ThingLab

ThingLab is a visual programming environment implemented in Smalltalk[1] and designed at Xerox PARC by Alan Borning.

A conventional system allows a user to provide inputs that produce outputs. A constraint-oriented system, such as ThingLab, allows the user to provide arbitrary inputs or outputs, then solves for whatever is unknown. ThingLab is viewed as one of the earliest constraint-oriented systems.

ThingLab is credited in "Fumbling the Future" as a big reason Xerox continued to fund computer development.

References

  1. ^ Borning, Alan (October 1981). "The Programming Language Aspects of ThingLab, a Constraint-Oriented Simulation Laboratory". ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS). 3 (4): 353–387. doi:10.1145/357146.35714. Retrieved March 11, 2026.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.