"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Flair

Sun gets in the game of replacing java, at least on the desktop. I would *never* make the mistake of underestimating Dan Ingalls, now a Sun Distinguished Engineer and previously the primary implementor of Smalltalk at Xerox PARC, Apple, HP, and elsewhere up through and including Squeak.

"AJAX deals with all of the old way of doing things. It makes it simpler, which is great, but underneath it’s still all this junky HTML, Document Object Model, cross site scripting, all that stuff, where 30 years ago, we knew how to do that stuff cleanly with a dynamic programming language and a simple graphics model," Ingalls said.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Ingall is stuck thirty years ago, that's ten years before NextStep demonstrated the superior power of DisplayPostscript over the "clean graphical model" of windowing API.

It is not by coincidence that all this web "stuff" was first developped on a NextStep system.

And there are very practical reasons why a "junky HTML" web browser zapped overnight the future of GUI fat clients.

Sun is desperately trying to save Java on the desktop. I fear that a time machine to get us back in 1977 won't help ;-)

Bill Barr said...

I would prefer a time machine back to 1977 rather than one that takes us back to 1964 (html/browser=ebcdic/3270).

Patrick Logan said...

Indeed, especially 1977 at PARC.

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.