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Category Archives: Technology

Lisa Source Code: Clascal Evolution

Sunday, February 5, 2023

Here’s another interesting thing I’ve learned about Clascal and Object Pascal: It went through exactly the same evolution from combining object allocation & initialization to separating them that Objective-C did a decade later! In early 1983 Clascal, classes were expected to implement a New method as a function returning that type, taking zero or more […]

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Lisa Source Code: Understanding Clascal

Saturday, February 4, 2023

On January 19, Apple and the Computer History Museum released the source code to the Lisa Office System 7/7 version 3.1, including both the complete Office System application suite and the Lisa operating system. (The main components not released were the Workshop environment and its tooling, including the Edit application and the Pascal, COBOL, BASIC, […]

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Mastodon URIs, not URLs

Sunday, November 20, 2022

One of the annoying things about Mastodon is that it’s tough to share Mastodon links and have them open in your favorite app instead of in a web browser. This is due to the lack of a shared scheme or a shared server—which makes sense for a distributed/federated system, but doesn’t help its usability. One […]

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The Web Sucks Now

Saturday, August 6, 2022

Web pages should be blazing fast on *25 year old* machines, modulo a little lag from more serious crypto. Like, I should be able to build *1998 Mozilla* against a modern SSL stack on my Silicon Graphics O2, and browsing the web should be nearly as fast as it was using Netscape Navigator 4 on […]

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Lucky Dozen

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Today is my twelfth anniversary in Developer Tools at Apple! Still love it, too!

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Raspberry Pi vs SPARCstation 20: Fight!

Saturday, December 26, 2015

A couple weeks back, I tweeted the following: Turns out a Raspberry Pi now is about 6 times as fast as a SPARCstation 20 was 20 years ago. And a Pi 2 is more like 15 times as fast. I was a little low in my numbers, too — they’re more like 7 times and […]

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SBCL test failures on ARM

Saturday, August 15, 2015

For hacking/prototyping/fun purposes I have a few embedded systems laying around. For example, I have a couple of Raspberry Pi systems, one of the original Raspberry Pi model B boards and one of the new Raspberry Pi 2 model B boards. And on everything, I have the latest Steel Bank Common Lisp building. On my […]

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When to use NSOperation vs. GCD

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Mac OS X has a number of concurrency mechanisms, and that increases with Snow Leopard. In addition to run loops, threads (both Cocoa and POSIX) and operations, Snow Leopard adds **Grand Central Dispatch** (GCD), a very lightweight way to represent units of work and the style of concurrency they need, and have the system figure […]

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Welcome to Snow Leopard!

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Last week, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was released! Snow Leopard represents a lot of hard work by a lot of folks at Apple and at seeded third-party developers, and it really shows. Now that it’s shipped, I can actually talk about some of the especially cool things this release has for developers.

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Rebutting Big Nerd Ranch on Objective-C 2.0 dot notation

Friday, August 7, 2009

The Big Nerd Ranch weblog has a new post about Objective-C 2.0 dot notation. They advocate never using it and they’re completely wrong. Given my reaction on Twitter, several people have asked me to write a more in-depth rebuttal. I’ve already addressed when and why you should use Objective-C 2.0 properties and dot notation in […]

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