AI article
The Postcard That Ate Six Grammars: 1980 Smalltalk-80, 1976 Make, TDD, and the Four Attractors of Agentic Coding
Community description: Why maintaining six separate parsers for Make, Gherkin, EBNF, DOT, SysV, and prompt checklists collapsed into a single Smalltalk-80 keyword cascade—and how 40-year-old Xerox PARC technology gave AI coding agents mathematical zero-amnesia.
Dev.to | Nov 3, 2026 | Randal L. Schwartz
Automated excerpt
Why did 1980 Xerox PARC Smalltalk-80 eat the inner five while pairing with 1976 Make on the outside? So why did we choose 1980 Smalltalk-80 over Tcl for our 2026 agent control plane? Smalltalk-80 Image & Keyword Fabric Inner Execution & Memory Fabric: StateGraph >> state:invariant:onSuccess:onFailure:, thisContext #storeString, baseline.sources + .changes + Smalltalk condenseChanges, on:do: unwind, and self call: human gate continuations.
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