Apple II Debugger
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From: randyhyde@earthlink.net on 31 Jul 2006 17:20 f0dder wrote: > randyhyde(a)earthlink.net wrote: > > >> And the way TeX was written, using WEB programming language, was > >> truely innovative. > > > > Uh... > > TeX was written in Pascal. > > TeX predated the WEB programming language by many years. > > Hm, how is WEB related to TeX then? When building TeX from source on a linux > box a bunch of years ago, I seem to remember that part of the process was > running some "web2c" program? This part happened much later. > > TeX is a pretty nifty idea, but IMHO it's too arcane to be really useful. > Becomes more human with things like LaTeX, but still - unless you're using > some pre-packaged template, there's *some* amount of manual setup you need > to do. The big problem with TeX is that the Apple Lisa and the Mac came out shortly after TeX became usable. All of a sudden there really wasn't much of a need for TeX. Sure, the academic community picked it up (meaning die-hard *nix fans used it a lot), but for the average person, something like Adobe Framemaker Quark or any of a dozen other WYSIWYG page publishing systems was a much nicer choice. > > It's also a bunch of bother to change fonts and such (no, not changing fonts > in the traditional Office style, but setting up a TeX equivalent of a CSS > style). It would be nice if there was something as intuitive as XML/CSS that > could give as pretty output as TeX... SGML? .. > > Innovative, ho humm. Perhaps my sense of time is schewed, but weren't there > a bunch of p2p apps available before bittorrent showed up? The innovation wasn't so much in the p2p stuff, but in the way it improved bandwidth in a cooperative manner. I.e., the massive p2p part. Cheers, Randy Hyde
From: Phil Carmody on 31 Jul 2006 19:01 "randyhyde(a)earthlink.net" <randyhyde(a)earthlink.net> writes: > > And the way TeX was written, using WEB programming language, was > > truely innovative. > > Uh... > TeX was written in Pascal. TeX was written in SAIL. Phil -- The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894), American physician and writer
From: rhyde on 31 Jul 2006 19:15 Phil Carmody wrote: > "randyhyde(a)earthlink.net" <randyhyde(a)earthlink.net> writes: > > > And the way TeX was written, using WEB programming language, was > > > truely innovative. > > > > Uh... > > TeX was written in Pascal. > > TeX was written in SAIL. Well, so says the Wikipedia (and we know how reliable that is). OTOH, if it was first written in SAIL, then it was converted to Pascal fairly quickly. Because I remember compiling Knuth's Pascal code (very carefully written in ISO Pascal to be portable just about everywhere) at UCR in the very early 1980s. It was actually some classy Pascal code. Cheers, Randy Hyde
From: rhyde on 31 Jul 2006 19:30 Phil Carmody wrote: > "randyhyde(a)earthlink.net" <randyhyde(a)earthlink.net> writes: > > > And the way TeX was written, using WEB programming language, was > > > truely innovative. > > > > Uh... > > TeX was written in Pascal. > > TeX was written in SAIL. > > Phil Yep. I stand corrected. It was originally written in SAIL and then rewritten in Pascal for portability reasons (e.g., http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb02-1/tb02fuchszab.pdf). Same reason for the proliferation of versions later on. Cheers, Randy Hyde
From: Dragontamer on 1 Aug 2006 01:24
randyhyde(a)earthlink.net wrote: > Dragontamer wrote: > > > > Abiword is run by volonteers, they don't got a paycheck. I find it > > hard to believe that they would make something before Microsoft > > unless they had a head start on the "innovation". > > I'm sorry, I don't remember claiming that all innovation comes out of > Microsoft. (innovation==Microsoft, now that's kind of funny). Toche. Though, it seems like more and more smaller companies are going OSS, selling services as opposed to the product specifically. > > > > If Microsoft thought it up, they would have put it into MS Word > > before Abiword probably existed. But to my knowledge, there > > are no other word processors that exist that have even attempted > > this idea. > > The only reason Microsoft hasn't done this is because Apple didn't do > it first :-) > (okay, running away rapidly.) > > Seriously, though, Microsoft has done their share of innovations, but > most people *don't* hold up Microsoft as the paragon of innovation. Meh. C# and .NET seemed pretty innovated to me. The pieces of it of course; were quite > > > Having spent considerable time installing FreeBSD over and over again, > > > I'm not real impressed by FreeBSD's "ports" that forces me to swap CDs > > > a couple of dozen times because it installs things in the order *it* > > > wants to, rather than their order on the CDROMs. Forgive me for not > > > being impressed. > > > > Try