Hi folks, I've been enjoying this discussion and happy to see this list come to life. Coming out of lurk mode to toss my $0.02 in.
On 2010-03-11, at 11:05 PM, Julian Leviston wrote: > No, generally programming involves changing the nature of a program. Using > Gmail doesn't change the way the program runs. It simply runs it. Perhaps GMail is a bad example, but James Noble and Robert Biddle made a convincing (to me, at least) argument that Google's search bar is a programming language, in their "Notes on Postmodern Programming." http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/comp/Publications/archive/CS-TR-02/CS-TR-02-9.pdf What I remember of their presentation at OOPSLA was their making a stronger case than in the paper above, so I will try to summarize it. 1. A programming language is defined by the types of problems we can solve with it 2. One common problem to start off CS students with is "write a program that returns the first thousand prime numbers" 3. Pulls up web browser, types "first 1000 primes" in search bar 4. Clicks on answer Other have made the argument that Google is essentially the modern command-line interface, but I think this goes way beyond Google. Things like mash-ups are made possible by the View Source nature of the web, every web page becomes an API. The ubiquity of Javascript is what makes it powerful, not so much the actual syntax of Javascript (although I will go on record that I *like* Javascript). And back to Andrey's example that Julian was responding to. We can write bookmarklets or GreaseMonkey scripts, or browser plugins that change every aspect of GMail. We can use GMail to make general Google Queries. We can embed spreadsheets and other executable code into GMail messages. How much goal direction and configuration is needed to become "a program?" --Dethe _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
