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[Lift] Good problems to have...

Meredith Gregory
Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:50:01 -0800

David and other Lifted folk,

i just saw this paragraph.

I am projecting the kind of issues that Greg Meredith is having with Lift.
> From reading the code that Tony and Greg have written, they have a similar
> coding style and I believe a similarly rigorous approach to design and
> development.  Lift is a blend of FP and OO, stateless and stateful,
> transformative and imperative.  And, as Lift gets closer to 1.0, I'm not
> sure that we got the balance right.
>

Just to be clear, most of my Lift apps are complete toys. My last couple of
years of work have been on some language design features focused on
providing language level support for next generation search capability. [1]
This can all be demo'd in a REPL. However, in the modern culture, if it
isn't a webapp, it is worth looking at. ;-( So, i have been wrapping up
REPLs for my little experiments in Lift-based web apps. There's little to no
exploration of Lift's actual capabilities in these applications.

That said, even in these little applications i have seen real promise in
Lift. One of the ways i'd like to test Lift is to see how hard it would be
to write a generator for the applications i have built. All of these apps
should be completely generable from the BNFC file describing the parser. If
i can climb up the productivity ladder to only having to produce a little
language spec and generating a (shell for a) full on web-based REPL, then i
have really gotten bang for buck.

In the next phase of my work i am actually going to test Lift, itself in
terms of scale and capability. You've been warned ;-).

Best wishes,

--greg

[1] Those interested might read the following posts.

   - 3 applications of indexed
compositions<http://biosimilarity.blogspot.com/2009/01/3-applications-of-indexed-composition.html>
   - distributed
zipper<http://biosimilarity.blogspot.com/2009/01/distributed-zipper.html>
   - domain specific
solvers<http://biosimilarity.blogspot.com/2009/01/domain-specific-solvers.html>

The context in which these technologies have been developed is to leap frog
the ideas i pursued when i founded the biotech company that has produced this
offering <http://www.cellucidate.com/>. At the end of the day, i am
exploring language based support for building web-based applications that
support the following kinds of queries.


   - (Behavioral and structural queries in physical systems) Find all the
   pathways, p, in <SignallingPathwayDB> such that when <Reagent> is added in
   concentration K p eventually reaches states in which we see these
   <Reagent1>,...,<ReagentN> in concentrations K1,...,KN.
   - (Behavioral and structural queries in logical systems) Find all the
   implementations of message queue in http://svn.myrepo.org such that the
   queue is FIFO and use the Xerces XML parser for XML-encoded messages
   - (Structural queries in physical systems) Find all the knots in <KnotDB>
   that have alternations of <Trefoil> and any 7-crossing knot as subknots
   - (Geometric queries in physical systems) Find all the conduit wires
   running from the nose of the aircraft to the midsection that are likely to
   undergo a twist between source and destination



-- 
L.G. Meredith
Managing Partner
Biosimilarity LLC
806 55th St NE
Seattle, WA 98105

+1 206.650.3740

http://biosimilarity.blogspot.com

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  • [Lift] Good problems to have... Meredith Gregory