In no particular order: 100r.co, OpenBSD (& its many individual contributors such as tedu or JCS), Suckless/9front, sr.ht, Alpine, Gemini (&gopher) & all the people you can find there, Low Tech Magazine, antirez, Fabrice Bellard, Virgil Dupras (CollapseOS), & many other people, communities, and projects - sorry I don't have a single comprehensive list, that's just off the top of my head ;)
I would add Jochen Liedtke (unfortunately he passed away already more than 20 years ago) as inventor of the L4 microkernel.
Several research groups continued work on L4 after Liedtke's death (Hermann Härtig in Dresden, Gernot Heiser in Sydney, a bit of research at Frank Bellosa's group in Karlsruhe and more industrial research on L4 for embedded/RT systems by Robert Kaiser, later a professor in Wiesbaden), but I would still argue that Liedtke's original work was the most influential, though all the formal verification work in Sydney also had significant impact - but that was only enabled by the simplicity of the underlying microkernel concepts and implementations.
i... really don't think kris de decker is on niklaus wirth's level. i don't think he can write so much as fizzbuzz
fabrice bellard is wirth-level, it's true. not sure about tedu and jcs, because i'm not familiar enough with their work. it's absurd to compare most of the others to wirth and hoare
you're comparing kindergarten finger paintings to da vinci
> it's absurd to compare most of the others to wirth and hoare
You're the one trying to directly compare achievement, not me. If you're looking for top achievers, I'd have to name PHP or systemd, and THAT would be out of place ;)
I even said "in no particular order", because I don't think any two can be easily compared.
My main criterion for inclusion was the drive for simplifying technology, and publishing these efforts:
> An apostle [...], in its literal sense, is an emissary. The word is [...] literally "one who is sent off" [...]. The purpose of such sending off is usually to convey a message, and thus "messenger" is a common alternative translation.
Every single project, person, or community I've named here has some form of web page, blog, RSS feed, papers/presentations, and/or source code, that serve to carry their messages.
Achievement can be measured, simplicity can only be appreciated.
uxn is cool but it's definitely not the same kind of achievement as oberon, pascal, quicksort, forth, and structured programming; rek and devine would surely not claim it was
you don't get to be described as an 'apostle of simplicity' just because you like simplicity. you have to actually change the world by creating simplicity. devine and rek are still a long way from a turing award
you don't get to dictate who does or doesn't get recognized for creating awesome works that influence and inspire others. take your persistent negativity elsewhere.
btw, uxn is absolutely the exemplification of "software built for humans to understand" and simplicity. I mean...
> the resulting programs are succinct and translate well to pen & paper computing.
> to make any one program available on a new platform, the emulator is the only piece of code that will need to be modified, which is explicitly designed to be easily implemented
i don't think uxn is trivial, i think it's a first step toward something great. it definitely isn't the exemplification of "software built for humans to understand"; you have to program it in assembly language, and a stack-based assembly language at that. in that sense it's closer to brainfuck than to hypertalk or excel or oberon. it falls short of its goal of working well on small computers (say, under a megabyte of ram and under a mips)
the bit you quote about uxn having a standard virtual machine to permit easy ports to new platforms is from wirth's 01965 paper on euler http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/euler-2/; it isn't something devine and rek invented, and it may not have been something wirth invented either. schorre's 01963 paper on meta-ii targets a machine-independent 'fictitious machine' but it's not turing-complete and it's not clear if he intended it to be implemented by interpretation rather than, say, assembler macros
i suggest that if you develop more tolerance for opinions that differ from your own, instead of deprecating them as 'persistent negativity' and 'dictating', you will learn more rapidly, because other people know things you don't, and sometimes that is why our opinions differ. sometimes those things we know that you don't are even correct
i think this is one of those cases. what i said, that you were disagreeing with, was that uxn was not the same kind of achievement as oberon, pascal, quicksort, forth, and structured programming (and, let me clarify, a much less significant achievement) and that it is a long way from [meriting] a turing award. i don't see how anyone could possibly disagree with that, or gloss it as 'uxn is trivial', as you did, unless they don't know what those things are
i am pretty sure that if you ask devine what he thinks about this comment, you will find that he agrees with every word in it
Someone sent me this thread so I could answer, and I do agree. I for one think uxn is trivial, it was directly inspired by the VM running Another World and created to address a similar need. It's not especially fast, or welcoming to non-programmers, it was a way for my partner and I to keep participating in this fantastic universe that is software development, even once our access to reliable hardware was becoming uncertain. It's meant to be approachable to people in a similar situation and related interests, and possibly inspire people to look into assembly and stack machines -- but it has no lofty goals beyond that. We're humbled that it may have inspired a handful of developers to consider what a virtual machine designed to tackle their own needs might look like.
