Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xkriva11 398 days ago
A demonstration of on-the-fly modification of GUI internals in Smalltalk-78: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEz08IlcNMg
2 comments
whartung 398 days ago
My first encounter with ST was at a Macintosh event at college in ‘85.

And there was a fellow there with a Mac Plus, and he had the Apple ST image running on it.

The Apple ST image was a descendant of the original Xerox image. This is the same image that became Squeak. Quite the heritage.

The first the the guy showed me was how easy it was to change the width of the scroll bar. A simple tweak and, voila, the scroll bar changed. This worked particularly well because in the original UI, the scroll bar was a popup (unlike most are today).

It was a dynamic demo to be sure to get that kind of reactivity to development. Made an impression to be sure.

link
lproven 398 days ago
You confused me with "ST" here. I thought you meant the computer called the ST, that could run an Apple OS image.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST

link
rbanffy 398 days ago
I once crashed Squeak by telling it that true:=false
link
Jtsummers 398 days ago
I think that or something like it was a rite of passage in our course using Smalltalk in college (number forgotten). "That couldn't possibly work...Oh, shit."
link
igouy 397 days ago
The "couldn't possibly work" things seem different — they don't crash the VM and exit.
link
igouy 397 days ago
Seems like Cuis Smalltalk also has that crash & exit behavior.

That does not crash Pharo Smalltalk.

That does not crash Dolphin Smalltalk.

link
rbanffy 397 days ago
At that time it didn’t exit - it just hung there forever. Even the mouse wouldn’t move.
link
igouy 396 days ago
Today after re-install on MSWin10

    true := false
Cuis is perfectly OK

    Cannot store into ->
link
speedbird 398 days ago
Object become: nil -- pretty findamental rug pull
link
igouy 397 days ago
Which could be handled without crash & exit behavior.

That does not crash Pharo Smalltalk.

That does not crash Dolphin Smalltalk.

    Object class(Object)>>error:
    Object class(Object)>>primitiveFailed
    Object class(Object)>>become:
    UndefinedObject>>{unbound}doIt
link
rbanffy 397 days ago
Every time a young hacker finds one of these, it gets patched.
link
igouy 396 days ago
Today after re-install on MSWin10

    Object become: nil
Cuis does crash & exit, or hangs, or …

    Sorry but the Squeak VM has crashed.
    …
    crash.dmp
link