inferno programmer's notebook

NAME lab 59 - acme stand alone complex NOTES A project that's been on my mind for quite a while is to package Inferno's acme as a stand alone editor. I only had Windows in mind as a target host, but the work should be quite easy to reproduce on other hosts. I wanted the editor to blend well with the host system, and work as a substitute for other popular programmer editors such as vim, emacs, or jedit. Acme and Inferno being already stable and mature, there were only a few things I felt needed to be in place for this to work. cut & paste between the host and acme (lab 55) acme to resize with the host window dead simple packaging and install of acme on windows. This lab covers the code to do the acme resize with host windows. I copied the code from /emu/port/devpointer.c and made devwmsz.c . The code is almost identical except for the name changes. This device holds a short queue of window resize events and serves a file /dev/wmsize that's the same fo...

NAME lab 58 - dried dung NOTES "Even as the clock ticks, better and better computer support for the creative spirit is evolving." - Dan Ingalls. How does computer support evolve and interact with the creative spirit? Doug Englebart tackled a related question, "How can a computer support a problem solver's intellect?" Englebart's solution was a form of recursion called Bootstrapping. Build tools to help build better tools. The better tools would augment the programmers abilities to help them on their way to bootstrap the next system. A significant aspect of the bootstrapping philosophy was that the researchers used the tools they build. The Smalltalk researchers took those ideas to heart. The Design Principles of Smalltalk followed this evolution cycle explicitly: Build an application program within the current system (make an observation) Based on that experience, redesign the language (formulate a theory) Build a new system based on the new design (m...