@amoroso@fosstodon.org
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amoroso

@amoroso@fosstodon.org

Astronomy, space, Android, retrocomputing, Lisp, coding.

No stock photos, SEO, marketing, clickbait, ads, or calls to action. I Just enjoy sharing my geeky interests.

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thelastpsion, to retrocomputing
@thelastpsion@bitbang.social avatar

It's been a great weekend at the Festival for Portable Computing. Thank you so much to everyone who came along.

I also gained a Revo (dead, of course) and became the custodian of a Geofox!

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@thelastpsion If you have fun you're doing it right regardless of how interesting or useful what you do is. Even just your passion alone is inspiring. Nothing you post is boring, no matter what you accomplish or share.

Take care.

amoroso, to VintageOSes
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

A young developer who never used Windows 98 back in the day stumbled upon an introductory book on the operating system and posted his impressions on skimming it, which brought him joy. He wrote:

"I was also left with the impression that perhaps I would like more software to come with a physical manual."

https://jamesg.blog/2024/05/19/windows-98-manual

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@lopta Absolutely.

amoroso, to retrocomputing
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In this interview Charles Simonyi told the origin of the acronym WYSIWYG in the context of his work at Xerox PARC on the Bravo word processor, see page 21:

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2015/06/102702232-05-01-acc.pdf#page=21

Xerox Star ads such as this might have been inspired by the anecdote Simonyi told:

https://interface-experience.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IE-Star-2.jpg

From here:

https://interface-experience.org/objects/xerox-star-8010-information-system/

By the way, it's an interesting 2008 interview Grady Booch did with Simonyi for a Computer History Museum oral history project.

amoroso,
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@thollief You're welcome.

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@mattof The video is cool and reminds how much paper we handled back then.

screwtape, to gamedev
@screwtape@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

Post nobody wants #itch #gamedev #meta analysis from latest / popular devlog posts.
https://lispy-gopher-show.itch.io/logos-lisp-legend/devlog/733862/post-nobody-wants-itchio-meta-at-my-glance
tl;dr #springlispgamejam2024 people are already doing well by breaking out of the sameyness with #lisp power tools and cultural memory. On the other hand, it must be hard to break into the crowds of The Exact Same People Doing The Exact Same Thing With The Exact Same Engine Demo Examples. Maybe just don't worry about it. I kinda regret writing this.

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@screwtape A major motivation for joining such a project is often learning and having fun rather than making something original. Since time is limited this may explain much of the similarity as people start from popular and widely available frameworks and tools.

amoroso,
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@screwtape I wonder what languages and frameworks would participants pick if the contest schedule was less tight.

amoroso,
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amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@screwtape Back in the day Naughty Dog was widely shared as a Lisp success story.

amoroso, to random
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amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@rogersm The noVNC VNC web client you see on the screen connects to a Medley session running in the cloud, which uses as much memory as the Maiko Virtual Machine can (up to 256 MB).

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@rogersm I can run it locally too but it still can't use more than that amount of memory.

amoroso, to Lisp
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I didn't know much about John Allen, the author of the classic 1978 book Anatomy of LISP. This post by a researcher who knew him well tells a bit about Allen, his work, and his passion for Lisp and computing.

https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2024/04/11/1249/

#lisp #retrocomputing

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@halla Glad you like it.

amoroso, to Lisp
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

I didn't realize ACM makes available the full-ish archive of the LISP Pointers journal SIGPLAN published from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. It contains most of the papers of most of the issues, an historical treasure of practical value.

https://dl.acm.org/loi/sigplan-lisppointers

#lisp #CommonLisp #retrocomputing

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@joeygibson There's plenty of good reading material.

amoroso,
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@weekend_editor I always heard about LISP Pointers but could never subscribe or get my hands on an issue.

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@weekend_editor No thanks, they're available now.

bitzero, to Lisp
@bitzero@corteximplant.net avatar

There's now a long thread about what would make Lisp more successful. Nice idea, but it quickly turned into a good example of why this will never happen and why Lisp rarely fascinates new developers. I do not know if the term "lisplaining" exists already, but the thred is mosly lisplaining now.

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@bitzero Can you elaborate on what you mean by lisplaining?

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@bitzero Okay thanks.

Aside from the attitude I'm not sure what the practical alternatives are. If it's better to adapt Lisp to what a wider audience expects or is comfortable with, this is basically what already happened over the past three decades. I mean the new languages that incorporated many Lisp features and can be, and effectively are, used by a wider audience.

amoroso, to retrocomputing
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

The history of corporate presentations from film slides to PowerPoint. Back in the day we all did our fair share of presentations, but likely with far less fancy film slide equipment.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/11/1077232/corporate-presentations-history/

svetlyak40wt, to random
@svetlyak40wt@fosstodon.org avatar

Do you have ideas, how we could make Lisp more popular and used in widely in commercial companies?

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@svetlyak40wt This paper provided a few suggestions three decades ago:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/192590.192600

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@screwtape And a meta gist: one really has to love and want to use the language.

@jackdaniel @amszmidt @svetlyak40wt

amoroso, (edited ) to space
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

These unofficial Mastodon accounts of space agencies are bots that merely share news items the agencies publish elsewhere, yet the accounts have quite a lot of followers:

  • NASA: @nasa 71K followers
  • ESA: @esa 1.4K followers

There's an unfulfilled demand for public institutions to communicate on open and independent platforms.

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@ghose Cool, not bad.

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