The PataPata project (by me) attempted to bring some ideas for Squeak and Self to Python about five years ago. A post mortem critique on it from four years ago:
  "PataPata critique: the good, the bad, the ugly"
  http://patapata.sourceforge.net/critique.html

I am wondering if there is some value in reviving the idea for JavaScript?

Firebug shows what is possible as a sort of computing microscope for JavaScript and HTML and CSS. Sencha Ext Designer shows what is possible as far as interactive GUI design.

Here are some comments I just posted to the list there that touch on system design, Squeak, Self, and some FONC issues:
  "Thoughts on PataPata four years later..."

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=4CACF913.8030405%40kurtz-fernhout.com

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=4CAF294B.8010101%40kurtz-fernhout.com

Anyway, I still think the telescope/microscope issue in designing new computing systems is important, as I suggested here in 2007: "[Edu-sig] Comments on Kay's Reinvention of Programming proposal (was Re: More Pipeline News)"
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/2007-March/007822.html
"There is once again the common criticism leveled at Smalltalk of being too self-contained. Compare this proposal with one that suggested making tools that could be used like telescope or a microscope for relating to code packages in other languages -- to use them as best possible on their own terms (or perhaps virtualized internally). Consider how the proposal suggests scripting all the way down -- yet how are the scripting tools built in Squeak? Certainly not with the scripting language. And consider there are always barriers to any system -- where you hit the OS, or CPU microcode, or proprietary hardware specifications, or even unknowns in quantum physics, and so on. :-) So every system has limits. But by pretending this one will not, this project may miss out on the whole issue of interfacing to systems beyond those limits in a coherent way."

Biology made a lot of progress by inventing the microscope -- and that was done way before it invented genetic engineering, and even before it understood there were bacteria around. :-)

What are our computing microscopes now? What are our computing telescopes? Are debuggers crude computing microscopes? Are class hierarchy browsers and package managers and IDEs and web browsers crude computing telescopes?

Maybe we need to reinvent the computing microscope and computing telescope to help in trying to engineer better digital organisms via FONC? :-) Maybe it is more important to do it first?

But sure, everyone is going to say, we have all the debuggers we need, right? We have all the inspectors, browsers, and so forth we could use?

I know, inventing a "microscope" probably sounded crazy at the time too:
  http://inventors.about.com/od/mstartinventions/a/microscopes.htm
"1590 – Two Dutch eye glass makers, Zaccharias Janssen and son Hans Janssen experimented with multiple lenses placed in a tube. The Janssens observed that viewed objects in front of the tube appeared greatly enlarged, creating both the forerunner of the compound microscope and the telescope."

After, all, everyone in 1590 probably thought biology was already well understood. :-) Dealing with "Evil humors" and "Bad air" and "Bad blood" (requiring leaching) were obvious solutions to what ailed most people -- there was no need to suggest tiny itty-bitty creatures were everywhere, what an absurd idea. Utter craziness.

BTW, the guy who proposed less patients would die if doctors washed their hands before examining them (before much was known about bacteria) essentially got beaten to death for his troubles, too:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

This guy (Herbert Shelton) was hounded by the police and the medical establishment for suggesting about a century ago that sunlight, fasting, and eating whole foods was a recipe for good health:
  http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/shelton.bio.bidwell.htm

That recipe for good health is one we are only rediscovering now, like with the work of Dr. John Cannell and Dr. Joel Fuhrman putting the pieces together, based on the science and scientific tools and communications technology that Herbert Shelton did not have.
  http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw

Still, Herbert Shelton missed one big idea (about DHA) that probably did him in:
  http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/lack_of_DHA_linked_to_Parkinsons.aspx

So, it can be hart to introduce "new ideas", between the risk of being beaten to death by the establishment (after all, how could a gentleman doctor's hands be "unclean"?) and the problem of only being 95% technically right and getting 5% technically or socially very wrong.

Could the "semantic web" be the equivalent of the unknown bacteria of the 1590s? What would computing look like as a semantic web? Alan Kay said in one talk that a baby can grow 20 times in size without being taken down for maintenance. Is the web every "taken down" in its entirety for maintenance?

As I said at the end of my second post linked above: "It's taken a while for me to see this, but, with JavaScript, essentially each web page can be seen like a Smalltalk ObjectMemory (or text-based image like PataPata writes out). While I work towards using the Pointrel System to add triples in a declarative way, in practice, the web of calling cgi scripts at URLs is a lot like message passing (just more like the earlier Smalltalk-72 way without well-defined syntax). So, essentially, a web of HTML pages with JavaScript and CGI on servers is like the Smalltalk system written large. :-) Just in a very ad hoc and inelegant way. :-)"

Anyway, maybe that is not what FONC is about as far as actual new tools (which focuses on being more self-contained or reinventing everything)?
  http://www.viewpointsresearch.org/html/work/ifnct.htm

But, it seems like there is a need for even better microscopes and telescopes to begin to think about all that stuff already around us (especially tools in the hands of the next generation). And, then, with that better knowledge of our surroundings (and history), and with other tools those microscopes and telescopes help us build, then together we can reinvent that emerging dynamic semantic web as needed (or at least improve some parts of it and learn to live better with the rest of it, like we have not wiped out bacteria, but we have learned to appreciate them more, including the good stuff they can do for humanity). Examples:
  "Winemaking"
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winemaking
  "Scientists Develop Plastic-Producing Bacteria"

http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/09/22/scientists-develop-plastic-producing-bacteria/
  "Teen Discovers Plastic-Decomposing Bacteria"
   http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/24/0335242

And even this, about something as basic as mother's milk:
  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/science/03milk.html
"A large part of human milk cannot be digested by babies and seems to have a purpose quite different from infant nutrition — that of influencing the composition of the bacteria in the infant’s gut."

So, through the tools of science, and not just microscopes, but also communications tools, we have moved from thinking of health in terms of evil spirits to seeing it as a partnership with certain bacteria and more an issue of ecological management. :-)

Anyway, in part, this is just about following Dan Ingalls' and Alan Kay's lead like with trying out JavaScript with the Lively Kernel.
  http://www.lively-kernel.org/
But it is also about something else -- something about tools, and asking, what are the tools that we need to survive and prosper in this emerging JavaScript, HTML, CSS, RDF, etc. semantic web we all ready live in and are building more-and-more of around ourselves as a global community?

Anyway, just some things for VPRI and others to think about in terms of new projects.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

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