October 2023 Update

Published on 6 November 2023.

This is what I’ve been up to in October 2023:

• Somehow videos from Computer History Museum showed up in my Youtube feed and I once again got sucked into the world of Alan Kay and Smalltalk. Here are (some of?) the videos that I watched:

  • CHM Live | Making Smalltalk
  • CHM Live | Making Smalltalk: Member Event
  • Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk

• I found the Byte Magazine Volume 06 Number 08 - Smalltalk online which covers many topics from Smalltalk. So interesting.

• I played with some Smalltalks from the Smalltalk zoo, and also with Squeak.

• I played with RLMeta and worked on a simpler base version.

• Revisiting Alan Kay, I once again was inspired by his ideas. What triggered it this time was re-watching Joe Armstrong & Alan Kay - Joe Armstrong interviews Alan Kay. In it, he mentions the Linda programming language and how it relates to META II (which I’ve previously explored in RLMeta). I decided to try to explore those ideas further in a new project: https://github.com/rickardlindberg/linda-meta-oop. Perhaps more to come there soon.

• I watched Is Software Engineering Real Engineering? • Hillel Wayne • YOW! 2023. What I remember from it now is that other engineering disciplines envy that software engineering has version control.

• I had the realization that creating a DSL might be like science. You observe how a certain problem is solved or how a certain thing works. Then you try to describe that phenomena in a new language, the DSL. Then you make it run by writing a compiler. The new language allow people to solve problems that they might not have been able to do before. It allows them to think in a different way. The group of people who can create a DSL is most likely smaller than the group of people who can do useful work with one. Similar to how many people can use math today to solve useful problems, but might not have been able to invent math itself.