I once had some Norwegian room mates in Ireland, and whenever we collectively couldn't find the proper English word, we usually got lucky with our native tongues. When listening to Scandi TV series, I'm still surprised more than I should be by the occasional match (recently: suddenly -> "plutselig", similar to German "plötzlich").
Now, as for the Danish room mate, he might as well have been speaking Greek.
In Norway, Danish is sometimes subjected to friendly ridicule as sounding like Norwegian spoken with a potato in your mouth...
Danish is if anything ever so slightly closer to German in vocabulary and grammar, but the pronunciation is another matter.
The effect is bigger in writing. In high school I worked my way through Faust in German by finding an old Danish translation as a parallel text - the old Danish version was a decent halfway point when I struggled too much with the German, and helped me find similarities I wouldn't otherwise.
I studied in Trondheim for a semester and learned some Norwegian. Whenever I didn't know a word, I just pronounced the Dutch or English word in a 'Norwegian way'. Most of the time people didn't even blink. So much so that I'd then ask them if the word I just used existed and invariably the answer was that that was the correct word.
Enlightenment always had a pretty weird value proposition. In the very beginning, there was "fvwm-xpm" and early "E" prototypes. They were graphically crazy with a heavy focus on shaped Windows. There's still nothing quite like that weird steampunk/Brazil-ish theme they had. Probably for a reason.
Then they went both visually rather tame and scope-creepy (own graphical libraries etc.). At the beginning I was hoping that we'd get some kind of Amiga-influenced design sensibilities on X (basically a more "artsy" MUI), but that never manifested.
Yeah, I saw that back in the day, and it's great, but that was too faithful. I liked the eye candy of Enlightenment, but with a nod to the nostalgia...
There is still a lot of things I miss from the Amiga, but I'm acutely aware that a lot of what I wish for are based on rather rose-tinted memories.
> There is still a lot of things I miss from the Amiga, but I'm acutely aware that a lot of what I wish for are based on rather rose-tinted memories.
Yes! I have often wondered what it would be like trying to daily drive an OS4 amiga for modern stuff. I suspect it probably wouldn't be super awesome, mainly due to lack of software for modern things. But I'd really like to try it - if only I could run OS4 on an x86 PC*. I would definitely try it out.
(* yes, I know I can run it in an emulator, but that's not the same)
One thing I'd particularly love to see is something like ARexx adopted in modern OS's and software. It would be super-useful to have most applications expose something like an arexx port, would make a lot of cool things very easy to do.
The odd thing is that a lot of Linux software does have Dbus support, but it somehow feels like the barrier is a lot higher and buy-in a lot worse. Just throwing together ad-hoc scripts w/dbus feels like it has a higher barrier.
Datatypes is another obvious one - present-day Amiga's can support modern image formats in apps that haven't seen updates for 25+ years...
I recently added hacky assigns to my (very hacky) little shell, as an experiment, as it's one of those features that feels like it's "just" link symlinks setting an environment variable to a path, but as it turns out it really is a lot more ergonomic (to me at least).
I've settled on a tiling wm w/one floating desktop to sort-of emulate how I typically used my Amiga screens, and that I like.
> if only I could run OS4 on an x86 PC*. I would definitely try it out.
AROS would be the closest thing. E.g. AROS One (a distribution)
It's been many years since I spent any time on AROS, so I don't know what it's like at the moment. Back then I could boot the Linux-hosted version of AROS with a startup-sequence that booted straight into FrexxEd (editor w/extensive AREXX support co-written by the author of Curl) faster than a default install of Emacs would start on the same machine.
You make a good point about dbus. It is sooooort of similar if you squint. But I think both your points are correct. I feel like the buy-in factor is probably the big one - I think if there was lots of buy in the tooling would probably get easier.
How did I not think of datatypes? Yeah, omg they were do great. I'll never forget my amazement when I installed one (I think for jpeg) and now just everything supported jpeg.
I think IIRC beos did something similar to that.
Oh yeah I've seen AROS, but like you I haven't actually fired it up in a long time. The last time I did it was "Amiga Research Operating System".
I just noticed on their wikipedia:
there is also an ARM port for the Raspberry Pi series
That sounds like a good excuse to break out one of these pis I have sitting around!
> Teapot is pretty great, it's too bad there is close to zero room for real innovation in the spreadsheet domain.
One issue is that this is hard to do while still retaining backwards compatibility. Lotus Improv basically gave you no other choice, something that Excel The Next Version can't do. And I doubt that we're getting a third MS app, no Multiplan -> Excel -> NewSpreadsheetThingProbablyCalledCopilotAnyway.
I know a lot of people that don't even use Excel's tables, introduced almost 20 years ago. But instead they painstakingly recreate most of its built-in features. It's just an easy shortcut away, and has plenty of GUI support hidden in the ribbon morass, but it's not the default state…
Way back in the days, I always thought that Tcl/Tk had a pretty good packaging story compared to the P-languages, given the presence of Starkits-/packs[1], and (somewhat sadly) the absence of dependencies.
I think they still exist in theory. The last time I tried one it crashed. The original TCLKit developer has not maintained it for years, but it is still around.
I'd say most people run Emacs in the GUI mode, not in a terminal. So these days, you're pretty much on the same level as most rivals.
Sadly, "these days" is a low bar. The days of consistent platform-specific "Human Interface Guidelines" are over, it's all just a browser wrapped in a top-level window or something that simulates that, with most interaction patterns being a cargo cult of how it's remembered from the 90s. So "GUI" means that some unique overlays can be drawn without a fixed width character grid and that you might get the original file requester now and then.
I mostly run Emacs in a terminal, except I configure for two finger scroll on Mac trackpad and tap to move cursor. I also reduced the size of my .emacs by 60% in the last year.
Now, as for the Danish room mate, he might as well have been speaking Greek.
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