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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

I was lazy, that's why I mentioned talks. But I'd be happy to have a list of books too. Thanks.

I got a few for you that show his way of doing things. The Lilith system was a start. Its approach of simplicity, layering, and consistency will help if you're lazy. Only a few here because I'm lazy after the huge posts I've been writing. ;)

Lilith System http://www.cfbsoftware.com/modula2/Lilith.pdf

Main project page http://www.projectoberon.com/

Old system with links and ports (HW diversity or learning) http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/archives/systemsarchive/sys_geneal...

How he compiles it https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/CompilerConstruction/...

Turning programs into circuits https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Oberon/286.pdf

His hardware description language https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Lola/LolaCompiler.pdf

A guy who inspired his approach & did safe languages + OS's, including bullet-proof concurrency in 80's ;) http://brinch-hansen.net/

There you go.

I didn't know half of this, thanks a lot.

Sure thing. I always laugh when I hear "full stack developer" in its main use. I'd think the title shouldve been reserved for people like Wirth who develop apps, OS's, firmware, compilers, assemblers, and the hardware they run on. That's literally every part of the computing stack.

Oh yeah, look up Juice project. Will need to use Wayback Machine. It replaced JavaScript in browsers with Oberon so you get safety plus native speed. Sent as compressed, abstract, syntax trees so used little bandwith without losing typing info. Faded like the rest but would've been awesome compared to the JS that bogs down even a Core Duo.

Ha... I'm sighing so hard reading about Juice. Never even heard about it and I'm into 'esoteric'. Mainstream is as boring as inevitable.

http://web.archive.org/web/20000831045133/http://caesar.ics....

http://web.archive.org/web/20000610021840/http://caesar.ics....

Thought you'd like it. Came to mind again in a recent conversation on Ethereum with their "new" idea of distributed, smart contracts with programming languages. Reminded me of agent-oriented programming we did in the 1990's with products like Telescript running whole stores and stuff:

http://www.sce.carleton.ca/netmanage/docs/AgentsOverview/ao....

Impractical really, but fun concept. You created a bot that programmatically represented your goals, limits, heuristics for analysis, and so on. It could, with 1-2 commands, pack its code & data into a file that moved to another "place." It could move to Amazon's store over slow WAN, analyse certain products for you, commit to the right one, notify you, record the receipt, pack that up, and come back with a report for you. Used interpeters with safe programming languages and sandboxes plus A.I. for some of them. Imagine how easy, efficient, and secure Juice applets would be for that, today's smart contracts, or Facebook. Now you can sigh again as you realize how much faster and safer things could be if a handful of companies merely learned from the past and made it an option.

Btw, back then, we foresaw problems coming from untrusted or runaway code on machines in these agent marketplaces. So, platforms like Telescript had interpreters that isolated execution on a per-agent (per-user) basis. The platforms set in then-small datacenters on servers that spun up interpreters on demand in response to API requests. They measured CPU, memory, storage, and network usage for billing purposes. Any of that sound familiar? Like some "new" invention we hear about on HN, etc all the time? ;)

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