Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48735097

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# Comments: 0

It's rather the other way round. There is no pre-Hewitt implemented semantics matching Kay's later 2001 claims; Smalltalk-72 was a synchronous token-stream interpreter rather than a system of independently active message-driven agents; FLEX shows processes, scheduling and quasi-parallel control, not objects, not messaging, not actor-style autonomous entities.

> something like a small computer of its own

Which corresponds pretty well with the Simula I concept, published 1966 in the Communications of the ACM. A Simula event notice (time, process) in the sequencing set is just a message step(process, time) in a priority mailbox; the two are the same mathematical object, making Simula's discrete-event active processes and Kay's message-passing active objects trivially isomorphic.

In particular the "Smalltalk-72 school" which had indeed something like "message passing" (though still synchronously). Starting from Smalltalk-76, and particularly in Smalltalk-80, which is the Smalltalk we know today, the object model pretty much corresponds to Simula-67, with compiled methods dipatched via virtual method tables. The only difference is, that in Smalltalk, the dispatch goes via the internalized string address of the selector (vs. method index as e.g. in Simula-67, C++ or Java). See e.g. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386335.

The compositions and arrangements are pretty good and make sense musically, though in the first example the base drum is a bit too much:

- https://rochus-keller.ch/Diverses/music0-generated-1.mp3

- https://rochus-keller.ch/Diverses/music0-generated-2.mp3

The piano sound has very similar artifacts I can hear in Suno.

To compare, here a piece with a similar style description I made with Suno: http://rochus-keller.ch/suno_2025_2/suno_EsotericFunkA_Cover... (here is the whole set: https://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1428).

It's about a Smalltalk-80 image from 1983.

Trellis/Owl had interesting ideas, though I spent more time with Modula-3.

But many MUMPS based systems are still in operation and maintenance today; and not many significant systems in IT reach a 50 year lifetime.

A modern JavaScript, PHP or Python system (languages with similar limitations for large-scale software engineering as MUMPS) written five years ago hardly works today because dependencies significantly changed or are no longer available. In 50 years (or even in 10) it will be astronomically expensive to keep a current Node.js system alive. But you still can run an unmodified 1985 MUMPS system on a current InterSystems IRIS server.

The main problem with critical MUMPS systems today is less technical, but mostly staff shortage. The same applies to COBOL, or Ada, or even Java.

In 1976, the year of the first standard, massive hospitals with thousands of patients run on MUMPS, on PDP machines with 8K to 24K of core memory and many concurrent users.

For those unfamiliar, MUMPS is an imperative language famously born at Mass General Hospital in 1966. Its defining characteristic is that the language and the database are deeply integrated. There is no impedance mismatch: hierarchical, persistent sparse arrays (called globals) are a first-class part of the language syntax, acting as an early NoSQL database decades before the term existed.

Implementing this was a lot of fun, but the lexer was a real challenge. MUMPS has highly unusual whitespace semantics, and nearly all commands can be abbreviated to one or two characters. This is probably the most complex lexer in my collection. The parser was originally generated using my EbnfStudio.

There are pre-compiled versions and a MUMPS 76 Primer with modern terminology in case you want to play with it.

For those unfamiliar, MUMPS is an imperative language famously born at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1966. Its defining characteristic is that the language and the database are deeply integrated, acting as an early NoSQL database decades before the term existed.

See here for more information about the project: https://github.com/rochus-keller/mumps/

There are pre-compiled versions of my MUMPS 76 interpreter in case you want to play with it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48706796

Points: 90

# Comments: 59