it when you have a net installation. Auto Downloads == great > > stuff. > > Yes, I've done that. How is this "innovative"? I've been doing this > with Apple, Microsoft, and Linux OSes for quite some time. Perhaps > FreeBSD is a little slicker in some respects (I don't know), but this > is hardly an "innovative" concept. At the very best, it's an extension > of an existing idea. Hmm. I gotta look up the history of Ports, but they seem to be the first one on the list (Before Linux at least. Debian was the first one IIRC on the Linux platform that introduced automatic download + dependancy resolution. The MS vs Mac vs BSD innovation competition thing... seems to have no history to check who invented what first) > > You mean, like Perl (OSS Artistic License)? A totally new programming > > paradigm that focuses on text and utility using "natural language > > constructs" ? > > Take a look at SNOBOL4 sometime (a programming language from the 1960s. > Then take a look at ICON. (1970s). > > And being forced to use PERL on ocassion at work, I hardly feel that it > uses "natural language constructs". PERL is like the BASIC language of > the 2000s -- every time they need something they just clutter up the > language with yet another keyword using inconsistent syntax. Meh. Given its popularity, it seems like people like something about Perl. There must have been something that "clicked" with perl that wasn't there with SNOBOL4. But I'll look at it later. [snip] > the nroff idea that predated it. And finally, the creation of TeX > predated the OSS movement by many years. It was a single-person > project, by a person who was being paid for his time spent on the > project. That's not the OSS model. Woah woah woah. It was under my impression that people get paid in the OSS model. Not just donations mind you; but actual wages. The XEmacs project for example; had programmers working on updating Emacs full time. Now... if you are talking about Freeware, and not OSS, then yeah. The only thing freeware can do is copy other ideas. But in OSS, you have people getting paid to say, expand and improve the WINE project so that MS Word works on Linux. Yes: you've got "many eyes" to keep an eye out for the project. And if you think about it, the entire TeX system evolved into something greater. Most OSS projects start off as a single-person or a small team doing the vast majority of the work. But then when the tool is used and people start liking it, you get additions to it later. Linux may be developed like a Bazaar, but so far, it seems like you need a pretty big Cathedral before anything gets done anyway. Bazaar OSS projects tend to be the very popular very sucessful projects. (Apache, Linux, so on, so forth). But a good amount of OSS projects are still done by paid programmers; or at least, a small dedicated group of people. > > Literate programming, > > Again, research coming out of Universities by people who were *paid* to > do this research. Not the OSS model at all. I think we have different definitions of OSS model. My thoughts of OSS is simply any business model that ends up creating software that is released in a OSS license > > integrating typesetting and > > Sorry, dude, I was around then. Knuth wasn't the first one to do this. > The graphic arts field was doing this already. I think there is a double standard going on here. Delphi and VB were not the first programming languages either. What exactly do you see in them thats innovative? Maybe that will settle the argument a little. > And, of course, there > was the troff program that did typesetting from a computer that predate > all of this (developed at Bell Labs, I might point out). Knuth did > some cool things, like MetaFont. But again, this is not an example of > an OSS triumph. It is a result of university grants (typically from > commercial concerns) and student fees paying professors and grad > students to do the research and work. Its not like Delphi was the first programming language either. But TeX has glue, automatic kerning, hyphenation, etc. etc. > > compiling, while... erm, IMO, stupid, is an innovative idea, and OSS. > > The OSS model didn't even exist back then. Some would argue that everything at that age was OSS. But I'm not of that era, and am only saying what others say. > > As was Sliced Bread. > > But was it really? > Was their really a single person who came up with idea? Or was it just > an obvious idea that lots of bakers developed independently? I.e., do > you have the *name* of the guy who invented sliced bread. Can you show > it was an unobvious idea that did not exist in any form prior to that > point? Joke has been taken too far. Aborting... > > Hmm. I just don't think ego is the main insentive to OSS development. > > Anytime someone suggests that they don't want to release something as > Public Domain because they want |