A lot of our work is owed to Wirth's fantastic documentation on Oberon, to the p-machine and to pascal. Niklaus' works has influenced us in ways that it would be very unlikely that we could pass forward. I'm sad to hear of Nicklaus' passing, there are people who inspire me in similar ways, that are alive today and that I look up to for inspiration, but to me, Wirth's work will remain irreplaceable. :)
There wasn't a single place I asserted that uxn is specifically novel or unprecedented. In fact, Devine's own presentation[0] about uxn specifically cites Wirth and Oberon, among countless other inspirations and examples. I'm saying it's awesome, accessible, simple and open.
I don't need to "develop more tolerance for differing opinions" - I have no problem with them and am completely open to them, even from people who I feel are communicating in an unfriendly, patronizing or gatekeeping manner. rollcat shared some other people and projects and you took it upon yourself to shoot down as much as possible in that comment - for what purpose? No one said Drecker is "on Wirth's level" when it comes to programming. We don't need him to write FizzBuzz, let alone any other software. I'm sorry you don't recognize the value of a publication like Low-Tech Magazine, but the rest of us can, and your need to shoot down that recognition is why I called your messages persistently negative.
Further, when I give kudos to uxn and recognize it as a cool piece of software, there's absolutely no point in coming in and saying "yeah but it's no big deal compared to ____" , as if anyone was interested in some kind of software achievement pissing contest. The sanctity and reverence for your software idols is not diluted nor detracted from by acknowledging, recognizing and celebrating newer contributors to the world of computing and software.
I have to come back and edit this and just reiterate: All I originally said was "uxn ftw" and you found it necessary to "put me in my place" about something I didn't even say/assert, and make it into some kind of competition or gatekeeping situation. Let people enjoy things. And now, minimizing this thread and never looking at it again.
Yeah, these younguns have a lot to learn. :-) The notion that there's something innovative about using a small VM to port software is hilarious. BTW, here is a quite impressive and effective use of that methodology: https://ziglang.org/news/goodbye-cpp/
Dewey Schorre and Meta II, eh? Who remembers such things? Well, I do, as I was involved with an implementation of Meta V when I was on the staff of the UCLA Comp Sci dept in 1969.
Heh, no way do I remember the details. I just remember that we were rewriting it in 360 assembler but I left before that was completed (if it was), and that I wrote an Algol syntax checker in Meta V that was obliquely referenced at the end of RFC 57.
I think it was a very minor contribution ... they wrote a pseudo-Algol program as a form of documentation of their network protocol and were concerned about checking the grammar/syntax of the program (people actually cared about the quality of documentation back then), and I wrote a syntax checker for it in Meta V, as it was on hand because it was written at UCLA (I don't know whether it was Dewey (Val) who designed and implemented Meta V or someone else) and was used by people in the Comp Sci Dept. to design programming languages. But the dept was shifting to networking at the time (the IMP had just arrived) under the direction of Leonard Kleinrock and through the efforts of pioneers Steve Crocker, Vint Cerf, and Jon Postel (all of whom had attended Taft High School together) ... this is why the authors of that network protocol were visiting UCLA. I got involved because I worked for Crocker, under the direct management of Charley Kline, who was the fellow who made the first ever networked login.
