Technologies that exist in a parallel universe

[nicefish]

I'll start:

<script language="[glow=green,2,300]wabascript[/glow]">

[nicefish]

I'll start:

<script language="[glow=green,2,300]wabascript[/glow]">

Damn I outed myself as a boomer.

[Mozai]

I remember <script language="Python"> and I even saw it implemented.  Alas, everybody deploys the cheapest version they can.  Only windows really gave us the variety promised by the language attrib of the <script> tag, since MSHTML.DLL was tied into everything in the OS, so you install Python into the WSH and then iexplore.exe could hand that chunk of text over to WSH for interpreting.

My offer:  A world where Lisp-machines were stubbornly preserved, so ALGOL and its children didn't dominate computer programming.

[nicefish]

I remember <script language="Python"> and I even saw it implemented.  Alas, everybody deploys the cheapest version they can.  Only windows really gave us the variety promised by the language attrib of the <script> tag, since MSHTML.DLL was tied into everything in the OS, so you install Python into the WSH and then iexplore.exe could hand that chunk of text over to WSH for interpreting.

My offer:  A world where Lisp-machines were stubbornly preserved, so ALGOL and its children didn't dominate computer programming.

(Score:5, Insightful)

[here cums the fuck truck]

 

I remember <script language="Python"> and I even saw it implemented.  Alas, everybody deploys the cheapest version they can.  Only windows really gave us the variety promised by the language attrib of the <script> tag, since MSHTML.DLL was tied into everything in the OS, so you install Python into the WSH and then iexplore.exe could hand that chunk of text over to WSH for interpreting.

My offer:  A world where Lisp-machines were stubbornly preserved, so ALGOL and its children didn't dominate computer programming.

(Score:5, Insightful)

damn i have a six digit slashdot id.. this really takes me back..

what the heck is algol childern

[Mozai]

four-digit slashdot.org ID.  That just means I've been there too long.  The editors lately are shit, with one exceptionally bad.

I forgot Fortran precedes ALGOL.  Way the fuck back when it was COBOL, Fortran/Algol, and Lisp.  COBOL was easy to write but awkward to use and modify.  Lisp was slow.  So Fortran won.

What if the computer-programming revolution happened in a country with a syllabary instead of an alphabet?  We'd still have 8-bit bytes, but we'd probably use single bytes as tokens instead of strings of bytes.

[nicefish]

C:\WINDOWS\TEMP -> C:\WINDOWS\EVANESCENT

[nicefish]

Soylent but for cats and dogs.

Oh wait we already have that in this universe.

[nicefish]

Phones with a built-in heater feature.

[nicefish]

Phones with a built-in heater feature.

https://codepen.io/Nicefish/pen/GRyaLNv

Was going to make one but God says no. It was going to keep adding 1x1 divs on a setInterval 0. Not sure how much it would have warmed my phone though.

[kayimbo]

telephone pills that come in pairs, and you and a friend swallow them then can talk to each other

photosynthesis patches you slap on your forearm, and leak glucose into your blood instead of eating.

Alcohol bars where none of the alcohol is ethanol

[kayimbo]

dark bulbs then when you turn them on make the area dark around them

[Mozai]

computers... a syllabary instead of an alphabet

TBH I doubt I'll stop thinking of that idea.  I'm gonna try something simple, like Katakana or Canadian Aboriginal where a syllable is always consonant (or null) followed by a vowel.  Katakana has 16 consontants (four bits) and five vowels (three bits), which we can fit in the same space as 7-bit ASCII with room left over for non-printable characters like \x00-\x31.  I think the actual glyph count is 100, more than the 95 printable in ASCII, but both 100 and 95 are less than the 127 of 7-bit ASCII.  and there's still one more bit in the register for 256 different bytes!

Canadian Aboriginal is only 55 glyphs, tho some dialects want up to 25 more glyphs, for a total of 80.  That still leaves room for punctuation symbols.  Each glyph does double-duty as both the unvoiced and voiced sound so not a great choice for the must-be-unambiguous world of giving machines instructions.

[nepnep]

a 3d avatar that you can use across all 3d games:


with links to your internet homepage and other stuff packaged inside of it:

[nicefish]

SHA-69