langreiter.com plain, simple: comments-2002-05-01

LANGREITER.COM plain, simple

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Mittwoch, 1. Mai 2002

Bill Gates ([create 1979]): "APL will see an incredible increase in popularity because it will be exposed to so many people. To date, it has been an expensive language to use and is almost never introduced to first time computer users. APL's strengths assure that a significant percentage of personal computer users will adopt it as "the language". However, it is not the ideal first-time language and has some limitations of its own. BASIC will continue to dominate in this role, although specialized languages will be supported by personal manufacturers. Microsoft will introduce APL on the TRS-80, Exidy Sorcerer, Interact-One, Nascom and NEC TK-80 in 1979." — Oh well.

2002-05-01-msApl

fn exp in .as:

flash-mx-notes-functional

2002-05-01-asFP

Macromedia hat offensichtlich vor, Flash auch zu einer optimalen Plattform für kommunikative Anwendungen zu machen. Webcam- und Mikrophon-Support sind im Plug-In schon enthalten, die dazugehörige serverseitige Datenschaufler-Komponente mit dem schönen Namen Tin Can soll irgendwann im Laufe des Jahres veröffentlicht werden. Als Protokoll zum Datenaustausch wird für Video- und Audiodaten RTMP und für's sogenannte Flash Remoting das binäre AMF verwendet werden, beides bislang undokumentierte, proprietäre Protokolle (wie lange wird es wohl dauern, bis es die ersten Rogue-Spezifikationen gibt? Ewig wohl nicht).

Jeremy Allaire: "[...] [M]ore importantly[,] you can do what's called shared objects. Shared objects allow you take any object in a client in your application, a data object, or a user-interface object, and share that across a connected client. So I could have a collaborative application where multiple users are interacting with the data and the user interface. They may also be doing communications, they may also be speaking to one another and so on, but they may just be collaboratively interacting with a user interface and the data in it."

Klingt extrem spannend — was Self und Squeak schon seit Jahren in prototypischer Manier als Kansas bzw. Nebraska boten, könnte sich nun auf breiter Ebene durchsetzen. Und ist MX erst einmal als der Router kollaborativer Applikationen etabliert, so wird sich wohl Macromedia auf beinahe ewiges Leben einstellen können (und vielleicht sogar den Sprung in die Gewinnzone schaffen ;-).

2002-05-01-stateOfTheMX

David Ness 8240 days AGO
I have comments of two kinds on the Gates snip. First, as to content. Two things about it are amusing. (1.1) The mention of the Exidy Sorcerer brings back fond memories. I made heavy use of one for a good while just as we were moving from the era of Time Sharing to Personal Computers. I did a wonderful (to me, that is) implementation of TECO for the Sorcerer that was essentially indistinguishable from the one that ran on our DEC10. Indeed the usual way to tell it was the `local' TECO running was that it was much faster than the apparent speed (on a 300 baud line, of course) of the one running on the remote DEC10. The Sorcer was a wonderful machine, and had Exidy not been run by idiots it could well have taken the core out of Apple.

(1.2) The notion that APL was a `coming thing' in 1979 strikes me as hard to imagine. We taught a lot of APL in the late 1960s and early 1970s at MIT and Wharton (at least) but it was already well on the decline by the mid 70s. Indeed my best guess is that the high-water mark of use was probably in the mid-70s, so predcitions of impact in 1979 and beyond seem particularly ill-considered.

As to the second general point about the snip, I find `dates' on snips to be particularly helpful. Every day I seem to encounter a higher percentage stale links as I chase down projects. Lots of them have pages that haven't changed since the mid or late 90s. While this isn't proof of inactivity, it is at least an indication that the line is effectively dead, and I am usually disappointed that it took me a fair amount of time to beat my way down a path that proves to be essentially dead. I wonder if there could be a `mode' that makes the age of the downstream link available in much the way that Chris hilights the `age' of our comments by putting them `on the clock'. It strikes me that this becomes ever more important as the number of pages grows.

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