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Devil Lu Linvega

TIL 16rFFFF for hexadecimal mode in Smalltalk.

16 comments
Chris [list of emoji]

@neauoire

Is this an emulated Alto?

Also, if you haven't checked out Squeak, I recommend you take a look at it. It's the continuation of this project and keeps the cool ideas while taking advantage of more advanced hardware.

Chris [list of emoji]

@neauoire

I thought so, but I wanted to make sure you hadn't missed out on The Good News.

Avi Bryant

@neauoire that's an old school smalltalk image you're using!

Devil Lu Linvega

@avibryant it's the Xerox image 2 of ST-80 described in the bluebook.

Avi Bryant

@neauoire it's nice to see the MVC UI, I never really clicked with Squeak's Morphic despite spending a decade in it. I'd love to hear your thought sometime on where Squeak falls short of uxn's goals - certainly it has higher memory requirements but it seems philosophically aligned in a lot of ways.

Devil Lu Linvega

@avibryant I don't like Squeak or Pharo either.

ST80 is an amazing program, maybe someday I make something like it on Uxn. I think message passing schemes are pretty cool to play with computers in fun ways.

The ST80 VM is total madness tho, I've recently read "Bits of History, Words of Advice" and it's a nightmare in terms of portability.

While I enjoy noodling in ST from time to time, it's just not how I enjoy programming personally, but I could see myself building a similar sandbox.

Devil Lu Linvega

@avibryant immediate drawing to the screen, self discoverability, structural editing. It's all great ideas. If I was a programming teacher, perhaps I'd use something like ST to show logic in real time and explain procedural graphics.

Uxn is just a CPU, most of the programs that I've built on it are of a much smaller scale, I'm not smart enough with these things to put together something like ST, but I think I can draw inspiration from it and bring some things over.

Avi Bryant

@neauoire ok, but Bits of History is pre-Squeak. ST80 wasn't particularly trying to be portable, whereas Squeak very much was (and successfully so). Certainly it's a much larger VM spec than uxn, but it's portable and long-lived, and you feel very close to the (VM's) metal when you work on it.

Devil Lu Linvega

@avibryant the Squeak VM is a cathedral, but like I said, they are not misaligned with what I'm trying to do with Uxn.

Actually Uxn is inspired by Alan Kay's paper Cuniform Tablets Of Computing. Have you ever had a chance of watching Weathering Software Winter?

youtube.com/watch?v=9TJuOwy4aG

I go over the connection between the Cuneiform and Uxn.

Peter Burka

@neauoire Love #Smalltalk's arbitrary bases! 36r was popular, too.

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