Thanks for the response. That kind of sounds like the goal is fewer lines of code (and presumably less labor) per unit of function (increasing productivity). Is that correct?
On 2010-07-08, at 06:01 PM, Alan Kay wrote: > Once a project gets going it usually winds up with a few more goals than > those that got it started -- partly because the individual researchers bring > their own perspectives to the mix. > > But the original goals of STEPS were pretty simple and longstanding. They > came from thinking that the size of many large systems in terms of amount of > code written seemed very far out of balance -- by many orders of magnitude -- > with intuitions about their actual "mathematical content". This led to a > "science of the artificial" approach of taking the phenomena of already > produced artifacts in the general area of personal computing, and seeing if > very compact "runable maths" could be invented and built to model very > similar behaviors. > > If this could be done, then some of the approaches in the new models would > represent better ways to design and program to complex behaviors -- which > could be very illuminating about systems designs and representations -- and > some of these would likely be advances in programming in general. > > I think of this as "scientific exploration via coevolving mathematics and > engineering". _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
