What is the point that you believe would be demonstrated by a new text editor running at the limit of hardware in a compiled editor? Would that point apply to every other text editor that exists already?
> Software folks are obsessed with copying what has been shown to work to the point that any advance quickly becomes a cargo cult
Seems more accurate to say they are obsessed with copying "what sounds good". Software industry doesn't seem to copy what works, rather what sounds like it'd work, or what sounds cool.
If they copied what works software would just be faster by default, because very often big established tools are replaced by something that offers similar featurage, but offers it at a higher FPS.
Well imagine somebody was talking about "bass" the fish, in a context of "bass" the instrument. If they pronounced it like the fish, certainly for a moment your language processing would stop, figure it out, fill in the gap, and continue.
Every time the wrong pitch accent is used, a similar process takes place. Especially in highly complex conversations, where a lot of processing power is going towards the semantics itself, and hopefully the person shouldn't have to worry about figuring out which word the other person is saying.
It's unclear if you yourself have native-level (or close to) pitch accent yourself. But if you don't, how can you know whether it's actually important or not?
"Unfortunately, inheritance — though an incredibly powerful technique — has turned out to be very difficult for novices (and even professionals) to deal with." Alan Kay, The Early History of Smalltalk, page 82
That's taken from a section which reflects on introducing programming to children in the summer of '73 —
In part, what we were seeing was the "hacker phenomenon", that for any given pursuit, a particular 5% of the population will jump into it naturally, while the 80% or so who can learn it in time do not find it natural.
… it is likely that this area is more like writing than we wanted it to be. Namely, for the "80%", it really has to be learned gradually over a period of years in order to build up the structures that need to be there for design and solution look-ahead.
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Here's how that Alan Kay quote is used in The Big OOPs —
13:47 -- It's because 10 years earlier, he was already saying he kind of soured on it. He's like, inheritance was like really powerful, but people just didn't know how to use it. Novices and experts apparently both couldn't use it, right. It was just uh you know, it's really good, but no one can figure out how to use it, I guess. Uh so that's a little bit weird.
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Not "kind-of-soured on it" one page later —
There were a variety of strong desires for a real inheritance mechanism from Adele and me, from Larry Tesler, who was working on desktop publishing, and from the grad students. page 83
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Not "kind-of-soured on it" but wanting a "comprehensive and clean multiple inheritance scheme" —
A word about inheritance. … By the time Smalltalk-76 came along, Dan Ingalls had come up with a scheme that was Simula-like in it's semantics but could be incrementally changed on the fly to be in accord with our goals of close interaction. I was not completely thrilled with it because it seemed that we needed a better theory about inheritance entirely (and still do). … But no comprehensive and clean multiple inheritance scheme appeared that was compelling enough to surmount Dan's original Simula-like design. page 84
Curious, does it perform at the limit of the hardware? Was it programmed in a tools language (like C++, Rust, C, etc.) or in a web tech?
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