Thanks Jim --

... actually "POV is worth 80 IQ points" ....

Cheers,

Alan

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At 8:51 AM -0800 2/25/02, Jim Benson wrote:
>Alan,
>
>>
>>  Did that book also have the "Officetalk" paper from PARC, by William
>>  Newman, Dan Swinehart, Tim Mott, etc.? That was an amazing blast from
>>  the past.
>>
>
>No it doesn't, I've never seen that one. It sounds very interesting,
>something I would like to see.
>
>  However, "Interactive Programming Environments" does include what at the
>time (like even now) were pretty interesting ideas. One section is called
>"Artificial Intelligence in Interactive Programming Environments" which
>talks about things like the Lisp Programmer's Apprentice and knowledge based
>program editing. That approach is something like "Here's an outline of my
>problem, suggest a code solution for me".
>
>PARCs Warren Teitelman wrote up several articles on Interlisp. I remember
>being fascinated at the time by "A Display-Oriented Programmer's Assistant"
>which contained references to a 'Do what I mean' facility, which is a
>different flavor of the Smalltalk Transcript/Workspace/Debugger/cascading
>menus environment. Teitelman goes through a couple of programming examples
>in the Interlisp environment, and how the integration of the environment
>leads to an easier to use system. As an example, he's programming away in a
>Transcript Workspace and Debugger and INFORMAIL tells him he has an
>important email to read, so he pulls up the email, responds, and resumes
>debugging. At the time *I* was trying to poke a character into a PCs display
>buffer in assembler, and trying to figure out how I was going to afford to
>upgrade from a 160K floppy drive to one of the nice, new, big 360K drives
>for *all* my long term storage needs. You've noted that perspective is worth
>100 IQ points (I agree entirely), I've noticed that having a "big boy"
>machine and the right tools can change your perspective in a hurry.
>Fortunately that machine dichotomy isn't nearly as bad now as it was then.
>
>Adele Goldberg has a Smalltalk-80 paper, "The Influence of an
>Object-Oriented Language on the Programming Environment" in the book, and
>Richard Stallman extolls the virtues of something newish at the time called
>"EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable, Self Documenting Display Editor".
>Kernighan wrote up the UNIX programming environment. The last two didn't
>sound very useful to me in comparison to what other people in the book were
>doing. There are a couple of LISP Machine papers by Greenblatt et.al., and
>Winograd has his say in a couple of papers.
>
>A blast from the past to be sure, but I'm surprised about how little the
>programming task has changed over the last twenty years, and how little
>modern programming environments help construct reasonable programs in a
>timely manner. My take on this area has mostly been that the machine should
>know more about nuts and bolts programming than I do. That should include
>not only conceptually simple minded things like "make my code run faster",
>but also "programmer coaching".
>
>Jim


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