[9fans] Acme: the way the future actually was

dexen deVries

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Sep 14, 2012, 9:12:18 AM9/14/12

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Seems a well-meaning developer sort of re-invented Acme
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUR_eUVcABg

--
dexen deVries

[[[↓][→]]]

I'm sorry that this was such a long letter, but I didn't have time to write
you a short one. -- Blaise Pascal

Charles Forsyth

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Sep 14, 2012, 9:52:03 AM9/14/12

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Probably never heard of Acme.

Lucio De Re

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Sep 14, 2012, 10:07:06 AM9/14/12

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> Probably never heard of Acme.

The demo looks impressive, though. I didn't follow it very well, it
was way too fast and full of references to concepts that evidently
haven't reached my corner of Dark Africa yet :-)

Still, Oberon had all that a long time ago, if memory isn't betraying
me.

++L

Charles Forsyth

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Sep 14, 2012, 10:10:45 AM9/14/12

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Probably never heard of Oberon either.

erik quanstrom

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Sep 14, 2012, 10:19:00 AM9/14/12

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On Fri Sep 14 10:12:24 EDT 2012, charles...@gmail.com wrote:

> Probably never heard of Oberon either.

neither is knowledge of oberon ubiquitous among 9fans, who may
not realize that acme itself is a copy.

- erik

Charles Forsyth

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Sep 14, 2012, 10:26:25 AM9/14/12

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"Copy" is a little strong: inspired by, certainly, by way of help/help,

but there's an amazing difference in the structure of acme as "text editor as file server"

with many independent clients accessing it through the file system.

Oberon had a more conventional module "plug-in" structure within a single process.

Acme's user interface is also more strictly text-oriented, and streamlined the mouse conventions.

Hugo Rivera

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Sep 14, 2012, 10:25:51 AM9/14/12

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I knew it because I read the paper :-)

2012/9/14 erik quanstrom <quan...@quanstro.net>:

--
Hugo

Jack Johnson

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Sep 14, 2012, 12:48:40 PM9/14/12

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Even with it's "faults" (age?), I still miss Oberon. It was *fun* and elegant.

-Jack

Anssi Porttikivi

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Sep 14, 2012, 4:00:13 PM9/14/12

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Note that Oberon the OS was a stated influence of Ron Pike et. al. Even in Go, type embedding and resistance to class hierarchies relates back to Oberon, the language.

Anssi Porttikivi

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Sep 14, 2012, 4:02:05 PM9/14/12

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Typos by iPhone. Forgive me, Rob.

t. Anssi

Nick LaForge

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Sep 14, 2012, 5:58:17 PM9/14/12

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Speak of the devil....

"Good artists copy, great artists steal."

-Pablo Picasso^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSteven
Jobs^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSamsung Ltd.(?)

This message: -some blogger^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HNick LaForge

Typos by me. Sent from my meEgo (alphabet button invention included).
(Don't) forgive me, Elop.

hiro

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Sep 14, 2012, 7:15:53 PM9/14/12

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forgive me, mother, for reading this mailinglist.

Matthew Veety

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Sep 14, 2012, 7:28:50 PM9/14/12

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On Sep 14, 2012 7:16 PM, "hiro" <23h...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> forgive me, mother, for reading this mailinglist.
>

I feel as though our mothers have already abandoned us for this list.

Aram Hăvărneanu

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Sep 15, 2012, 8:51:02 AM9/15/12

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> Probably never heard of Acme.

Great, the idea must be good then.

--
Aram Hăvărneanu

michaelian ennis

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Sep 17, 2012, 8:51:07 AM9/17/12

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On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 10:19 AM, erik quanstrom <quan...@quanstro.net> wrote:

> neither is knowledge of oberon ubiquitous among 9fans, who may
> not realize that acme itself is a copy.

Isn't even that a derivation of the window system from PARC? Oak I believe?

Ian

Charles Forsyth

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Sep 17, 2012, 2:24:09 PM9/17/12

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And this just in:

http://research.swtch.com/acme?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+hnycombinator+%28HN+-+hnycombinator%29

Charles Forsyth

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Sep 17, 2012, 2:26:45 PM9/17/12

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And a cleaner link to that: http://research.swtch.com/acme

On 17 September 2012 19:24, Charles Forsyth <charles...@gmail.com> wrote:

And this just in:
...

Anssi Porttikivi

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Sep 18, 2012, 2:03:18 AM9/18/12

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Oh, god, this is what we have longed for almost 20 years. I always thought I should do this kind of video. Thank you Russ!

t. Anssi

michaelian ennis

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Sep 18, 2012, 9:51:02 AM9/18/12

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Ah. Cedar.
http://research.swtch.com/acme.pdf

Ian

Ethan Grammatikidis

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Oct 25, 2012, 10:28:09 AM10/25/12

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It's still around in AOS form where it can run native or as a
user-space program under other OSs. I used it to try out someone else's
work and didn't really find the UI very elegant. In particular I
couldn't copy text from the compiler error window, which I thought was
desperately bad. Anyway, apart from that it worked; middle-clicking to
compile and to launch the program was ok, and the OpenGL program I was
trying out ran very smoothly.

The only link I seem to have kept is http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/

--
This is obviously some strange usage of the word
"simple" that I was previously unaware of.

Dan Cross

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Oct 25, 2012, 10:58:39 AM10/25/12

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On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 10:28 AM, Ethan Grammatikidis
<eek...@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Sep 2012 08:48:40 -0800 Jack Johnson <knap...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Even with it's "faults" (age?), I still miss Oberon. It was *fun* and elegant.
>

> It's still around in AOS form where it can run native or as a
> user-space program under other OSs. I used it to try out someone else's
> work and didn't really find the UI very elegant. In particular I
> couldn't copy text from the compiler error window, which I thought was
> desperately bad. Anyway, apart from that it worked; middle-clicking to
> compile and to launch the program was ok, and the OpenGL program I was
> trying out ran very smoothly.
>
> The only link I seem to have kept is http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/

Hindsight is always 20/20.

When I first used Oberon 20 years ago, it had this amazing liberating
feeling to it; a graphical demonstration of sorting algorithms?
Brilliant! (I was in high school. Our "Computer Science" class was
taught using Turbo Pascal on IBM PCs; the textbook had a picture of an
IBM 4381 on the cover. Luckily, I managed to persuade the system
administrators at the local university into giving me accounts on most
of the major systems so I could use C, Unix and VMS.)

My point is that it's so easy to forget that these sorts of statements
about the power, simplicity and elegance of things past carry with
them a context that is usually not explicitly articulated. If you
came to Oberon from some primitive computing environment (like, say,
PCs or something) then it was indeed fun and amazingly elegant. That
said, I wouldn't want to go back to running it on a SPARCstation 1
with 16 megs of RAM, a 200MB disk, and a 17 inch black and white CRT.
It's easy to look back and say to oneself, "wow, that wasn't as cool
as I remembered it being..." but that doesn't change that, at the
time, it *was* that cool because of the context.

- Dan C.