Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar

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Strong rec pjmlp · 2020-10 · on “Re-Thinking the Desktop OS”

Good that you mention Engelbart, because none of the mainstream desktop OSes are close to his ideas, or what the Xerox workstations allowed for, ironically Windows is probably the one most closest to it. While GNU/Linux have the necessary tooling for making it as well, but thanks to the fragmentation and some communities hatred against GNOME/KDE, it will never happen. This is what a modern desktop OS should look like, "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" [this video] Including the part of being written on a memory safe systems programming language.

Strong rec pjmlp · 2021-01 · on “On Repl-Driven Programming”

Be prepared to be amazed with what Xerox PARC and others were doing, while Bell Labs was busy pushing for UNIX. "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" [this video] "Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0" [LINK] "Documents as User Interfaces Video Demo" [LINK] "SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO" [LINK] "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" [LINK] "Action!, the worlds first dynamic interface builder - 1988" (Interface Builder percursor, written in Lisp) [LINK] "The Interlisp programming environment" [LINK] And the cherry, how Lucid used Lisp ideas for their Energize C++ IDE, including an image based format

Strong rec DonHopkins · 2022-01 · on “Xerox PARC Mesa Programming Language 5.0 (1979) [pdf]”

Previous HN discussion about that video: [LINK] [this video] I posted about PCR: [LINK] This is a great video! They discussed and demonstrate Cedar's early text selection, copy and move commands, and compare them to Larry Tesler’s cut and paste (which didn't require any special keys or more than one mouse button). The Tioga text editor and other Cedar applications made common operations like repeatedly copying text into a document from different places very easy and streamlined (fewer actions than cut, copy and paste), by using the shift key while selecting text. Cedar took full advantage of the three button mouse as well as the control and shift keys (for 12 combinations of actions in any contex

Recommends DonHopkins · 2020-03 · on “Sun's NeWS was a mistake, as are all toolkit-in-server windowing systems (2013)”

There are definitely a lot of difficult issues and trade-offs about implementing true "WYSIWYG" editors that let you layout text and graphics that looks exactly the same on the screen and when printed. This Cedar demonstration video has some great examples of many of these issues. The Tioga text editor was "WYSIMOLWYG": what you see is more or less what you get. [this video] Some problems were due to technology and aren't as bad any more. Cedar and NeWS used black-and-white screens and didn't have anti-aliased fonts. CPUs were much slower and memory was much tighter and graphics were not accelerated, so even with color displays (which were usually only 8 bits with a colormap that makes anti-alias

Recommends Grumbledour · 2021-01 · on “Oberon OS Walkthrough (2009)”

It is inspired by it as the wikipedia[0] article notes. Both are inspired by Cedar/Mesa[1] from PARC. There is a great video of Eric Bier showing some of cedars capabilities on youtube[2]. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]

Recommends DonHopkins · 2024-10 · on “The Future of Big Iron: An Interview with IBM’s Christian Jacobi”

Here's another great historic oral history panel with a live demo of Xerox PARC's Cedar, including Eric Bier, Nick Briggs, Chris Jacobi, and Paul McJones: Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar This interpretive production was created from archival footage of Eric Bier, PARC research scientist, demonstrating the Cedar integrated environment and programming language on January 24, 2019. Cedar was an evolution of the Mesa environment/language, developed at PARC’s Computer Science Laboratory originally for the Xerox Alto. Mesa was modular and strongly-typed, and influenced the later Modula family of languages. Cedar/Mesa ran on the D-machine successors to the Alto (such as the Dorado) and added features

Cites teleforce · 2020-04 · on “The Guile in TeXmacs (2019) [pdf]”

I'm surprised nobody mentioning the similarity of TeXmacs to Tioga editor within the legendary CEDAR desktop environment from Xerox [1]: I've read somewhere some years ago that if you can create a usable hybrid combination of MS Office Word document (WYSIWYG) and TeX then you have a killer application for document editor. Additionally, similar to Tioga with the fact that you can also use other programs inside TeXmacs (e.g. spreadsheet, Octave, etc) is a huge boon for productivity [2]. I think the naming of the TeXmacs does create confusion though since it creates the impression that this is combination of TeX and Emacs but it's neither of them. Just like the Holy Roman Empire after the colla

Cites lioeters · 2020-05 · on “The naked truth about writing a programming language (2014)”

Ah, what a delightful rabbit hole your comment led me down.. I've got about twenty tabs open now, articles on the history of (and the relationships between) programming languages and graphical user interfaces. Will enjoy this food for thought! My recent reading has included: Unix: A History and a Memoir (Brian Kernighan) - [LINK] The Development of the C Language (Dennis Ritchie) - [LINK] JavaScript: The First 20 Years (Brendan Eich) - [LINK] (PDF) This morning, this little phrase jumped out: > C was created on a tiny machine as a tool to improve a meager programming environment. What this made me realize is that a language is a user interface. It makes sense how C evolved with UNIX as an op