A stupid newbie question

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Tue Oct 9 19:12:36 UTC 2001


Gary --

It only allows existing OSs to keep running to "be nice". It just 
seemed that running like an app would be a good transitional and 
ecological stategy. You should know though that Squeak has run on a 
number of platforms (such as some bare chips) without any other code 
(and this is how it ran at Xerox PARC and when it first came out into 
the world in the early 80s). There are only a few things that would 
need to be done (main thing is probably to put more primitive 
Internet stuff into the kernel) to make this the default -- and I 
think I have heard of some folks on the list who are doing just this.

However, I'm not an exclusivist. I think people should be able to run 
anything they need side by side and interoperably on their computers 
regardless of where they came from. That was one of the main points 
behind my particular conception of OOP (and how it would 
isomorphically relate to the ARPAnet) back in the 60s.

Cheers,

Alan

------



At 3:37 PM +0100 10/9/01, Gary McGovern wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "John Hinsley" <jhinsley at telinco.co.uk>
>
>>  If you're saying "I can't afford to stay on line long enough to play
>>  with the Squeakland stuff", I know that feeling. But don't forget that
>>  you can "save project to file" through the plug-in just as you can
>>  through your "real" Squeak. You can then load it into Squeak and play to
>>  your heart's content offline. I'm damned if I can remember where the
>>  plugin puts those files in Windows, though.
>
>Well thank you John, that could be the missing thing I was thinking of. If
>that works how I imagine then that would be almost perfect. My apologies to
>Alan Kay, I may see eye to eye now.
>
>I was never talking about dlls and registry stuff, because I never
>programmed that way before Squeak, mostly I did offline Java applet type
>programs.
>
>Now its a matter of how tidy and simple offline projects are. Stephen Pair
>needn't take up my offer.
>
>>Ken Kahn wrote:
>>But the bigger issue is to whether to build upon an >existing environment
>or build one from scratch.
>
>But Squeak piggy backs on OSes so is an environment built from scratch and
>built upon an existing environment.
>
>No flames please.
>
>Regards,
>Gary
>
>
>>  //snipped//
>>  >
>>  > I'm not trying to convert you here, but I can't think of anything
>simpler
>>  > than double clicking on an icon except single clicking on one. But who
>am I
>>  > to say.
>>
>>  I'm no longer sure of the context of this, but if it's simply to run
>>  Squeak, I think we've done it to death here! Of course, the drag file
>>  onto icon stuff is natural to Mac (and Kde) users.
>>
>>  Cheers
>>
>>  John
>>
>>  --
>>  If you don't care about your data, like file systems which automagically
>>  destroy themselves and have money to burn on 3rd party tools to keep
>>  your
>>  system staggering on, Microsoft (tm) have the Operating System for you.
>>
>>
>>


-- 




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