success (was: On Schopenhauer and Market-driven code)

Bruce O'Neel beoneel at mindspring.com
Thu Mar 16 15:17:25 UTC 2000


"Jecel Assumpcao Jr." <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:
 
> First a little story. At the 1986 "National Computer Fair" in Rio de Janeiro
> (Brazil), I was showing a little Smalltalk based Network Computer
<snip>

That reminds me.  A while go, '84 or so, I say a demo of a computer
from Tektronics which was a fantastic demo of Smalltalk.  My boss and
I at the time debated a long time buying a few (keep in mind that we
were a vax 780/fortran group) given that the demo looked way faster
than the 780 we shared, even when we were the only ones on it.
Looked like a great system.  What was it so that I can keep my eyes out
for one?  I think lack of fortran killed it for us eventually.  
Too much scientific code in fortran, too little time to figure it all out
to rewrite it :-(  Scientific reputations are made after running some
truely horrid code...

<snip>

> I am particularly worried about MPEG-4, Active VRML and similar efforts. I
> would hate for Squeak to have to include a full Java implmentation just to be
> able to import these things. I would much rather that Netscape and Microsoft
> were forced to include a Squeak plug-in with new releases so that their clients
> can see the nifty new content being deployed on the internet.

<snip>

In a similiar vein, I'm very worried by the proliferation of 
Javascript.  XUL (Extensible User Interface Language) looks kind of
interesting, (http://www.xml.com today or for the next week or so) but 
it seems to require Javascript.  sigh....

cheers

bruce





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