7thaccount

I keep seeing the videos pop up. It does look really cool. I see it has a basic interpreter, so I guess kinda like a C64?

Are you aware of anyone who has used that system outside of a hobbyist buying the dev board? I looked into it and the ideas were cool, but no clue how to actually do anything with it.

I respectfully disagree. The amount of folks in upper management that can actually use something like Tableau is very small. However it doesn't matter as none of those people have the time outside of very small businesses which probably don't need it anyway. The business intelligence person is supposed to deliver succinct insights to upper management to act on, not say "here's a cool system I built you... figure it out yourself". Executives aren't getting paid $$$$$$$$ to do data analysis. Hopefully I'm not misrepresenting your point.

I missed this earlier: "Radiance features a modern syntax and design inspired by Rust, Swift and Zig."

>"It's a tool for personal computing where every application and every surface, exists as code you can read, edit, and extend. It's a system you can truly own"

This sounds a lot like a Smalltalk running as the OS until they started talking about implementing a systems language.

I assume they know but don't care. Either way, that is a bad choice. I think "Rad" would be a good name, but maybe they already are using that for something else.

Edit: where did you see it's called "R"? It looks like they call the system language "Radiance" : https://radiant.computer/system/radiance/

You wouldn't I don't think (assuming this thing ever got off the ground - huge assumption), but is that really a problem? I think the web page is more to make normalish people aware that this hypothetical ecosystem would be out there. From within that ecosystem they could have a different page.

It's prob a balance. Sure, C is king....but if you are starting from scratch...do you REALLY need it or could you design something even better? Maybe, maybe not.

I've programmed for a long time, but always struggled with Assembly and C, so take my views with a grain of salt.

Same. I was super excited until I saw the AI stuff you pointed out. I'll have to read more about that. I like the idea of a new OS that isn't just a Linux clone, networking stack that is old school and takes computing in a different direction. I don't have a lot of need for the AI stuff outside of some occasional LLM stuff. I'd like to hear more from the authors on this.

I also understand that the old BBS way of communicating isn't perfect, but looking into web browsers seems to just be straight up insanity. Surely we can come up with something different now that takes the lessons learned over the past few decades combined with more modern hardware. I don't pretend to know what that would look like, but the idea of being able to fully understand the overall software stack (at least conceptually) is pretty tempting.

I think that is a fair point too. The person that builds the Tableau dashboard could just send Brenda a screenshot once a month and that saves everyone time.

That's a pretty specific example when there are a lot of good "spreadsheet people" out there who do a lot more than spreadsheets (maybe they had to write SQL queries or scripts to get those numbers), but commonly need to simplify things down to a spreadsheet or power point for upper management. I'm not saying you should have multiple people doing redundant work, but this style isn't entirely dumb.

What would this be replaced by? Some kind of large SAP like system that costs millions of dollars and requires a dozen IT staff to maintain?

I can't tell if OP just really enjoyed the experience or if he is the actual author of the OS.

I think some of that is a certain group of people will do anything to play with the new shiny stuff. In my org it's cloud and now GPU.

The cloud stuff is extremely expensive and doesn't work any better than our existing solutions. Like a commentator said below, it's insidious as your entire organization later becomes dependent on that. If you buy a cloud solution, you're also stuck with the vendor deciding to double the cost of the product once you're locked in.

The GPU stuff is annoying as all of our needs are fine with normal CPU workloads today. There are no performance issues, so again...what's the point? Well... somebody wants to play with GPUs I guess.

It may be designed to do that, but I'm highly skeptical it does a better job than a typical well-run school. I've heard plenty of horror stories too.

Early on, the selectric typewriter thing had a spherical ball that could rotate to stamp the characters. So when you typed a key the IBM hardware would type a character on a piece of paper exactly like a typewriter and also the IBM computer would keep track of this and when you ran the expression it would calculate the result and print that out as well. You can see videos of this.

Interesting to see this. I bought a book on Ada 2012 awhile back. Pretty cool stuff - especially with Spark.

The license model always made me uncomfortable for when you were using the commercial compilers though. Does this lock you into Spark forever?

I never went to Montessori, but did cub scouts at one and those were some odd kids and parents. I felt like I was on an alien planet. Not bad people or anything, just certainly different. Like they took a class on how to act human, but lost something in translation.

I do recall there being a lot of toys and stuff. There was an old Texas Instruments computer that caught my interest as we had computers with Windows 95 at my school. Apparently nobody was allowed to touch it though.

My guess is the best school for your kids is one where they're safe and one with curious and motivated kids and enthusiastic teachers that can help inspire and unlock talent. The method is secondary, but kids should be both challenged and given some amount of freedom to explore. It also helps if the parents care and ensure their kids are functioning members of society.

