, readability is required, so computer language improvements must focus on natural language. Human language itself has problems seen in large projects such as Ubuntu where contributors from around the world write in their own language and tag their code with favorite names which mean nothing to the average reader instead of words which best explain the application. Thus a major improvement for world computing would be careful adherence to a world wide natural language. We know cobbling together a variety of languages as in Esperanto fails. While English is the world standard language for business, Hebrew might be more inspiring. In any case the use of whole words with common sense is more readable than acronyms. The first math language Fortran was soon displaced in business by more readable code afforded by Cobol's longer variable names. In Smalltalk one can write unreadable math as easily as readable code but Smalltalk may have a few legacy bugs which nobody has yet fixed, possibly due to having metaphor or polymorphism design errors, where the code looks good to multiple programmers but fails to perform as truly desired in all circumstances. Further reluctance to use commonsense whole words on some objects such as "BltBlk" present a barrier to learning directly from the code. One way to reduce these errors is to develop a set of executable rules that produce Smalltalk, including checking method reuse implications. Then one could make changes to a few rules and the rules would totally reengineer Smalltalk accordingly, without forgetting or overlooking anything that the programmer hasn't overlooked in the rules. There is also room for a more efficient and more natural language. Smalltalk is supposed to be 3 times faster to code than C and Expert systems are supposed to be 10 times faster to code in than C. So a better language needs development in two directions, easy to understand Expert rules using common sense whole words and a built in library which enables "Star Trek's Computer" or "Iron Man's Computer" level of hands free or at least keyboard free function. There are three basic statements in any computer language: assignment, If then else, and loop. Beyond that a computer language should provide rapid access to all common peripherals. Expert systems tend to have a built in loop which executes everything until there are no more changes. Some industrial process controllers put a strict time limit on the loop. Examining published rules of simple expert systems, it appears that random rule order makes them easier to create while brainstorming, it is possible to organize rules in a sequential order which eliminates the repeat until no changes loop. Rule ordering can be automated to retain freedom of human input order. Several years ago I worked with a Standford student to develop a language we call Lt which introduces a concept of Object Strings which can make rules a little easier. Unfortunately the project was written in VBasic instead of Smalltalk so I've had insufficient ability to work on it since the project ended. Soon I'll be working on converting it to Smalltalk then reengineering it since it has a few design errors and needs a few more development cycles educated by co-developing an NLP application. Here's a simple Lt method which is very similar to Smalltalk game "example Lt code" | bird player rock noise | 'objects rock exists. player clumsy. 'facts player trips : [player {clumsy unlucky}, rock exists]. 'a if x w or x y and z noise exists; is loud : (player trips, player noisy). 'a and b if x or y bird frightened : noise is loud. 'a if x (bird ~player has : bird frightened. 'case: if b then not a else a. bird player has.). ^ 'answer rock exists, player clumsy, player trips, noise exists, noise is loud 'bird frightened Now to complete the project without corporate resources, it is necessary to select an NLP application which is both more powerful and physically smaller than IBM's Watson which won against Jeopardy's best players. The most powerful NLP text in history is the Bible which is only 4 Mb instead of Watson's 4 Tb. Bible analysis can be very rewarding - getting software to develop the footnotes in the free New Testament from http://www.biblesforamerica.org would be a first step, rewriting them based on my discovery of the true church being what Jesus practiced before Paul appeared would be progress. After that level of achievement, it should be easier to apply the system to any problem. This level of NLP mastery in or external to an outside and indoor robot could be used to end poverty, illiteracy, crime, terrorism, and war around the world by growing and serving food, educating and entertaining a family with the same language and religion cradle to Ph.D. in some ways similar to this video http://www.hulu.com/watch/69831/outer-limits-family-values, especially note the ending. While there are amoral inventions such as smoking, all good inventions come from a desire for absolute perfection of spirit and being resulting in faith for improving some aspect of life. Anyone wanting to work on this must agree to not allow any use of the system in the forthcoming rebuilt Temple in Israel for many reasons, especially the Creator's warning in the Gospel. Love Truth, Kirk W. Fraser </pre> Kirk Fraser 2013-04-04T20:19:21 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/3990 <pre>http://thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler I have to admit that I had not previously encountered such focused criticism of O'Reilly. With passing mentions of Engelbart and Postman, the essay may be of some interest to the list. </pre> Ryan Mitchley 2013-04-03T13:37:21 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/3983 <pre>I'm not sure if this is on subject or not. I recently considered not only copying data between applications, but also copying behavior. I know the typical response would be to tell the user to go find the behavior in the source code or library. What if some simple keystrokes could copy and paste behavior? Which systems have done this? Thanks in advance. </pre> John Carlson 2013-03-30T04:19:28 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/3980 <pre>Someone finally got round to making a cell that acts like a transistor. You knew they'd do it eventually;) http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/03/a-computer-inside-a-cell.html?ref=hp </pre> Casey Ransberger 2013-03-30T01:16:17 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc/3975 <pre>It reminds me of scratch &amp; etoys http://www.soe.berkeley.edu/boxer/20reasons.pdf - Francisco </pre> Francisco Garau 2013-03-27T07:51:39 Search the mailing list at Gmane query http://search.gmane.org/?group=$group=gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.fonc