ssrc (u/ssrc) - Readit News

ssrc commented on In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999) web.stanford.edu/class/cs... · Posted by u/wseqyrku

Nevermark · 2 months ago

The “strange” products they created to sell for money, were implementations of programming languages. When most software was (1) supplied by the large company that sold the large computer it ran on, (2) was written on one of those machines by the people who were going to use it, or (3) was hobby stuff, shared freely between hobbyists.

The latter made sense, since taking and giving back to the community was a natural and fair system. Which served everyone, while obligating no one. And in any case, how would you charge for something with no physical form and that anyone can copy?

ssrc · 2 months ago

Arguably this started in the mainframe world in 1969, with IBM "unbundling" software and services from hardware sales, after the US government launched an antitrust suit against them.

ssrc commented on Patterns.dev patterns.dev/... · Posted by u/handfuloflight

skydhash · 2 months ago

A lot of patterns only make sense in languages like C# or Java, which are inflexible by design. You have two hierarchical trees (inheritance and namespaces) that you have to work around. With something simpler like C, Go, JavaScript, you don’t have those obstacles and a solution can be way simpler to implement.

ssrc · 2 months ago

Some patterns in the GoF book only apply to C++/Java as they were in 1994, but I don't see any reason why other languages would have no useful patterns. The Linux kernel (C) is full of patterns for example.

Funny thing, Peter Norvig also has this position, that patterns only apply to languages like Java, but his book on Lisp and the Python course he had on Udemy (?) are super-pattern-y.

ssrc commented on The Future of Programming (2013) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEm... · Posted by u/jackdoe

blue_pants · 3 months ago

But couldn't we do something about that as well? Couldn't drivers be built on some abstraction that would simplify some work?

I have zero knowledge about this area though

ssrc · 3 months ago

If you are ok with the performance you can obtain from an FPGA, you could do it now. Look at FPGA hardware-software co-design and related stuff.

If you mean, in general, for the hardware that already exists, that's what the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) of the operating system tries to do.

ssrc commented on FPGA Based IBM-PC-XT bit-hack.net/2025/11/10/f... · Posted by u/andsoitis

II2II · 3 months ago

A bit misleading, albeit in an impressive way. I nearly skipped the article thinking that it would be an all FPGA solution. Instead, they interfaced somewhat period correct chips: the V20 was used in XT compatibles of the era, the DAC was authentic (even if it is only a small part of the sound card), and the 1 MB RAM chip is the sort of cost cutting measure they would have used back in the day if it was available (though it would likely have been DRAM rather than SRAM). The rest being on an FPGA is certainly understandable since it was listed as an FPGA based project!

ssrc · 3 months ago

And the FPGA is a modern day equivalent to an ULA. If they could have put all of the chips in a single programmable one, they would.

ssrc commented on Brimstone: ES2025 JavaScript engine written in Rust github.com/Hans-Halverson... · Posted by u/ivankra

phplovesong · 3 months ago

Why is stuff written in rust always promoted as "written in rust" like its some magic thing?

ssrc · 3 months ago

I'm old enough to have seen the "written in lisp", "written in ruby", "written in javascript" eras, among others. It's natural.

ssrc commented on Writing a DOS Clone in 2019 medium.com/@andrewimm/wri... · Posted by u/shakna

stevekemp · 3 months ago

Very much so. If programs are well-behaved, and call "int 21", etc all is well. But a lot of programs would use undocumented things, such as the list-of-lists and they'd directly peek and poke into the operating systems code.

I've had fun updating the shell, and code, of CP/M, in assembly, and writing emulators of it. But as always there is no shortage of programs making specific assumptions that make everything more complex than they should be.

ssrc · 3 months ago

I remember the books on undocumented functionality like

https://archive.org/details/Undocumented_DOS

ssrc commented on Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023) people.csail.mit.edu/rach... · Posted by u/jumploops

goranmoomin · 3 months ago

IMO: Transpilers are compilers, but not all compilers are transpilers.

In my book, transpilers are compilers that consume a programming language and target human-readable code, to be consumed by another compiler or interpreter (either by itself, or to be integrated in other projects).

i.e. the TypeScript compiler is a transpiler from TS to JS, the Nim compiler is a transpiler from Nim to C, and so on.

I guess if you really want to be pedantic, one can argue (with the above definition) that `clang -S` might be seen as a transpiler from C to ASM, but at that point, do words mean anything to you?

ssrc · 3 months ago

For me, the "human-readable" part is key. It's not just that the output is e.g. javascript, but that it is more or less human-readable with about the same organization as the original code.

If you implement SKI combinators, or three-address instructions, as functions in javascript, and that's the output of your compiler, I would not call that a transpiler.

ssrc commented on Lisping at JPL (2002) flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.... · Posted by u/adityaathalye

adityaathalye · 9 months ago

Forth, in fact, is. https://www.forth.com/resources/space-applications/

ssrc · 9 months ago

'Was' is more likely. The list is from 2003, and if FORTH Inc, the (only? biggest?) remaining forth company hasn't updated it...

ssrc commented on Show HN: Resurrecting Infocom's Unix Z-Machine with Cosmopolitan christopherdrum.github.io... · Posted by u/ChristopherDrum

ChristopherDrum · 10 months ago

Interesting to know, thanks. My intention with that comment was in pondering about vms distributed commercially in the home market, which I don't think I made clear enough in the post. :/

ssrc · 10 months ago

What's remarkable about Infocom's z-machine is the level of sophistication and polish vs the intended application, maybe unsurprising coming from MIT graduates with access to a PDP-10 as a development platform. Otherwise the use of virtual machines was, maybe not common, but not unusual.

* TinyBasic (1975) was specified (and sometimes implemented) as a VM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC

* Apple Pascal (1979) was a UCSD Pascal system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pascal

* The COSMAC VIP computer/console's (1977) games were programmed in CHIP-8, a VM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8

* Scott Adams' text adventures (1978+) used an application-specific VM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_International

* Wozniak's SWEET16 contained in Apple II Integer Basic (1977) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16

* If you count Forth as a VM, it was pretty common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)

ssrc commented on Xerox Alto Source Code (2014) computerhistory.org/blog/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

AdmiralAsshat · a year ago

It already is, though granted the phrasing is usually, "It was sure nice of Xerox to provide all that free technology for Apple and Microsoft."

ssrc · a year ago

"Well, Steve [Jobs], I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it." - Bill Gates

https://folklore.org/A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.html