Right now I'm looking at my terminal. It has a bunch of tabs. Each one of those tabs is a little "runtime". However, it is a runtime made up of ascii characters. That's what runs inside of it. Little letters, sometimes colored, sometimes made to look like borders for windows.
And I've got this other thing called my web browser. It also has a bunch of tabs, and each one of those tabs is a little "runtime" as well. This one just happens to support embedding images, video, audio, non mono-spaced fonts...
My terminal runtime communicates through the filesystem. (it's UNIX, files all the way down...)
My web browser "runtime" communicates through HTTP.
That's all I'm sayin'.
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Also, I KNOW why UNIX is all files and I get the whole concept of piping ASCII around... yeah, it's fucking awesome! And it's why UNIX is STILL around. It'll be around forever, and man, I DO like it, but should we use it for everything? Why?
Piping ASCII around only gets you so far. :)
Why am I getting so much HN downvote love for talking about some of the downsides of the UNIX-way?
But most developers are already using runtimes that support images, videos, audio and non-monospaced fonts: they're called Qt, GTK, Cocoa, etc. So that's not really a reason to switch to the web.
Sure, but those runtimes are EXTERNAL to their editors!
BTW, are you familiar with Literate Programming by Donald Knuth?
And the reason I'm mentioning the web is because, well, it's a nearly universal runtime and the best thing we've got that might get a lot of really important and forgotten about concepts from Smalltalk back in to the mainstream of computing!
Also, are you familiar with Don Knuth's Literate Programming? Thoughts on that?
(And yes, I realize this thread is going absolutely everywhere, but I've got a lot of questions!)
Sure, but those runtimes are EXTERNAL to their editors!
No more than than the web browser vis-à-vis the kind of editors you're talking about. They're built on top of the graphical APIs, much like web apps are built on top of HTML/CSS/JS.
(Note that I'm referring to graphical editors like Eclipse or Sublime, not ncurses editors in a graphical terminal emulator)
And the reason I'm mentioning the web is because, well, it's a nearly universal runtime and the best thing we've got that might get a lot of really important and forgotten about concepts from Smalltalk back in to the mainstream of computing!
Maybe, but without a concrete example / vision, I find it hard to believe that I'd be willing to lose the comfort of my development environment for the hack-y, keyboard-hostile world of web applications.
Also, are you familiar with Don Knuth's Literate Programming? Thoughts on that?
In a very vague way; it didn't really appeal to me, sorry.
Function/method/class docstrings (sorry, my comment may have been misleading) to document the purpose/contract/API, terse inline comments for the implementation only when something is not obvious to a skilled developer. And of course carefully-chosen variable names. I'm not at all a fan of heavily commented code. It just adds more bytes to comprehend, more bytes to maintain, and worst of all a high probability than the code doesn't exactly match the documentation, which causes a significant mental load. Also sometimes leads to people showing off in their natural language descriptions of their code. Same for literate programming: I want as few characters as possible that I have to understand, with that statement appropriately qualified :)
I can't say I see your point. What does switching to HTTP bring you?
HTTP is just piping around ASCII.
I don't think you're getting down voted for talking about the downsides of UNIX. You haven't actually mentioned a downside of UNIX, you've just suggested that we should switch to some other model.
Ok, so let's say you download a GitHub project... it has docs that run in a web browser, tests that run in python, some code that actually does something... it has some dotfiles for this and for that... well none of that DOES anything. It all depends on there being certain tools on your end of things...
I'm saying that instead, we just ship all the tools along with the code... and you can do that in browserland, and that's NOT the UNIX-way at all!
...it has nothing to do with HTTP, it has to do with the web browser runtime as compared to the runtime built on top of a filesystem!
UNIX land doesn't not play well when running any arbitrary stuff that comes it's way... sure, it might not have root, but, uhm, yeah if some code wipes out my entire user account, I'll be pretty bummed out... that's not gonna happen in the browser with it's sandboxed environment that has been battle-tested by trillions of page requests!
Find me another runtime that is as many places and is readily available to run third-party, untrusted code, and I'll happily jump ship! (aint gonna happen!)
And I've got this other thing called my web browser. It also has a bunch of tabs, and each one of those tabs is a little "runtime" as well. This one just happens to support embedding images, video, audio, non mono-spaced fonts...
My terminal runtime communicates through the filesystem. (it's UNIX, files all the way down...)
My web browser "runtime" communicates through HTTP.
That's all I'm sayin'.
---
Also, I KNOW why UNIX is all files and I get the whole concept of piping ASCII around... yeah, it's fucking awesome! And it's why UNIX is STILL around. It'll be around forever, and man, I DO like it, but should we use it for everything? Why?
Piping ASCII around only gets you so far. :)
Why am I getting so much HN downvote love for talking about some of the downsides of the UNIX-way?