(steps to reproduce: install dependencies; make; rm admu-shell admu-shell-fb admu-shell-wercam admu admu.o admu-shell.o admu_tv_typewriter.o; time make -j. it only takes 0.37 seconds if you only make -j admu-shell and don't build the other executables. measured on debian 12.1 on a ryzen 5 3500u)
i wrote pretty much all of it on october 12 and 13 of 02018 so forgive me if i don't think that writing a terminal emulator without scrollback is an achievement comparable to pascal and oberon etc.
not even if it were as great as st (and actually admu sucks more than st, but it can still run vi and screen)
Last I checked, st was around 8k lines. It's not bad (xterm's scrollbar and button handling is in a similar LOC range), but I'd argue it's not minimalist, so even if writing a terminal had qualified, st isn't it.
WRT to the scrollback it seems like they're going overboard in being difficult about features that adds little code but has much impact, while not paying close attention to their dependencies. Things they could've done without (the copy on my system includes libz, libpng, libexpat (assuming for fontconfig, which is itself a giant steaming pile of excessive complexity), and even libbrotlicommon... I'm pretty sure I have no brotli images on my system that st has any business touching...
I used st until I replaced it with my own, and I can't fault it for many things in terms of usability, though. Other than the box drawing - it's not pixel perfect (I only bring that up because I bikeshedded a pixel-perfect override for the boxdrawing characters for my font renderer when I was bored a while back so it's the one place where I can crow about mine being better than st ;) - in every other area it still has warts to clean up)
it would be interesting to see what an even more minimalist and more usable terminal emulator looked like. both your work and st are constrained by having to support terminal control languages with a lousy strength to weight ratio, something oberon opted out of
Yeah, there's a ton of cruft. On one hand I find it fun to see how much of vttest I can make it through, on the other hand, supporting DECALN (DEC service test pattern - just fills the screen with capital E) is just a boxticking exercise, and while that's one of the dumbest one there are also dozens that are hardly ever used, or that are used in rare cases but doesn't really need to.
That is one area where st's "tmux copout" on scroll somewhat makes sense - it would be a reasonable option to define a clean sufficient subset that lets you run enough stuff to tell people to just run anything that breaks under tmux/screen or a separate filter.
But from what I see with terminals, there's a lot of reluctance to do this not because people believe all these codes are so important but because it seems to become a bit of a matter of pride to be a precise as possible. I admit to having succumbed to a few myself, like support for double-width and double-height characters, as well as "correct" (bright/dim rather than on/off) blink and support for the nearly unsupported rapid blink... There is also a pair of escape codes to enable and disable fraktur. This is fertile ground for procrastinating terminal developers to implement features used by one person in the 70's sometime.
At the same time I sometime catch myself hoping some of these features will be used more... A very few I'll probably add support for because I want to use them in my text editor, e.g. different coloured underlines, and squiggly underlines are both easy to do and actually useful..
I think with a cleaner set of control codes, though, you could certainly fit quite a few of those features and still reduce the line count significantly...
I have used DECALN, which is sometimes useful for testing purpose (especially in full screen, although sometimes even if it isn't).
I will want to see support for the PC character set, for EUC character sets (including EUC-TRON), TRON-8 character code, bitmap fonts (including non-Unicode fonts), Xaw-like scrolling and xterm-like selecting, ability to disable receiving (not only sending) 8-bit controls (which should be used to switch between EUC-JP and EUC-TRON, as well as other purposes), a "universal escape" sequence (recognized anywhere even in the middle of other sequences), and some security features (I have some ideas that I don't even know if it is possible on Linux or on BSD, such as checking the foreground process, and being able to discard any data the terminal emulator sent to the application program that as not yet been read yet, which can avoid a file or remote server to send answerbacks which will execute commands in the shell, if you add a cancellation code into the shell prompt, etc)
It's a one-liner to fill your screen, and the fraction of people who even know DECALN exist is so small I wouldn't be surprised if the total invocations of DECALN by terminal users in recent decades is smaller than the number of indirect invocations by terminal implementers via vttest.
