[HN Gopher] Fabrik - A Visual Programming Environment (1988)
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Fabrik - A Visual Programming Environment (1988)
Author : marcodiego
Score : 67 points
Date : 2021-11-03 13:59 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| shaunxcode wrote:
| I have always considered this a cousin of Boxer.
| https://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/boxer.pdf
| znpy wrote:
| It kinda reminds me of HP VEE (which I learned got renamed to
| Keysight VEE -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keysight_VEE).
|
| Onw of our porfessors in high school was very fond of it.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| The interface looks like what you see in Unity This thing anyway
| [0] maybe there's a generic term for it.
|
| [0]
| https://unity.com/sites/default/files/styles/810_scale_width...
| beaconstudios wrote:
| It's a node and wire diagram. Also used in unreal blueprints,
| node RED and other visual programming environments.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I asked Dan what he'd been up to recently, and pointed out a
| wonderfully well written 1994 Roanoke Times article about Dan
| Ingals that interviewed several extremely interesting people
| about him, including Alan Kay, Tom Stambaugh, Ivan Sutherland,
| Peter Deutsch, John Sculley, and Michael Scott.
|
| We discussed some stuff his work inspired that I did with Kaleida
| Labs ScriptX called "DreamScape". He replied with some really
| interesting comments and links, including a video of some
| Programming by Demonstration / Programming by Example work that
| one his brilliant interns did.
|
| It was nice to see a local newspaper do such extensive research
| and interviews for a "Local Boy Makes Good" article, and actually
| get all the facts and names and credits right:
|
| https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1994/rt9...
|
| >Roanoke Times, August 14, 1994, A PIONEER'S RETURN TO THE
| HOMESTEAD
|
| >DAN INGALLS was a computer pioneer in Silicon Valley who helped
| invent the personal computer as we know it today. Then he gave it
| all up to run the family hotel in Bath County. Ever heard of The
| Homestead?
|
| >Kay headed the research team at the famous Xerox Palo Alto
| Research Center in the mid-1970s that made most of the
| technological breakthroughs that led to the modern personal
| computer - and Ingalls "was one of the seminal figures" in his
| lab, Kay says.
|
| >"Science has a better way of allocating credit than journalism
| does," he says. "Journalists are extremely attracted to the
| single-inventor theory. In the journalism world, I am often
| credited as the inventor of almost everything to do with the PC,
| which is not true."
|
| >To hear Kay tell it, Ingalls was the engineer who did the most
| important work.
|
| >"If Dan hadn't built them, Steven Jobs would never have seen any
| kind of demonstration and the MacIntosh would never have been
| built," Kay says.
|
| >"I'd say Dan is one of fewer than 10, maybe fewer than five,
| founding fathers of what we know as the personal computer today,"
| says Tom Stambaugh, a software engineer in Massachusetts who is
| familiar with Ingalls' work. "Children two centuries from now
| will recognize his name the way we recognize Galileo or Leonardo
| da Vinci. He really is in that category."
|
| >"In that group, he was one of the technological leaders," says
| Peter Deutsch, a former colleague from the Xerox days who now
| heads his own software company in Menlo Park, Calif. "It was
| really Alan first and then Dan and I don't know who it would be
| after Dan."
|
| >The key to Xerox's breakthrough in personal computers was "a
| technological burst," says Bert Sutherland, then Kay's boss and
| now head of the Sun Microsystems' lab in Mountain View, Calif.
| "And Dan did the hard-core nitty-gritty coding that made it all
| work."
|
| >Former colleagues recall his intuitiveness. "One of the things I
| always admired about Dan was he could just look at a problem and
| do it," says Adele Goldberg, now chairman of ParcPlace Systems in
| Sunnyvale, Calif. She recalls that Ingalls once designed a
| computer program that could scan Sanskrit and reproduce the
| letters of the Indian language on the screen - an astonishing
| innovation in the 1970s when scientists were having enough
| trouble getting computers to work in English.
|
| >Yet, Smalltalk, [Michael] Scott says, has been "incredibly
| influential" on the evolution of other programming languages.
| Indeed, it's such "object-oriented" programming that enabled the
| other computer breakthroughs developed in the Xerox labs to work
| as easily as they do. "All the graphical interfaces today began
| with Dan's work," Stambaugh says. "None of that would have
| happened without Dan."
|
| >Not that Ingalls has profited from this; much of the work at the
| Xerox labs never was patented, a corporate omission now generally
| regarded as a phenomenal error. "If I got a penny for every pull-
| down menu," he observes, "I'd be a rich man."
|
| >"He was a wizard," Sutherland says. "He could sit down at a
| keyboard and make it do magnificent things. I didn't think he'd
| give it up to go back and run a hotel. It was quite mind-
| boggling. He was that rare a talent."
|
| >"It's like removing one of the bright stars from the firmament,"
| Kay says. "He's irreplaceable."
|
| >Apple's chairman at the time, John Sculley, tried to talk
| Ingalls into staying. "Don't do that," he implored. "We'll find
| somebody to run The Homestead for you."
|
| >Ingalls is returning to the computer field just as many of his
| original ideas are emerging triumphant. The "object-oriented
| programming" he worked on is now elbowing the old-style computer
| languages out of the market. "It is the future of computer
| programming," says Scott, the University of Rochester computer
| scientist.
|
| Don:
|
| >I just ran across this beautiful well researched local newspaper
| story about you, which interviewed some amazing people!
