Rochus and I were arguing about this a couple of weeks ago, and I read through a bunch of historical papers, including Teitelbaum talking about how Smalltalk influenced Interlisp-D and Lampson more or less attributing the GUI to Smalltalk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857855
replyI had no idea about the Interface Builder Lisp history!
I really don’t remember much influence of smalltalk on interlisp at the time (I worked in the KSL, though I was working on 3Lisp so Interlisp was in theory just our implementation language…but of course boundaries were not what PARC was about.
replyMesa and Cedar interested me as I got into programming languages, but I was more into Trellis/Owl (and had copies of the documentation provided to me by DEC SRC after I wrote to them).
replyThe LeLisp version of Interface Builder that JMH wrote at INRIA predates the timeline in your link.
replyThat link is the official story I am aware of, where can I read about that one?
replyI have a paper copy of a paper (in French) about SOS Interface. Had scans of this at one point.
replyThere is a bit more of a timeline in a talk [1] he gave at INRIA a couple of years before he died.
[1] https://www.inria.fr/en/jean-marie-hullot-perforated-cards-i...
> Which then influenced Mesa, Cedar
replyIn what respect? What sources for this claim do you have?
You and I already went through this discussion at great length two weeks ago, and I came up with lots of sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857855
replyThe Xerox papers on digital archive, I can try to hunt them down, see for example the one on XDE Tajo experience for Mesa.
replyMPS/MPL began in 1971; the Mesa name was adopted in June 1974; an Alto cross-compiler worked in spring 1975. Cedar is both a language (an extension of Mesa, e.g. by a GC, but the OO features proposed by Lampson were never implemented to my knowledge) and a development environment. I assume your claim is about the latter. The programming language doesn't have anything in common with Smalltalk, and the fundamental work even predated the latter.
replyYes my claim is about the IDE experience shared across all Xerox PARC environments, and how it affected the design of each language individually.
replyI will hunt down the papers.
We should not forget that the original Alto operating system(s) had a GUI already and was the basis of well known applications like Bravo or Gypsy; the original OS and the said applications were implemente in BCPL; and all were operational before Smalltalk-76. By Wirth's first PARC visit in 1976–77, Mesa had already become a self-hosting systems-development tool (small operating system and symbolic debugger); I'm not aware of any substantial Smalltalk influence at that time.
reply> I'm not aware of any substantial Smalltalk influence at that time.
replyYou should be, because I spent hours telling you about it, in detail, with citations from the designers of the Alto and Bravo, less than two weeks ago. At the time you conceded the point and said it was not what you intended to dispute: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857855