Waldemar Kornewald wrote:
On Nov 25, 2007 6:50 PM, Bert Freudenberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Did you actually read the NSF proposal and its secondary literature?
I read everything that didn't smell like "implementation", but I think
I didn't really understand it.
I had the impression that, put very bluntly, it's about teaching
children how to code in an innovative programming language and using
that to teach them science and analytical thinking. The programming
environment would at the same time be a general-purpose computing
system (OS?), maybe similar to Croquet/Squeak, so you can do
everything in it, but you have to be an expert which is no problem
because you get taught everything at school. I definitely haven't yet
understood it and of course this mail is full of irony.
I'm trying hard to not picture an army of little programmers and scientists. :)
I think the VPRI teaching goals are only indirectly related to the FONC
project. The latter seems to be a reexamination of the programming
process with the goal of developing a unified programming model that
works for OS kernels, device drivers, web servers, distributed
databases, office applications, econometrics models, air traffic control
system, gene sequencing, etc. While fundamentally object oriented, I
think the goal is to subsume imperative, functional, logic, and/or other
programming paradigms. We have a Tower of Babel in present day
computing, with the first floor built of various assemblers, C, and
Forth; the second floor built of C, C++, C#, and Java, the third of
these plus Eiffel, Fortran, Lisp, Perl, Python, Ruby, ... Ambitious,
and it'll be interesting to see how successful the effort is.
# Steve
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