Alastair M. D. Touw @amdt@mastodon.social

Assume this is a work of fiction.

I hate computers (and programming is terrible). 💩

I just found out Lucas Brunelle is still making cycling videos after all these years (it’s been a decade, at least) and this definitely applies to his videos as well.

I’ve been using Magit for so long now I’ve forgotten how to use Git’s own command line interface. I’m sure there are esoteric features that would require it but I’ve yet to need any of them.

Drinking game: watch a Terry Barentsen video, and drink for every violation of a traffic law you see. 🚴🏻‍♂️

I’m not particularly interested in commercial implementations and I have more than enough to explore: Smalltalk’s implementation of the original model-view-controller pattern, Squeak’s self-hosted virtual machine simulator and early versions of Morphic, and Cuis’s modern yet minimal class library.

I’m ending this thread with Dan Banay’s very recent by-the-book (the blue one!) implementation of Smalltalk, which runs Xerox PARC’s release of Smalltalk-80 version 2 very nicely. https://github.com/dbanay/Smalltalk

I’ve never cycled along the Arakawa before. It’s nice, and a little cooler along the banks.

Pharo’s system browser displays subclasses with indentation, and that could be a nice hack for defining a hierarchy and site map… except class names need to be unique.

I am still thinking about static site generation with Smalltalk. It might be nice to move content models out of files and into classes… reading and parsing files wouldn’t be necessary, I could use native dictionaries, arrays, numbers etc. and authoring could be done in-image.

This is the same problem as trying to find photography of Japanese mountains which are not Mt. Fuji.

Unsplash has hundreds of beautiful photographs of sailboats… until you realise you want one of a gaff-rigged cutter, and then it has none.

Hugo’s been the easiest to work with, but its templating — both language and inheritance rules — is a shining trapezohedron.

I’ve used many different static site generators implemented in several languages and all of them have been an absolute hassle to install and run on the machines of coworkers using Windows.

I am new to Smalltalk but it’s very easy to get started with. Part of that is the syntax: it fits on a postcard. It’s also the class library: it has good online (in the old sense of being installed) documentation and even when it’s missing a class or method comment, the Smalltalk is succinct, readable and easy to explore.