|
| https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1994/rt9...
|
| >I'd love to hear about what you've been up to these days!
|
| >Are you still working on Lively? ;)
|
| >I'm re-watching your Lively talk -- it's delightful, I really
| love it!
|
| >It reminds me of what I was trying accomplish with ScriptX
| DreamScape: that drag-and-drop-editing-of-trees-of-live-animated-
| graphics-that-plug-together in my "Dreamscape" demo for the
| ScriptX programming language.
|
| >Of course it didn't have anything like the dynamic scripting and
| prototyping ability of Lively, but it was inspired by Smalltalk
| and ThingLab and other great stuff like that.
|
| >ScriptX was developed by Kaleida Labs, a joint venture of Apple
| and IBM. It was a lot like Dylan or Scheme, with a more c-like
| syntax, and a CLOS-like generic based / multiple dispatch object
| system (OIC: Objects in C), and a nice rich multimedia class
| library).
|
| >ScriptX could import Director sprite bitmap animations and
| registration points, and package them along with cross platform
| ScriptX byte code classes in "title containers", that you could
| download and plug together.
|
| >DreamScape was meant to demonstrate how interactive web sites
| could be collections of objects and spaces and maps, that you
| could export as static html+gif web sites, or preview live and
| browse through dynamic web servers as dynamically generated
| html+gif, and link into live simulations running on the server,
| and ultimately download the media and code to run locally in your
| own ScriptX interpreter.
|
| >There's a video of the WWDC talk, and I wrote up a transcript
| with screen snapshots that's easier to skim, too!
|
| >1995 Apple World Wide Developers Conference Kaleida Labs ScriptX
| DreamScape Demo
|
| >Video:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NytloOy7WM&feature=emb_logo...
|
| >Illustrated Transcript:
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/1995-apple-world-wide-develope...
|
| Dan:
|
| >I watched your DreamScape video - really nice stuff. In the
| process I realize that I missed a big opportunity with Squeak.
| One of the things you showed was generating web page content from
| inside of ScriptX. It was just a year later that we put out
| Squeak, and we were interested that more people were downloading
| Squeak to get its tiny wiki server than to run Smalltalk. It was
| free and cross platform so that was ideal.
|
| >But we could have made the leap right there to a web-borne
| system like Lively but in Smalltalk and a decade sooner. Avi
| Bryant's Seaside came along around 2002 but, again, it wasn't
| really a web-borne Smalltalk so much as a Squeak-based web app
| development system.
|
| >What am I up to? It's sort of a melange of picking up loose ends
| from times past and keeping some income going for times to come.
| Most recently I wrote a long piece for HOPL-2020,
|
| https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/papers/EvolutionOfSmalltalk....
|
| >built the beginnings of an online "Smalltalk Zoo"
|
| https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/
|
| >started a Smalltalk meetup
|
| https://www.meetup.com/california-smalltalkers/
|
| >I was having fun with this just when the funder (Infosys) pulled
| the plug on our project (HARC) at Y Combinator Research.
|
| >I felt that, by creating programming tiles from concrete
| actions, it completed the whole concrete programming approach in
| a nice way. Here's a link to a simple example by one of my
| interns (we had JUST got it to work):
|
| https://lively-next.org/users/robert/ProgrammingByExample_sh...
| deetz wrote:
| I was the chair for Demonstrations at OOPSLA'88 and Dan gave a
| demo of Fabrik as well as presenting the paper.
|
| I remember being completely astounded at the demo, a packed room,
| and other peers gasped and wow'ed during the presentation - I
| agree that Dan Ingalls, soft-spoken and humble, is truly an
| unsung HERO of many many ideas and innovations, some that stuck,
| and some that were stepping-stones..
|
| As an aside, also at OOPSLA and in the same soft-spoken and
| humble way, Trygve Reenskaug, inventor of Model-View-Controller
| paradigm gave a demo of "SI" a manufacturing oriented project
| management - I was a manufacturing guy doing Machine Shop
| automation in Objective-C and was validated and affirmed that
| others were solving practical problems in the real world while
| doing invention and innovation practically, instead of all the
| ivory tower types just cranking out papers.
| [deleted]
| jdougan wrote:
| Dan ported and updated Fabrik to run on the JS Lively Kernel. The
| link is https://lively-kernel.org/repository/lively-
| wiki/Fabrik.xhtm... but I haven't tried it for a while so I have
| no clue how well it currently works.
| pandatigox wrote:
| Looks interesting but is stuck on the "Loading" page! Though
| the GitHub development shows that it's still active
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| That is because it's trying to load from
| experimentalstuff.com which is(or seems to be) gone.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| So there is
|
| [1] https://squeak.js.org/ and
|
| [2] https://github.com/codefrau/SqueakJS which seems to be able
| to not only run Squeak, but also
|
| [3] https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-
| Dev/wiki/Ru...
|
| and
|
| [4] https://github.com/carolahp/pharo to shrink and adapt these
| images to be able to run on common JS-runtimes in acceptable
| speeds and memory usage.
|
| There is also
|
| [5] https://caffeine.js.org/ and
|
| [6] https://github.com/ErikOnBike/CodeParadise
|
| bidirectionally <-> bridging the gap between Smalltalk and JS
| even more, with
|
| [7] https://www.webcomponents.org/
|
| I think it should be possible to port, maybe to even have some
| hypercard-like visual website builder/explorable explanations
| thing.
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(page generated 2021-11-03 23:01 UTC)