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Comment by Torwald | Hacker News Reader

> What makes it amazing to me is the uniformity of it. Everything operates the same, and the keybinds apply everywhere that they're supposed to.

This is the best summary of what the original Macintosh was all about and why Macintsoh enthusiasts back then loved System 6 and upwards.

(They didn't call them keybindings though. Keyboard shortcuts. (Ironicly a longer word. (yes)))

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Yes, and this really showed with applications like Hypercard where you could build apps making use of the operating system's widget toolkit. The old Mac OS was based on the Xerox Star, which was in turn a commercial implementation of Douglas Engelbart's original GUI computer NLS. The Xerox Star supported both Lisp and Smalltalk development environments.

Unfortunately, Steve Jobs didn't care about Lisp or Smalltalk, and he hated Hypercard, and he took the company's product lines in a consumerist direction, which is why Apple has "app stores" nowadays instead of a thriving ecosystem of tiny Lisp programs that compose well with each other.

If Jobs did not care a ot Smalltalk the why was Next based on Objective C which is basically Smalltalk grafted onto C.

I suspect the reason that the Lisa was not Lisp or Smalltalk based is due to speed and cost of memory.

> If Jobs did not care a ot Smalltalk the why was Next based on Objective C which is basically Smalltalk grafted onto C.

That is a good question, I don't really know (or maybe I am misinformed). Somewhere along the way, Richard Stallman started GNUstep, and Sun Microsystems and NeXTstep founded the OpenStep standard. But it is strange to me that when Jobs started NeXTstep his engineers choose Objective-C instead of trying to license or port Smalltalk, I was under the impression that Jobs didn't care for it for some inscrutable reason.

I do know after Jobs left, Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL) continued to see some development, and there was even a version of the Hypercard product that could be programmed in Lisp (I can't remember what it was called). But when Jobs came back he obliterated all of that in favor of all the stuff they acquired from NeXTstep. MCL eventually became Clozure Common Lisp which is still in development.

I think BeOS (now Haiku) does a better job making everything object oriented in the way that Smalltalk does. I have also heard (though I've never tried it myself) that OS/2 also does a much better job making a fully object oriented system.

  > I was under the impression that Jobs didn't care for it for some inscrutable reason.

i dont remember where i read it, but i distinctly remember somewhere that he said something like "don't use any object oriented stuff, its too slow" to which his subordinates went and did it anyways... kinda like the floppy disk in the mac, devs did the right thing in the end even if he originally didn't want it

if thats wrong i'd love to be corrected though!

It is impossible to prove that someone did not say a particular thing so I don't think anyone can correct you.

The only thing that can happen is if someone can find the quote and confirm your memory.

I think what we ought to blame rather than Jobs is the logic of capitalism, maximum profits all the time, even at the cost of other things.

Please, elucidate. I'd love to hear about all the superior programming environments developed in non-capitalist economies.

To be fair, FOSS is pretty much the definition of socialism. Donations are pretty much the only way money is made directly off the software itself. Running an instance of the software, if it's a server for example, is a slightly different story. Everyone contributes of their own volition and interest.

I'm not a fan of government-enforced socialism or communism. But if you can get enough people together to willingly participate independently, I'm chill with it. And FOSS software is an example of it working out alright.

> the definition of socialism. Donations are pretty much the only way money is made

That's not the definition of socialism at all.

If you think about it, it's actually much closer to the principle of right-wing Christian charity rather than the left-wing sharing of means of production.

Christian charity is not a right-wing principle.

Many in the US tend to associate Christianity with right-wing ideology, but there's actually quite a few examples of a varied history of left-wing Christian thought and action. Sticking to US history: Reverend Martin Luther King, Jimmy Carter, Dorothy Day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Day). Outside of the US, Liberation Theology in Latin America was an ideology/movement explicitly linking Christian (mostly Catholic) teachings with Marxist-inspired struggles for workers' rights (sometimes those links are easy to do, if you focus on quotes such as "blessed are the poor").

I do agree that FOS software is not socialism, and that donations aren't socialism. But it's important to note that many people who work on FOS software do so without expecting anything in return. I think that idea is in sharp contrast with typical right-wing and centrist economic theories that view human beings as mostly money-driven, self-centered individuals.

We're falling in the pitfall of ‶left and right are different depending on where you're standing″. I'm 100% sure what you say is true in your country; but in mine, being religious and eschewing the state-based, tax-backed wealth redistribution in favor of the personal, charity-based one definitely puts you as left-wing.

As a Catholic I assure you that you can't reconcile Christianity with left-wing ideology. And I fully agree that FOSS is not necessarily socialist.

Christianity is fully compatible with a society where people can make meaningful decisions over things which affect them, with democratic control their workplace and community. In fact Tolstoy came to this conclusion, that Christian ideology says we should have no bosses, and not dominate or control other people.

> As a Catholic I assure you that you can't reconcile Christianity with left-wing ideology.

Did you mean right-wing ideology? (Calling @tptacek and @patio11 ....)

I suppose there are various right-wing ideologies, and some of them may be compatible with Christianity. I cannot imagine any left-wing ideology (which is at best wrong and at worst downright evil) compatible with Christianity.

Out of curiosity: In general, how would you describe "left-wing ideology" and "Christianity"?

One has to be enforced by government to work at a large scale. The other is formed by everyone willingly participating.

Pretty sure Jesus never said anything about the forced redistribution of wealth against your will being good.

any way you decide to organize a state will have to be enforced by government to work at a large scale. That's what the law is for.

Jesus actually did have a pretty clear statement in favor of taxes, the most common form of forced redistribution of wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_unto_Caesar

Rather than of socialism, I’d say FLOSS is a form of (digital) commons, which as GP points out, is a pre-capitalist/non-capitalist form of production and management.

thats a good point, probably people are colloquially using socialism to mean "the opposite of capitalism", but what it really is just one of many alternatives

on that usage then i think the proper wording for "the opposite of capitalism" would be something like non-capitalist (or even anti-capitalist maybe?)

(apologies for the depression)

Socialism can mean a lot of things. But originally it meant the control and management of society by workers, on a democratic basis, including the workplace.

People developed these great environments like EMACS and other open source software out of passion, not because they were chasing profits. There are many instances where seeking profits, as in the corporate world, reduces innovation and creates a short term mindset. A lot of the best research comes out of state-funded labs, even the development of the transistor and the computer in the USA, the development of the internet, all funded by the state.

You're painting with broad a brushstroke. Both good and bad things emerge from the public and private sectors. Despite often falling into the "worse is better" trap, self-interest is our species' most potent innovator, modulo purgative events like WW2 when all our intellectual capital returned to the state.

> The Xerox Star supported both Lisp and Smalltalk development environments.

There was a common hardware. It ran Star, Lisp or Smalltalk - but not at the same time. Each were whole operating systems.

Connecting the two, having emacs-like text navigation shortcuts work in any halfway-native text input or field, on Mac, now feels so right to me that any platform without that feature seems flat-out wrong.

It's pretty cool. It's even cooler in applications with working[0] Cocoa text widgets, where you can do things like M-u and M-l for upcase/downcase word, transpose, and even an Emacs-like kill-ring[1].

[0]: Unfortunately in most third party web browsers and Electron apps (Chrome, Firefox, Slack, etc) most of these shortcuts don't work for some reason.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

Did you mean to make a lisp joke here?

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