Comment by kragen
1 day ago
The reason the Alto included a GUI at all was specifically Alan Kay's vision, as explained in the text I quoted by the people who built it. That text includes primary sources written at the time by, among other people, Cedar's main author and Bravo's main author — not only, as you imply, stories written down from memory twenty years later. It also includes primary sources from many years later, but those add to the evidence; they do not subtract from it.
I do not believe that Wirth's "OO" is a different topic. To the best of my understanding, the reason he added procedure-typed record fields in Modula-2 and retained them in Oberon was specifically in order to implement that tiling window manager, which in later versions of Mesa (and Cedar) replaced the overlapping-window GUI in earlier versions of Mesa, which came from Alan Kay's 01969 doctoral dissertation, by way of Smalltalk.
Rochus has posted a response saying:
> Kay's 1969 thesis has no overlapping windows; its "windows" are Sutherland–Sproull clipping viewports into a vector-display virtual screen ("the terminology follows [A Clipping Divider, 1968]", p. 40); nothing occludes or moves. Overlapping bitmap windows first appear in Smalltalk-72 on the Alto (1973–74), implemented by Ingalls. Tiling did neither come from Mesa nor from Kay; multiple tiled windows were on screen in Engelbart's NLS in 1968 (Engelbart & English, FJCC 1968, and the demo), carried into PARC by his former team (English, Irby), and are the stated model for the Mesa debugger. Procedure types in Modula-2 (1977–80, for Lilith) were taken from Mesa after Wirth's 1976–77 PARC stay, years before Cedar's tiled Viewers (1982), which Wirth saw in 1984–85.
Unfortunately, and horrifyingly, this response is [dead].
I agree with some things in it, but not others, and I will have to write a longer response later.
> Unfortunately, and horrifyingly, this response is [dead].
That's strange. I didn't do anything and it still appears on the site in my browser. Did they add "shadow bans" to HN? That was one reason for me to turn my back on Facebook (and the fact that interesting discussions suddenly disappeared later on). I took me more than half an hour to re-check all sources; I (we) probably shouldn't spend that much time on comments anymore.
There are shadowbans on HN, but you are not shadowbanned. Some assholes just flagged your comment, that's all. I appreciate the comment, and will respond to it in due course — I don't want to depend on my own memories here, but also to re-check the sources myself.
Were you two having a discussion about extensible programming languages, or an extensible discussion about programming languages? Or was it an extensible discussion about extensible programming languages after all? Maybe it all boils down to whether discussions about programming languages should use static or late binding?
[dead]