Hacker News: jdougan

New comment by jdougan in "Prefer do notation over Applicative operators when assembling records (2024)"

jdougan — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 01:50:32 +0000

Smalltalk keyword message syntax seems to be in a middle ground

New comment by jdougan in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

jdougan — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 04:30:21 +0000

Culturally they're not really the same organization. JPL has a different culture than Goddard, which is different than Marshall, etc.

New comment by jdougan in "Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?"

jdougan — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:50:44 +0000

I'm still of the opinion that the right direction is something architectEd more like NeWS with better underlying language support. If you're going to break stuff make it a real improvement.

New comment by jdougan in "Centuries of selective breeding turned wild cabbage into different vegetables"

jdougan — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:31:38 +0000

Did they get the sulfurous compounds out as well?

New comment by jdougan in "Two Years of Emacs Solo"

jdougan — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 03:11:06 +0000

Did they do anything to fix the OpenSmalltalk VM lamentable keyboard input?

New comment by jdougan in "Smalltalk's Browser: Unbeatable, yet Not Enough"

jdougan — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 06:55:10 +0000

Have you looked at the tooling in Genera or other lisp machines?

New comment by jdougan in "Smalltalk's Browser: Unbeatable, yet Not Enough"

jdougan — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 06:22:32 +0000

In case you want to know more about them, they're called "Miller columns"

New comment by jdougan in "Smalltalk's Browser: Unbeatable, yet Not Enough"

jdougan — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 08:47:42 +0000

There was a browser that worked on Squeak 3, Whisker, that had some of these attributes. I used it up until it became unsupported. It took a little getting used to as its primary orientation was horizontal, but in the age of widescreen monitors that is an advantage.

Wiki description: https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1993

Archive of its homepage. Has an image of the browser in use. https://web.archive.org/web/20070228113449/http://www.mindsp...

New comment by jdougan in "To understand our fascination with crystals, researchers gave some to chimps"

jdougan — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 08:34:28 +0000

Time flies like a banana.

New comment by jdougan in "Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993"

jdougan — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 06:52:41 +0000

Close enough. I had a copy of MacOS Apple Smalltalk from the 1985 training course I took, and had started a job using Objectworks. Squeak 1.0 is quite close to ST-80.

New comment by jdougan in "Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993"

jdougan — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 06:36:22 +0000

Every so often I fire up an old Squeak Smalltalk image, put it in full screen mode, and pretend that much of the intervening years never happened.

New comment by jdougan in "Erich von Däniken has died"

jdougan — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 14:55:54 +0000

> what's a cubit?

What's an ark?

New comment by jdougan in "It's hard to justify Tahoe icons"

jdougan — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 14:34:18 +0000

Yup. He is, by all accounts, a great supply-chain guy. eg. As far as I can tell, there were no significant breaks in Apple's supplies during COVID.

But he clearly falls afoul of Steve Jobs'warning about leaders with no taste.

New comment by jdougan in "Linear Address Spaces: Unsafe at any speed (2022)"

jdougan — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 13:07:32 +0000

Have you looked at the Apple Newton memory architecture?

http://waltersmith.us/newton/HICSS-92.pdf

New comment by jdougan in "Google Titans architecture, helping AI have long-term memory"

jdougan — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 11:37:36 +0000

In Eclipse Phase:

> The acronym TITAN stands for Total Information Tactical Awareness Network. These were a group of highly advanced, self-improving seed Artificial Intelligences (AIs) that are responsible for the catastrophic event known as The Fall.

Someone else has already made the mandatory Torment Nexus quote.

New comment by jdougan in "Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)"

jdougan — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 05:26:04 +0000

Emacs is a (virtual) Lisp Machine

New comment by jdougan in "Recreating the lost SDK for a 42-year-old operating system: VisiCorp Visi On"

jdougan — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 05:12:59 +0000

The latter 2 usages are pretty much the same. They just have different virtual instruction sets.

New comment by jdougan in "Recreating the lost SDK for a 42-year-old operating system: VisiCorp Visi On"

jdougan — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 11:44:19 +0000

Wow, just what I wanted for Christmas. Back in the day I found VisiOn's approach fascinating since almost everything at the time was either more tightly integrated or completely unintegrated.

Maybe someone could do the the old Reason software bus based system next? As detailed in Jan 1984 Byte magazine. Lord only knows if there are surviving copies anywhere in the world.

New comment by jdougan in "Checked-size array parameters in C"

jdougan — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 07:58:32 +0000

One of the nicer features of D is that arrays are value types with no degrade to pointer.

New comment by jdougan in "The lost cause of the Lisp machines"

jdougan — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 11:37:44 +0000

Smalltalk romantics