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It's a talk by two Daniels, a father and a son:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_H._H._Ingalls_Sr.

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ingalls

The later: "is a pioneer of object-oriented computer programming and the principal architect, designer and implementer of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He designed the bytecoded virtual machine that made Smalltalk practical in 1976. He also invented bit blit, the general-purpose graphical operation that underlies most bitmap graphics systems today, and pop-up menus. He designed the generalizations of BitBlt to arbitrary color depth, with built-in scaling, rotation, and anti-aliasing."

As Dan Sr. talks about the research on how the epics were made and recited, he refers, around the 12th minute, to Milman Parry and Albert Lord, and we're now lucky that there is Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature On-Line:

https://mpc.chs.harvard.edu/

Although most of it is in too "raw" state to be used by the researchers, who probably depend on the more processed editions.




Interesting bio info for Ingalls Jnr, thanks: Fun to see his wry references to the performance issues that dogged Smalltalk and which, I would argue, ultimately prevented it from achieving the far more significant place in programming that its design deserved.


The talk is from 1980, but right after that L Peter Deutsch and Allan Shiffman added dynamic compilation to Smalltalk (known as "JIT" these days) and made it a reasonable option on the new 68000 based workstations that were coming out. This technology was spun out as the company ParcPlace in 1987. So Dan's comment "... or make Smalltalk faster!" was actually prophetic.




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