12 Feb
2020
12 Feb
'20
12:54 a.m.
Acme was definitely inspired by Oberon the system. I visited ETH a number
of times in the '80s and there were some properties of Oberon I found
attractive. Acme definitely grew out of thinking I did there, but of course
it was not tied to any language (unlike Oberon or an IDE), but rather
integrated the Plan 9 command environment. Also, the button 3
context-getting thing was completely new, and when I spoke at ETH later
about Acme, Wirth singled out that feature as something of interest.
Sam predates all that.
-rob
On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 5:35 AM Christopher Browne <cbbrowne(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On Tue, 11 Feb 2020 at 05:00, Rob Pike
<robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
My general mood about the current standard way of
nerd working is how
unimaginative and old-fashioned it feels. There are countless ways we could
be interacting with our terminals, editors, and shells while we program,
but for various sociological and historical reasons we're pretty much using
one from decades ago. I'm sure it's productive for almost everyone, but it
seems dull to me. We could be doing something much more dynamic. I mean,
xterm is hardly more sophisticated than the lame terminal code that ran in
mpx (ca. 1982), other than colors and cursor addressing, which date from
the 1960s via early PCs. IDEs don't sing to me, although they are powerful,
because they don't integrate well with the environment, only with the
language. And they are just lots of features, not a coherent vision. No
model to speak of.
Compare what happened with our shell windows with what happened with our
"smart" phones in the last 20 years and you'll get some inkling of what I
think we're missing. It's not that we should program the way we use
iPhones, but that there are fields where user interface work has made a
real different recently. Not so in programming, though. We're missing out.
But I'm a grumpy old man and getting far off topic. Warren should cry,
"enough!".
I recently saw indication that the UI for Sam and Acme were inspired by
Oberon. (And per url [1] below, Rob Pike is quoted, sort of...)
I'd be interested (and I think that's a TUHS thing ;-) ) in hearing some
elaboration on that. All that is said is that "Rob was blown away" and
that this "influenced" Sam/Acme; is there some further explanation of that
worth pointing at? (Or are some Oberon fans putting words in mouths? ;-) )
[1] https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2011/006245.html
--
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"