> Since this article was written, the iPad has gained a number of excellent programming tools
That's true, and good, but misses the point. In the smalltalk world (and Lisp machine worlds of PARC and MIT) everything running in the machine (above the microcode layer) was inspectable, breakpoint able, and modifiable.
While on the iPad everything is, as the article says, opaque and unmodifiable, unless its your own app.
note: I worked on Lispms at MIT (and other places) and on D-machine Interlisp at PARC (and other places)
What can you say about the contrast between the East Cost -vs- West Coast approaches to Lisp?
My impression is that Interlisp-D tried to solve problems with excellent tooling, which helped you get around the crappy language design, and Lisp Machines tried to solve problems with excellent language design, which helped you get around the crappy tooling. Kind of like two different manifestations of "Worse is Better", with different trade-offs for what they do worse.
I don't see any reason somebody should't simply combine excellent tooling with excellent language design! But here we are, with neither.
Maclisp/CADR Lisp was more to my taste, true, but to be fair Interlisp was originally developed at BBN, and folks like Teitelman and Bobrow were former MITers.
I agree the D machine had a more intensive UI while the cadrs and their descendants were more text oriented.
On the other hand, the article misses the point too: if the iPad had everything modifiable
(a) most people wouldn't bother,
(b) the fewer that would bother would include programmers and tinkerers who could create awesome stuff, but also marketers, spammers, crackers, bad programmers, etc, who would create malicious or totally crap stuff that would undermine the stability, functionality, security, etc of the system to a total nightmare.
(Not to mention those were made in an era where you didn't have your personal life plus credit cards on a computer).
In the end of the day the allure of the iPad is that if worse comes to worse, 99% of the time you reboot (or just close an app) and everything is like new. And most of the time it just works.
Android is nowhere near as open as the Smalltalk systems, but is more open than the iPad, and is plagued by the majority of malicious code (according to research).
And there are ways to just open it totally and write anything you want on it, but most don't care.
That’s true, but I shudder at the thought of today’s users running a machine where they, their kids, or some nefarious third party can easily change, say, what the command to draw a line, to write a file, or to send a network packet does. Even well-intended “here’s a nice hack that makes your word documents smaller” changes will wreak havoc, breaking the ability to share files.
Smalltalk and lisp machines are great for hacker types, and I think many of today’s systems are locked down to much, preventing potential programmers from making mistakes to learn from, but I also think we need some restrictions in today’s world.
I disagree. I'd rather have a defense in depth against the nefarious & accidents and allow a Cambrian explosion of experimentation. The professionalization and permissions culture that's developed over the last few decades is ultimately stultifying.
It's shocking to me that network protocols (layers 1-5 at least) are basically 1970s designs. Why don't each set of machines automatically develop their own "jargon" optimised to the kind of communication they have? That's what humans do, to hone the efficiency and precision in their language, yet it doesn't stop us from talking to people outside our immediate circle.
But amateur experimentation in many areas is basically dead.
You worked on D-machines at Parc? Awesome! For years I had an ‘in love’ relationship with my 1108 Dandeline Lisp Machine. Makes me a little sad to now work in the environment of Databricks and Jupiter notebooks using Python, compared to the 1108 in the 1980s. Oh well!
EDIT: I wonder if we ever met? I used to demo my OPS5 port to the 1108 at conferences in Xerox’s booth.
I'm pretty sure we would never have met as I was on the research staff and only went to conferences like POPL and AAAI/IJCAI.
I agree about Jupiter notebooks; the funny thing is on some HN discussion of them I commented that perhaps their popularity might mean we were back on a path towards lispm kinds of environments -- and the comment was downvoted to oblivion. Hilarious!
I always went to the AAAI/IJCAI conferences back then, and those were where the Xerox 1108 sales team would invite me to do demos. That was so much fun.
I still find Jupiter notebooks painful programming environments, Python kernels at work, Common Lisp + Haskell at home. I should try to be more open minded about Jupyter.
> In the smalltalk world (and Lisp machine worlds of PARC and MIT) everything running in the machine (above the microcode layer) was inspectable, breakpoint able, and modifiable.
There were no kernel/user space distinctions in any of the systems I mentioned, and all of it could be dynamically modified at runtime (no recompilation or restarting) down to the function and variable level. Philosophically completely different from Unix et al.
But you raise an interesting point: one of the reasons I started Cygnus with John and Michael was that I had never used a machine to which I didn't have access to the source code and the idea of that horrified me.
Having everything in the same space, and being able to inspect and modify anything in real time by the seat of your pants, was exactly how Dan Ingalls impressed Steve Jobs on his fateful visit to Xerox PARC! It's unfortunate the iPad never did (and never will) achieve that level of power and flexibility.
>Q: What was it like to be at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs visited?
>A: Alan Kay, Agitator at Viewpoints Research Institute
>[...] The demo itself was fun to watch — basically a tag team of Dan Ingalls and Larry Tesler showing many kinds of things to Steve and the several Apple people he brought with him. One of Steve’s ways to feel in control was to object to things that were actually OK, and he did this a few times — but in each case Dan and Larry were able to make the changes to meet the objections on the fly because Smalltalk was not only the most advanced programming language of its time, it was also live at every level, and no change required more than 1/4 second to take effect.
>One objection was that the text scrolling was line by line and Steve said “Can’t this be smooth?”. In a few seconds Dan made the change. Another more interesting objection was to the complementation of the text that was used (as today) to indicate a selection. Steve said “Can’t that be an outline?”. Standing in the back of the room, I held my breath a bit (this seemed hard to fix on the fly). But again, Dan Ingalls instantly saw a very clever way to do this (by selecting the text as usual, then doing this again with the selection displaced by a few pixels — this left a dark outline around the selection and made the interior clear). Again this was done in a few seconds, and voila!
>The Smalltalk used in this demo was my personal favorite (-78) that was done for the first portable computer (The Parc Notetaker), but also ran on the more powerful Dorado computer. For a fun “Christmas project” in 2014, several of us (with Dan Ingalls and Bert Freudenburg doing the heavy lifting) got a version of this going (it had been saved from a disk pack that Xerox had thrown away).
>I was able to use this rescued version to make all the visuals for a tribute to Ted Nelson without any new capabilities required. The main difference in the tribute is that the revived version had much more RAM to work with, and this allowed more bit-map images to be used. This is on YouTube, and it might be interesting for readers to see what this system could do in 1978–79.
Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Fest
That's true, and good, but misses the point. In the smalltalk world (and Lisp machine worlds of PARC and MIT) everything running in the machine (above the microcode layer) was inspectable, breakpoint able, and modifiable.
While on the iPad everything is, as the article says, opaque and unmodifiable, unless its your own app.
note: I worked on Lispms at MIT (and other places) and on D-machine Interlisp at PARC (and other places)