How do people think? Co-inventor of Self, which influenced JavaScript. Also sped up Java, Python. Animation for screens. Reality? How to be useful now?
Joined October 2011
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- Followers 1,243
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6 Photos and videos
David Ungar retweeted
Mar 18
Joking aside, there is no one alive who writes about the classics with such simplicity and depth as @SpencerKlavan. Reading him on the Greeks is like reading Sowell on Economics. Clarity that puts the pseudo-scientific jargon of academia to shame. This piece is a joy.
Mar 18
“Aratus’s most brilliant insight was that the world, like a poem, is inexhaustibly layered with hidden meaning.”
Read “A phenomenal poet,” by Spencer A. Klavan.@SpencerKlavan
newcriterion.com/article/a-p…
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Feb 8
In this morning’s after party, there was a discussion about free will. What I like to say is that I have no choice but to believe in free will. @OwenGregorian #afterparty
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David Ungar retweeted
28 Jul 2024
Truly amazing New Horizon footage of Pluto.
28 Jul 2024
Pluto's mighty ice mountains, deep frozen plains and layers of atmospheric haze backlit by a distant sun, as seen by the the NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.
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11 Jun 2023
Clarifying: Flattening a linked data structure into an array, using indices for pointers. That's *all* you could do in FORTRAN. I wrote cross-assemblers for TI minicomputers that way in 1975.
11 Jun 2023
In the old days we had a name for this: FORTRAN.
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22 Feb 2023
Be thoughtful when applying a theoretical result to the real world as shown here: hillelwayne.com/post/np-hard… Hard, or undecidable in theory may not mean impractical for real problems.
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10 Oct 2022
It’s very hard to imagine what it was like to have to go into the office to work at night to use a computer you could never afford that had 16 K of RAM, millisecond cycle times, and if you were lucky, a MB disk. No network, and a real teletype for input and output…
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10 Oct 2022
Correction: cycle time was 1.5 microseconds. (Single core, no graphics processor. ). (PDP-11/20)
And to get a pizza delivered, you had to speak to a human.
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10 Oct 2022
An assembler was a huge achievement, written in machine code. If you wanted a compiled language, the compiler had better be very simple. My point: it’s near impossible to properly judge a programming language that was created before starting one’s career.
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24 Aug 2022
thehackernews.com/2022/08/as… has me wondering about the state of security research wrt reference counting vs mark-sweep GC. Thoughts?
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3 Apr 2022
BTW, after 4 yrs at Apple working on Swift, I realize that production programming is very different from research programming is very different from hobby programming, even when all in the same language, same IDE. All respectable, aim to be clear which one I mean at all times.
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19 Mar 2022
Why so much about context? Now, I'm using Swift/Xcode. (Have worked on speeding Swift compiles.) Very very different from Self, but aimed a very different context! Deeply appreciate what that team has done. Huge set of goals, technical and non-. Tough tradeoffs. (miles in shoes)
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David Ungar retweeted
11 Feb 2022
38. Idiocy Saturation:
Online, people who don't think before they post are able to post more often than people who do. As a result, the average social media post is stupider than the average social media user. Worth remembering whenever Twitter dumbassery drives you to despair.
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6 Mar 2022
Just greatly enjoyed: Stephen Fry & Lawrence Krauss youtu.be/O0SNKCRV5Wg
Was reminded that I have a suspicion that the question of free will has much to do with some flaw in the way we put notions into language. I say that I have no choice but to believe in free will.
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11 Feb 2022
When I was young, I used to have to wait for my radio to warm up. Then we got solid-state and my transistorized stereo turned on instantly. Now, I have to wait for my receiver to boot up, feh! What was ours, is ours again, sadly in this case.
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22 Jan 2022
Today, we need our apps to run on battery power. That has something to do with it, but IIRC Lars Bak worked on that. Also, modern apps do much more. Finally, it could be me. Memory can be fallible. I could have been better at incidental complexity then. Still...
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22 Jan 2022
Just ran across & recommend gbracha.blogspot.com/2020/05… and wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/… . (I was involved.) @Gilad_Bracha @awbjs Great look back. But Smalltalk (and esp. Self) were better for creativity than the mainstream IDE/PL I use. Only partly for good reasons.
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David Ungar retweeted
5 Jul 2021
Something magical happened in Xcode 13 beta 2, where when I do a recompile of my 2,217 source files (stacked in 16 frameworks and an app) it now will compile only like 6 files.
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David Ungar retweeted
6 Jul 2021
The speedup for my app is incredible. Here’s the stack of Swift frameworks that make up Dwelling — you can imagine the speed difference this change has made.
ALT Dwelling framework structure
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9 Jun 2021
Optimizing and Debugging Incremental Build Time in Swift 5.5 forums.swift.org/t/optimizin…
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