Did you hire them?

I'm in a similar boat. It would be cool ...but how would I use it outside of hobbies.

I think it's a simple abstraction situation and the move for programming environments that include everything.

Geordi Laforge doesn't code much on the Enterprise. He simply asks the computer to build him a model of the anomaly so he can test out ideas. In a way, modern languages like Python (even before LLMs) let you get a lot closer to that reality. Sure you had to know some language basics, but this was pretty minimal and you'd use those basic building blocks to glue together libraries to make an application. Python has a good library for practically anything I do and since this is standard, it's expected that a task doesn't take too long. I can't tell my boss I'll need 3 years to code my own solution that uses my own libraries for numpy and scipy. You're expected to glue libraries together. This is why MIT moved SICP from scheme to Python. It's a different world.

With Forth, every program is a work of art that encapsulates an entire solution to a problem from scratch. It's creator chuck moore takes this to such a level that he also fabs his own chips to work with his forth software optimally. These languages had libraries, but they weren't easy to share and didn't have any kind of repository before Perl's CPAN. Perl really took off for awhile, but Python won out by having a simpler language with builtin OO (Perl's approach was a really hacky builtin OO or you download a library...).

To be honest though, I spent a decade trying many languages (dozens including common lisp, Prolog, APL, C, Ada, Smalltalk, Perl, C#, C++, Tcl, Lua, Rust...etc) looking for the best and although I never became experts in those languages, I kept coming to the conclusion that for my particular set of needs, Python was the best I could find. I wasted a lot of time reading common lisp books and just found it much easier to get the same thing done in Python. Your mileage will vary if you're doing something like building a game engine. A lot of people are just doing process automation and stuff like that and languages like Python are just better than common lisp due to the environment and tooling benefits. Also, although Python isn't as conceptually beautiful as lisp, I found it much easier to learn. The syntax just really clicked for me and some people do prefer it.

I think I'd agree from a mathematical perspective that lisp is more elegant, but implementation-wise, I really do like Forth's simplicity. They're both really cool.

The quote makes more sense IMO for array languages like J that support a tacit style. J's "trains" just make things flow without a lot of variables. Aaron Hsu's Co Dfns compiler (spoken about on here and YouTube) also uses this style with Dyalog APL.

Forth is concatenative, so you can build the words on top of each other without worrying about a ton of variables. So I think it's partially true for Forth.

It's well known in the array community.... which is practically nobody, so you're correct :)

It is exciting to see free and open source languages like this and uiua maturing though.

https://www.uiua.org/

Not if those components eventually get included as part of other core chips you can't remove. At some point, you'll have to completely redesign your cars electronics system to do so.

I don't think that's always possible anymore

It's really just that it's a pretty easy language to learn that finds a good balance between structure and brevity. It has very good support for the data structures you need and libraries for everything. A lot of people love the language and that built up a lot of momentum and eventually people started adding stuff like numpy and scipy and pandas and before long you had this giant scientific computing environment that almost anyone can get into.

I tried out most of the scripting languages out there (Ruby, Perl, Tcl, Groovy, R, and many more) and Python just seemed to click more and it has a whole lot less to worry about upfront than languages like C# and Java. In comparison to languages like C and C++, it's a godsend for those with typical automation needs.

In my eyes it seems like a pretty straightforward development. There have been plenty of other tools that may have made sense throughout history too. Matlab could have done this, but by that time nobody was going to build out massive libraries for something expensive and partly closed off.

The corps won't stomach it anymore at the scale they formerly did, but at one point they did. It could happen again some day...just a lot would have to change.

Parc just didn't capitalize on what they had. I know the Alto was expensive, but still seems like a huge shame.

I wonder if Milton Friedman regrets going out and popularizing that and saying the board has a duty to maximize shareholder profit and all that.

On one hand, sure. They're able to make an informed decision to maximize return to shareholders.

On the other hand, a ton of amazing inventions came out of that system which created entire industries that went on to turbocharge the economy and create millions of jobs. I can see how someone may feel that a company being able to inflate it's stock price more is less useful to humanity and not worth the trade.

There may have been other reasons as well for the collapse of corporate research like changing tax rates, or maybe we were just in a golden age (1940s-1980s) as new advancements in physics and materials science allowed for a rapid amount of discoveries and now we're back in a slower period.

Nothing against research universities as good stuff does occur there, but it just seems like it was such a a huge loss seeing those corporate labs disappear. I think it helps to have scientists and engineers closer to the problem and who don't have to spend a huge amount of their time writing grants and training grad students.