On 21/12/2010, at 3:43 AM, John Zabroski wrote: > Let me try to change the topic just a tiny bit. > > For those of you interested in this gambit: If you were to predict where FONC > is going and what will come of the project, what would you do to > out-architect Alan Kay & Co? > > There are many ways I could see people on here answering. You might want to > base your decisions off what they've released so far, issue a code review oh > what they've written so far and comment on how the SLOC could be reduced even > further. Also, you could state your own goals, since Alan, Alex and Ian are > all in the "novel-sized book" club and others in VPRI have more specific > interests (HyperCard legacy continued, etc.)
What's interesting me at the moment is the idea of languages that are not necessarily linear. That's to say language as the form of any representational system (think O-META definition, and beyond). Thus, a GUI is a perfectly valid from of language, taken from this viewpoint... LOC doesn't really provide a useful metric when talking about representation. If the representation system includes all the information in it necessary to explain itself or generate all the information necessary to explain itself from the "bootstraps up", then it could explain itself using either time or space (capacity) as a resource, depending on which resource is more or less scarce. "All the information necessary" would be just enough metalanguage to explain in its own metalanguage what each element of the system is... thus the system becomes a translatable system... able to be used in whatever form the user prefers. You can see glimpses of this when you use certain programming languages where you're allowed to use C++, C, assembler, or other languages interchangeably in certain environments. You can also see the edges of this in operation somewhat when listening to two people who speak two common languages are communicating. It's a beautiful thing. Add a machine in there that lets you explain anything from any language to any other language because all the languages have been translated into a common meta-language, and you get something incredibly powerful in terms of pedagogy. Have you seen the iOS program that does live language OCR on the video camera input? Interesting what happens when you connect up some common things these days isn't it? :) Word Lens it's called... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2OfQdYrHRs) Just my 2 cents. Julian. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