It made sense as a service tool on a physical terminal, not much now. It's not that it's a problem - it's trivial to support. It's just that it is an example of one of hundreds of little features that are box-ticking exercises that would cause about a dozen people worldwide to shrug if they noticed they weren't there before they'd do the same thing a slightly different way and not think about it again.
Some of the ones you list are useful some places, but many of them don't need to be in every terminal. I want more, but smaller, options built from generic reusable components.
E.g. most of my terminal does not care what your character set is, or what type of fonts you want to use, or how your scrolling works, or if you have scroll bars, or whether there is a shell, or whether there's a program being run by a terminal vs. a program embedding the terminal, or if it's running in a window, or whether it has GUI output at all or is entirely headless. This is true for most terminals. Yet these components are rarely separated and turned into reusable pieces of code.
Most of the features you list are features I don't need, won't implement, and don't care about. But what I do care about is that with some exceptions (e.g. the Gnome VTE widget) most terminals reinvent way too much from scratch (and frankly most users of terminal widgets like VTE still reinvent way too much other stuff from scratch), put too much effort into supporting far too many features that are rarely used, instead of being able to pick a terminal that is mostly just pulling in generic components as a starting point.
The result is a massive amount of code that represents the same features written over and over and over again and sucking time out of the bits that differentiate terminals in ways useful to users.
E.g. just now I've been starting to untangle the bits in my terminal that handles setting up the PTY and marshaling IO between the shell or other program running in it and the bits that handle the output to the actual terminal. The goal is to make it as easy for casual scripts to open a terminal window and control it as it was on the Amiga, without having to spawn a separate script to "run in it".
On the Amiga you could e.g. do "somecommand >CON:x/y/w/h/Sometitle" to redirect "somecommands" output to a separate terminal window without any foreground process, with the given dimensions and title, and assorted other flags available (e.g. "/CLOSE" would give yo ua close button, "/WAIT" would keep the window open after the process that opened it went away etc.).
If you've written a terminal, then part of your terminal represents 99% of the code to provide something almost like that.
Beyond that, I'm going to rip the escape code handling out too, so code that don't want to do escape codes still can pretend they're talking to a terminal with a somewhat ncurses-y interface but with the freedom to redirect the rendering or render on top of it, or whatever, then that makes "upgrading" from a terminal UI to somewhat of a GUI far easier (the Amiga, again, had a lot of this, with apps that'd mix the same system console handler used for the terminal with few graphical flourishes; it lowered the threshold to start building more complex UI's immensely)
Then I'm going to extract out the actual rendering to the window into a separate component from the code that maintains the (text) screen buffer, so that I can write code that uses the same interface to render either to a terminal or directly to a window.
Same for e.g. font-handling - I've decided I don't care about bitmap fonts, but the actual bit of my terminal that cares about any kind of fonts is ~40 lines of code, and to most of my terminal components it doesn't matter if you output anything anywhere, but even of the remaining code actually dealing with GUI output, 3/4 doesn't care, or know, about fonts at all (managing a window, clearing, filling, scrolling take up more). Making it pluggable so someone could plug in either a client side bitmap font renderer or code to use the old X11 text drawing calls is trivial.
Because with all of these things broken out into components it doesn't matter much if my terminal doesn't support your feature set, if "writing another terminal" doesn't mean writing the 95% of the code that implements shared functionality over and over again.
You could write literally half a dozen of custom tiny terminals like that before even approaching the line count of xterm's mouse button handling code alone.
That is good, to have separate components of the codes, that can then be reused. Do you have terminal emulator codes with such things? Then, we can see, and it can easily be modified.
i've been thinking that maybe nested tables would be better than character cells, for example, accommodating proportional fonts and multiple sizes much better
Everyone has... I'm not sure it's a big loss, but I found it funny to "fix" and the fun of tweaking tiny things like that lies at the core of a whole lot of terminal bikeshedding...
> i've been thinking that maybe nested tables would be better than character cells, for example, accommodating proportional fonts and multiple sizes much better
A lot of simplicity could easily go away if it's not done well, but I like the idea. I want to eventually support some limited "upgrades" in that direction, but will take some cleanup efforts before that'll be priority.
