arnsholt

Yeah, for “normal” syntax I’d generally go for recursive descent, but for expression parsing with operator precedence I’d implement Pratt parsing if I had any say in the matter.

Yeah, Smalltalk has select, reject (inverted filter), collect (map) and inject.

The application writing its state to the executable is basically Smalltalk (or Lisp). It's an extremely powerful way of writing software, IMO.

Yeah, it's not that the hurdles pointed out in this article are wrong, but IMO the jump from "it's very hard" to "it's impossible" isn't convincingly argued. In discussions of the future of C, something along the lines of "C is never going away" is frequently said, which I think is both right and wrong, depending on what precisely you mean by "going away". If you ask me, C is not going away in the same way that Fortran never went away: it's still hugely important for numerical kernels used extremely widely every day, and software like sqlite will continue to be important. But for C as a culturally defining language in computing, I think the tide is already turning.

Very chatty build scripts for one. I remember reading the build instructions for clisp many years ago, and it very explicitly told you to run the build in xterm and not something like gnome-terminal, because xterm was way way faster at getting all the output through.

Oh derp. It’s been a while since I worked adjacent to this, so I clearly misremembered some important bits. Thanks for the correction!

And in case people think ultrasonic signaling isn’t a real thing, it very much is. In the oil and gas industry, it’s how measurements taken while drilling a hole are sent back to the surface through the drilling mud.

I worked as a Smalltalk developer for a few years, and it spoiled to such an extent that I’ve tried to make an extension for IntelliJ to replicate the browser for Java development. Maybe I should revive that project, actually…

I wasn’t involved in the day to day operations of the system, but it had records going back to the 90s at least I think. I think data related to non accepted offers were deleted fairly quickly (since they didn’t end up being actual customers), but outside of that I think everything was kept more or less indefinitely.

Yeah, basically. The full system actually has more date stuff going on, to support some other more advanced stuff than just tracking objects themselves, but that's the overall idea. When you need to join stuff it can be annoying to get the SQL right in order to join the correct records from a different table onto your table of interest (thank Bob for JOIN LATERAL), but once you get the hang of it it's fairly straightforward. And it gives you the full history, which is great.

The core system at my previous employer (an insurance company) worked along the lines of the solution you outline at the end: each table is an append only log of point in time information about some object. So the current state is in the row with the highest timestamp, and all previous stars can be observed with appropriate filters. It’s a really powerful approach.

For about two and a half years I worked on a Smalltalk system, written in a quite old Smalltalk, which gave me two idiosyncrasies editor-wise: I no longer care very much about syntax highlighting (though I don't really bother to turn it off), and I now prefer to use proportional fonts for my programming. The only syntax highlighting I missed in the Smalltalk was a fading out of comments (which would in fact have prevented a stupid issue similar to the comment thing shown in the OP).