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This is the temporary home page for wirfs-brock.com
Personal blog · wirfs-brock.comprogrammingdesign
This is the temporary home page for wirfs-brock.com is a personal blog at wirfs-brock.com about programming and design. Since 2009, 42 different Hacker News readers have linked it 64 times, most often “JavaScript: The first 20 years. (HOPL)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- JavaScript: The first 20 years. (HOPL)8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-03-13
- The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-06-02
- The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk (2020)3 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2024-04-29
- Tektronix Smalltalk Document Archive3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-02-13
- /allen/posts/2282 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-07-19
- How Smalltalk Became a AI Language (2022)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-09
- Efficient Implementation of Smalltalk Block Returns (2001)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-05-18
- /allen/jshopl.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-07-28
- Software Diagrams Aren’t Always Correct and That’s OK2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-25
What Hacker News says?
I don't think a few code snippets prove the point. My conjecture is that any complex enough piece of code with essentially (not accidentally!) convoluted concepts will benefit from OOP more than any other style Can we just appreciate the fact Python is such a Swiss Army Knife and allows for multi-paradigm approach? Let's just not use low "bashing" of any paradigm as an excuse to neglect the design. In some other thr…
Comment linking /PDFs/How%20Designs%20Differ.pdf
on “OO in Python is mostly pointless”Submitted The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk as a story · 202 points
HN discussionBack-in-the-day Digitalk VisualSmalltalk PARTS: https://www.wirfs-brock.com/allen/files/digitalk/VSbrochure....
Comment linking /allen/files/digitalk/VSbrochure.pdf
on “Formatting code should be unnecessary”Submitted The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk (2020) as a story · 148 points
HN discussionSmalltalk-80 did this too. Later implementations try to avoid it, but sometimes still do: http://www.wirfs-brock.com/allen/things/smalltalk-things/eff...
Comment linking /allen/things/smalltalk-things/efficient-implementation-smalltalk-block-returns
on “Why you can have millions of goroutines but only thousands of Java threads”Submitted Smalltalk-87 as a story · 115 points
HN discussionThe prototype ("Mocha") was created in a week, but the language went through multiple iterations. (See https://www.wirfs-brock.com/allen/jshopl.pdf ) Honestly, I can point you to languages with worse design than JS. There was an idea (perhaps from BASIC) that "scripting" means permissive. Instead of failing fast, it was designed to fall back to something that works (e.g., '1'+1=2). That's a terrible design decision,…
Comment linking /allen/jshopl.pdf
on “Yet another way to invoke functions in JavaScript without parentheses”Submitted Testing for -0 (negative zero) in JavaScript as a story · 39 points
HN discussion> ... when the 90s arrived it didn't have a big company pouring gobs of money into marketing it unlike Java. IBM not big enough? :-) But of course IBM's consulting group were technology neutral and pivoted from Smalltalk to Java when the wind changed. > Like who wants to distribute a whole system for each smalltalk program they sell? Smalltalk was marketed to corporations as a 4GL replacement for green screen system…
Comment linking /allen/posts/914
on “Goodbye, Rust. I wish you success but I'm back to C++ (sorry, it is a rant)”Submitted Handling Software Design Criticism (2007) [pdf] as a story · 25 points
HN discussion> To me that reads like gibberish. Perhaps you could be more charitable in your reading. > Common Lisp is used in large-scale commercial and industrial applications, why isn't it "as popular as" Java? Because those large-scale commercial and industrial Smalltalk applications are mid-1990s business-critical legacy systems! "Over six months in 1996, Smalltalk’s place in the market changed from the enterprise darling C…
Comment linking /allen/posts/914
on “Pharo 12”Submitted A Modular Journey to a World Spanning Virtual Image (2014) [pdf] as a story · 9 points
HN discussionDigitalk’s Team/V unobtrusively introduced a non-reflective syntax and versioned source code using RCS. Team/V could forward and backwards migrate versions of Smalltalk “modules” within an running virtual image. https://wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/914
Comment linking /allen/posts/914
on “Ruby and Its Neighbors: Smalltalk”Submitted Efficient Implementation of Smalltalk Block Returns (2001) as a story · 9 points
HN discussionSee "Software Diagrams Aren’t Always Correct and That’s OK" < https://wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/1018 >
Comment linking /allen/posts/1018
on “UML: My Part in Its Downfall”Submitted Personal Digital Habitats as a story · 7 points
HN discussionIt's also recommended to have a look at other pages from Allan's site such as http://www.wirfs-brock.com/allen/things/smalltalk-things/tek... which is full of interesting facts and documents.
Comment linking /allen/things/smalltalk-things/tektronix-smalltalk-document-archive
on “The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk”Submitted Tektronix Smalltalk Document Archive as a story · 4 points
HN discussion"The major commercial Smalltalk implementations of the 1990’s all corrected these problems and developed various techniques for efficiently implementing blocks." https://wirfs-brock.com/allen/things/smalltalk-things/effici...
Comment linking /allen/things/smalltalk-things/efficient-implementation-smalltalk-block-returns
on “Type Theory and Functional Programming (1999) [pdf]”Submitted Modern JavaScript: The Smalltalk Influence [pdf] as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAt the risk of putting readers off by the title, there's a video essay on YouTube called "Object-Oriented Programming is Bad"[1]. It's both thoughtful and thought-provoking, although I don't agree with the conclusion. Steve Naroff (from Stepstone/NeXT/Apple) did a recent-ish set of interviews with the Computer History Museum[2][3] and referenced that video a bit (and extemporized about objects in small parts through…
Comment linking /allen/posts/866
on “Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)”Submitted A JavaScript Optional Argument Hazard as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHuh? The Xerox Star was introduced in 1981 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star Apple's Lisa was introduced in 1983. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa With it, Lisa Toolkit and Clascal (Pascal with Classes) http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/app... The Mac in 1984 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K MacApp in 1985 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacApp The Tektronix 4404 runni…
Comment linking /allen/files/tek/4404-Flyer.pdf
on “Haskell Typeclasses vs. C++ Classes”Submitted The Third Era of Computing as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> we run [your custom code] inside a wasm-based sandbox, a compiled version of the QuickJS VM (yes, it's JS-in-JS). I'm curious about why. Is sychronicity the only reason? (And is it really worth it? `await` makes asynchronous code paths pretty unobtrusive.) Mirrors[1][2] are pretty interesting. (Not sure that I agree that compile-to-WASM makes for JS-in-JS. WASM isn't JS. Why do people keep conflating them?[3]) 1.…
Comment linking /allen/posts/228
on “Hello, Dynaboard”Submitted The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk (2020) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://wirfs-brock.com/allen/things/smalltalk-things/tektro...
Comment linking /allen/things/smalltalk-things/tektronix-smalltalk-document-archive
on “The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)”Submitted The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk (2020) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe announcement blog post is at http://www.wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/866 but sadly the wayback machine doesn’t have a copy of the pdf
Comment linking /allen/posts/866
on “ECMAScript 4: The Missing Version”Submitted Software Diagrams Aren’t Always Correct and That’s OK as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
