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Stop Writing Dead Programs

2025-12-04 16:16:53.219769+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments

Interesting both for work, and for thinking about environments and platforms like Emacs: Jack Rusher at Strange Loop 2022: Stop Writing Dead Programs.

I found a taker for the TI99-4a that came into my life, but in pondering the joy of the BASIC environment I was reminded of a lot of the Seymour Papert and Alan Kay ideas that made their way into this talk, about how a great environment isn't just about being able to inspect the state at a given place, but to play with it and let it continue.

My primary environment these days has been XCode, and the problems with Apple's direction on software process are well documented, but as conditional breakpoints are apparently broken and it's harder to change values than it was with CodeView or SoftICE back in the day, I've been pondering this even at my level.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Nature and environment Software Engineering Writing Work, productivity and environment ]

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