Fully agree. It's still (or even more than ever) more entertaining than watching Netflix. Why should I care if other people use agents to do the programming?

Well, writing a brief article about the code, what it does, why it exists, why it is interesting, is feasible and better than the common "I implemented this" with little additional description. I would rather be concerned that whenever I look at the lobsters front page I don't see anything interesting.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50088191

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50042707

Points: 1

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That's strange. I didn't do anything and it still appears on the site in my browser. Did they add "shadow bans" to HN? That was one reason for me to turn my back on Facebook (and the fact that interesting discussions suddenly disappeared later on). I took me more than half an hour to re-check all sources; I (we) probably shouldn't spend that much time on comments anymore.

The Alto OS, Bravo (1974) and Gypsy (1975) were written in BCPL by CSL/POLOS people (Lampson, Sproull, Simonyi, Tesler, Mott); the June 1975 Alto OS manual and Alto Packages contain nothing from Smalltalk, and they had no overlapping windows or pop-up menus.

Mesa the language (MPS 1971, named 1974, self-hosting 1976) owes nothing to Smalltalk either. Sweet's "patterned after those of Smalltalk [Kay76]" refers to the Dec 1976 Mesa 1.0 debugger's optional, "experimental" window manager. It never touched compiler, binder or OS and was dropped/replaced in Mesa 4.0.

Smalltalk influence is documented for Star and for Cedar's environment goals, both 1980s. For the Alto software of 1973–75 there is none; for Mesa 1976–77 it is BitBlt plus an experimental debugger add-on. BitBlt and overlapping windows were specifically Ingalls' work, which he internally demonstrated in 1975.

Paul McJones has a nice Mesa History Collection with a lot of primary sources from the time: https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/mesa

I hope not.

And please note that this is again a different topic.

Last time I was talking about Wirth's OO vs. Simula OO, and the similarity of Wirth's implementation with Kay's vision. You then first extended this discussion to whether Kay directly influenced Wirth, which I responded. Then you extended the topic even more to the question whether and to what degree Cedar was influenced by Smalltalk. That was far off my interest and irrelevant for the discussion given that Wirth just took the tiling window manager, which none of the Smalltalk versions had.

Now I'm talking about the development of the Alto computer which included an OS with a GUI and two groundbreaking applications, Bravo and Gypsy (implemented on top of Bravo), all in BCPL, implementing their own interaction and presentation concepts.

If you want to do historical research, you have to go to the primary sources (e.g. https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xe..., https://xeroxparcarchive.computerhistory.org/Xerox_PARC_sour..., or e.g. https://archive.org/details/Xerox_PARC_Gypsy_Demonstration_T...), not to stories written down from memory twenty years later.

In what respect? What sources for this claim do you have?