My very first foray into software was copying a BASIC program from a blackboard and entering it into a mainframe via a DECwriter terminal way back in January 1981, a time when most people didn’t know what a computer was and even fewer knew how to write programs. I was in high school at the […]
Smallworld
Using Powershell with Magik
Magik is a terrific language for many tasks, but it’s at a distinct disadvantage to other languages with respect to interacting with the Operating System and Frameworks. C#, for example, has access to an entire suite of .NET Framework classes and Powershell has tons of built-in Cmdlets that do just about anything you would require. […]
Visual Studio Code and Smallworld 5
Until Smallworld 5 was released, emacs was the standard editor with which to write Magik code. As such I’ve been using it for more than 25 years. It was okay and got the job done. But what I really wanted to use was a modern editor with features such as context-aware autocomplete, tree-like navigation, outline […]
Beeble GeoJSON
In today’s interconnected world, moving data is a given – especially when applications rely on network-based communication. Of course this is nothing new. Since almost the birth of computers we’ve had the need to transport data from one place to another. The rise of the Internet has only exponentially accelerated this need and, today, one […]