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liam_on_linuxI am slightly surprised at the number of interesting new things I've come across recently in a field I am increasingly disenchanted with, but I have stumbled across some interesting new (to me) stuff of late.
The Raspberry Pi is old news, but I just discovered that there is a port of Plan 9 for it:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=24480
Given that there is very little acceleration or anything in Plan 9, as far as I know, it doesn't need to have very sophisticated drivers or anything. This brings the tally of OSs for the Rπ to 5, I think: Linux, RISC OS, NetBSD, FreeBSD and now Plan 9.
Plan 9, if you are unfamiliar, is basically Unix 2.0. It's what Unix's original developers went on to do next. It's not a Unix but it's broadly Unix-oid, but as well as everything being a file and a stream of bytes, Unix-style, it also offers transparent network access. On Unix, you access your own hardware via /dev/thingy. Processes are under /proc, something modern Unix borrowed from Plan 9.
Well, on Plan 9, so to speak, you can access other machines' hardware and processes by prefixing the device or process with the name of that machine - a bit like //nodename/ in NFS. This is a grotesque oversimplification but I think broadly representative.
Smalltalk is a programming language that has interested me for many years. It is not like other languages. Everything is an object - it doesn't even have an "if" statement, AIUI - but Smalltalk is more than a compiler: it was a whole OS, complete with editor, interpreter, runtime, IDE, apps, the lot. (Compare with the Lisp Machine OSs, where you don't "boot" or "shut down" - the whole affair suspends and resumes.)
Smalltalk is obscure these days, but it's far from dead. My ex![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kjersti makes a very good living as a Smalltalker for a City bank and has done for over a decade now.
Smalltalk is also the origin of the GUI: all the stuff that so inspired Apple when they visited Xerox was Smalltalk. It's a natural fit for an interpreted environment running on a bytecoded VM.
So it occurred to me that Smalltalk running on the JVM could be pretty nifty. And lo, it is being done - in the form of Redline Smalltalk. The kickstarter didn't quite make it; this is a project that really merits some support.
http://www.redline.st/
The origins of Smalltalk were as an OS environment for Xerox' Altos workstation - the first computers with a GUI. Smalltalk more or less ran on the metal; the environment is an OS; it's just that these days, it runs hosted on top of other machines' OSes in a rather inefficient way, mixing two quite separate sets of concepts and metaphors.
Thus it was interesting to learn that the most widespread FOSS Smalltalk environment, Squeak, is being ported to the bare metal of the X86 PC, in the form of SqueakNOS. It's not received much love in a while, but this is fascinating stuff - a revival of the original OS/language/environment concept that created the GUIs that every computer in the world uses today.
http://squeaknos.blogspot.co.uk/
Speaking of interpreted languages, Lisp Machines and so on, I am intrigued by Lisp, but its syntax melts my brain. As such I am intrigued by Dylan, Apple's project to create a Lisp with Algol-like syntax for app development on the Newton. Clojure has revived much interest in Lisp by running on the JVM; it also seems like a good fit for Dylan. Today, I received a hint that Dylan on the JVM is a work-in-progress. Exciting stuff.
https://twitter.com/DylanLanguage/status/309057656633565187
The Raspberry Pi is old news, but I just discovered that there is a port of Plan 9 for it:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=24480
Given that there is very little acceleration or anything in Plan 9, as far as I know, it doesn't need to have very sophisticated drivers or anything. This brings the tally of OSs for the Rπ to 5, I think: Linux, RISC OS, NetBSD, FreeBSD and now Plan 9.
Plan 9, if you are unfamiliar, is basically Unix 2.0. It's what Unix's original developers went on to do next. It's not a Unix but it's broadly Unix-oid, but as well as everything being a file and a stream of bytes, Unix-style, it also offers transparent network access. On Unix, you access your own hardware via /dev/thingy. Processes are under /proc, something modern Unix borrowed from Plan 9.
Well, on Plan 9, so to speak, you can access other machines' hardware and processes by prefixing the device or process with the name of that machine - a bit like //nodename/ in NFS. This is a grotesque oversimplification but I think broadly representative.
Smalltalk is a programming language that has interested me for many years. It is not like other languages. Everything is an object - it doesn't even have an "if" statement, AIUI - but Smalltalk is more than a compiler: it was a whole OS, complete with editor, interpreter, runtime, IDE, apps, the lot. (Compare with the Lisp Machine OSs, where you don't "boot" or "shut down" - the whole affair suspends and resumes.)
Smalltalk is obscure these days, but it's far from dead. My ex
kjersti makes a very good living as a Smalltalker for a City bank and has done for over a decade now.Smalltalk is also the origin of the GUI: all the stuff that so inspired Apple when they visited Xerox was Smalltalk. It's a natural fit for an interpreted environment running on a bytecoded VM.
So it occurred to me that Smalltalk running on the JVM could be pretty nifty. And lo, it is being done - in the form of Redline Smalltalk. The kickstarter didn't quite make it; this is a project that really merits some support.
http://www.redline.st/
The origins of Smalltalk were as an OS environment for Xerox' Altos workstation - the first computers with a GUI. Smalltalk more or less ran on the metal; the environment is an OS; it's just that these days, it runs hosted on top of other machines' OSes in a rather inefficient way, mixing two quite separate sets of concepts and metaphors.
Thus it was interesting to learn that the most widespread FOSS Smalltalk environment, Squeak, is being ported to the bare metal of the X86 PC, in the form of SqueakNOS. It's not received much love in a while, but this is fascinating stuff - a revival of the original OS/language/environment concept that created the GUIs that every computer in the world uses today.
http://squeaknos.blogspot.co.uk/
Speaking of interpreted languages, Lisp Machines and so on, I am intrigued by Lisp, but its syntax melts my brain. As such I am intrigued by Dylan, Apple's project to create a Lisp with Algol-like syntax for app development on the Newton. Clojure has revived much interest in Lisp by running on the JVM; it also seems like a good fit for Dylan. Today, I received a hint that Dylan on the JVM is a work-in-progress. Exciting stuff.
https://twitter.com/DylanLanguage/status/309057656633565187
