eighty-twenty news

Screenshot of smolts showing object1.smol.

This is the third part of a series of three articles on modelling actor-like systems1 2 using PLT Redex.

Back in 2002/2003, Ian Piumarta wrote an “essentially complete” VT102 terminal emulator for Squeak Smalltalk.1 Here are his unmodified original changesets, encoded using the MacRoman character set; these do not load directly into current Squeak images as-…

Smalltalk programs strictly alternate between data and behaviour.

Usually, method lookup results in a single body to execute.

A fantasy abstract is a short piece of writing in the style of the abstract of an academic paper presenting the outline of a piece of research that has not (yet) been done.

I always forget how to do this, so I’m writing it here in part as a reminder for myself next time I need to do this.

Small experiments in the use of libliftoff to try out the modern Linux graphics stack drove home quite how slow DRM “dumb buffers” can be, but also that it’s reading that’s slow, not writing.

“Erlang supports change of code in a running system.”

Back in June, I made a quick-and-dirty attempt to get the big-bang model of functional UI running in Processing 4.

I had a small insight yesterday while building a component for a small web app: the user interface for editing an incomplete value of sum type A+B needs to remember a product of input 2×A×B from the user: A + B ⟿ 2 × A × B This allows the user to ergonomi…

I noticed a bug in Guile 3.0.9’s aarch64 atomics handling, and found a couple of apparent solutions (1, 2), but one of them is weird enough for me to write this post.

As is well-known, JavaScript’s Promise is not a monad.

Python 3.13 will, for inscrutable reasons, remove the crypt module from the standard library.

direnv works fine on Windows 11, but if an .envrc tries to set the PATH, the result will be a path in Windows format, not Unix format.1 Instead of adding eval $(direnv hook bash) to your .bashrc, try the following snippet: export _unmangle_direnv_names='P…

Trusting Signal and/or WhatsApp and/or Android (google) and/or iOS (apple) with your precious photos, videos, and chats is a huge mistake.

I’ve just updated the Preserves spec to version 0.990.0.

I’ve been working with Markdown tables a lot recently.

uxn is a delightful virtual-machine specification (with lots of implementations) supporting 16-bit operation.

This is the story of a one-afternoon hack that turned into a one-weekend hack.

I’ve just spent a few hours writing documentation for the Python preserves package, which implements Preserves for Python 3.x.

Happy New Year!

Apparently Peter Henderson’s 1982 paper “Purely Functional Operating Systems” is hard to find online.

I’ve recently been using cargo-flamegraph to profile syndicate-server.

Part of a series: #squeak-phone I’m proud to announce a new project on using the Syndicated Actor model and dataspaces to implement a system layer. https://syndicate-lang.org/projects/2021/system-layer/ The project will be investigating the question Could…

I’ve just published a completely revamped and massively expanded Syndicate project website: https://syndicate-lang.org/ Hooray!

Part of a series: #squeak-phone Back in October 2020, I built an on-screen keyboard for Squeak Smalltalk.

UPDATE: Full code available at this gist (also embedded below).

Recently on HN, rbanffy brought up a form of the old chestnut about crashing the image by simply executing true become: false.

Part of a series: #squeak-phone One lovely thing about working in Smalltalk is the effortlessness of development.