Samis2001

In the case of houses, I would think in most cases there's less conflict between prettiness and efficiency, for things like furniture there's much less space for the aesthetics to make a given piece more or less functional or efficient. However the tension isn't entirely gone, Juicero and 'McMansions' spring to mind as possible counterexamples.

The SmallInteger limitation is probably because as an optimisation they stored them as immediate values rather than generic objects, and Squeak shares this limitation (the newer Spur format extends this to one or more additional types depending on image bitness).

Related to references and the above, Eliot Miranda's blog may be informative as it provides both details and sometimes code for many of the changes that have happened in the Squeak (and now OpenSmalltalk) VM, e.g. http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/2013/09/13/lazy-become-a...

There have been very extensive changes since 2002, yep, such as a much improved interpreter, a JIT, a replacement of the original object memory format which incidentally supports faster become and most recently a new bytecode set.

Even broader is the one in the drafted repeal of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, the scope of (b) being particularly worrying - what exactly counts a related purported decision? 'A court of law may not question— (a) the exercise or purported exercise of the powers referred to in section 2,(b) any decision or purported decision relating to those powers, or (c) the limits or extent of those powers.'

By what metric of 'better'?

....JavaScript?

There have been systems that take this approach such as fabricate.py (https://github.com/brushtechnology/fabricate) and tup (http://gittup.org/tup/).

It would be even better if Kallithea or RhodeCode adopted the UI style shared by GitHub/Gogs/Gitea and friends. Then we could have the best of both worlds - good, well-known UI but with software that isn't as closely coupled to Git as some others are (and is lightweight with requirements)

Not the author, but the kernel is Multiboot compliant. See: https://sortix.org/man/man7/installation.7.html 'If you wish to dual boot, you need an existing operating system with a multiboot compliant bootloader such as GRUB.'

For this area, my ideal world is one where both the BIOS and UEFI are dead, replaced by something that is inspired both by OpenFirmware and coreboot.

Assuming the tagged reference or capability system was built, wouldn't it need software to take advantage of it? If it's not actively used, no real point having it over more block pointer space - and I doubt significant amounts of software would use such a filesystem-specific feature.

Why?

It's not publicly owned but the market is way less dysfunctional than in the US - aside from the few fiber & cable ISPs, a single phone line allows you to choose from a reasonably broad selection of ISPs.

Python's a modern stack in any reasonable definition of the word. Just because it doesn't use $TRENDY_LANGUAGES doesn't make it 'not modern'.

If you're talking standards, then platform-specific advantages mean precisely nothing.

Here's the problem with that idea: How do you convert your abstract high-level description into a set of specific operations? First you need to parse your specification, and parsing natural language is already hard. Secondly, you have to infer everything else that was requested and will be needed but was not originally specified.

Alright, now you have your list of requirements. Firstly, you must break each requirement down into a long series of small steps that perform exactly one operation - such as add 1 and 1 together. You must also find the correct order for all of the steps, as well as the operations to store and manage all required data in memory as meeded.

Finally, the list must either be translated to the native language of your computer's CPU or ran by a program running on the CPU.

As you can see, this is actually a large and difficult task, even if you manage to not encounter any unsolvable problems along the way. I would think the following comes naturally: The difference between your language and the 'dumb-as-rocks' ones is that the latter are implementable and usable.

An addition to this list: http://www.pawfal.org/dave/index.cgi?Projects/Scheme%20Brick...

Elsewhere on the internet (without resorting to seedier places like torrent sites) you can find versions of SunOS 2.x/3.x/4.x as well as Solaris 1.x, 2.x, 7.x and 8.

I'm a fan of Smalltalk, particularly the small Cuis variety. Anyway, you may be interested to know that Pharo either has or had a MOOC about learning and building things with the language. Additionally, there is an updated book I believe, at https://github.com/SquareBracketAssociates/UpdatedPharoByExa.... Some Cuis-oriented tutorials or documentation can be found at https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk-Learning/Learning-Cuis.

Happy Smalltalking! (Just don't do 'true become: false' :) )

They seem to have recognized this..5 or so minutes later.

This is the type of site which is a really interesting idea but finding it half-way through sucks somewhat :(

Related to RedPower: OpenComputers. While it does come with Lua as the default OS / platform but it has support for arbritary computing architectures - both real and fake. I'm not sure if any has matured to the point of RP2 though (I know someome at least attempted a 6502 architecture at: https://github.com/gamax92/ocsymon)

Eh, socialism and communism may seem to offer better end results but the difficulty of implementation without being exploited / converting to another ideology is evidently hard, perhaps impossible.

For the OODB, perhaps Squeak's Magma? http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2665

No kidding. 'Recent DNS Attacks' mentions 2007 in the description. I wonder if it's still active.

I was expecting that to be a quote from a book or a story and was surprised that it wasn't. Good job, it's scarily plausible. Especially in the UK.

I don't think such a system would be a technocracy - it would seem to be more along the lines of a Corporatocracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy)

I feel your pain due to a different reason. After seeing how the major Linux UI toolkits support consistent theming of all the programs using them, original styles/themes be damned, the lack of a consistently-applied theming system/mechanism among web applications is all the more obvious. With web pages this generally isn't an issue (barring annoying/just crap ones) but with web applications, why should their visual appearance and design be arbitarily (from my perspective anyway) decided by a developer/designer with no effective way to alter/change/override this either cleanly or consistently over multiple applications.

This directory seemingly contains both a copy of the Alto OS and a Smalltalk-80 image/changes file. Not sure which file is the VM executable though. http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/Indigo/BasicDisks/Small...

Is there any particular reason why you linked to Smalltalk-76 vs say, -78 or -80