On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 12:09 AM, Alan Kay <[email protected]> wrote:

> The larger problems will require something like "negotiation" between
> modules (this idea goes back to some of the agent ideas at PARC, and was
> partially catalyzed by the AM and Eurisko work by Doug Lenat).
>

Separate thread of thought:

Some rather successful designs do recursive negotiation for request
resolution.  I gave an HTTP example on LtU awhile back [1], explaining why
REST is such a good design for an Interpreter pattern to handle very
large-scale systems.  I also link it to the best solution to Wadler's
Expression Problem that I've seen yet (and, according to Wadler, the best
he's seen in Haskell [2]; the reader comments there are pretty good as
well): Data Types a la Carte.

Also, Sameer Sundresh recently completed his Ph.D. thesis, Request-Based
Mediated Execution [3], under Jose' Meseguer.  I spoke with him about how
broadly applicable I felt his ideas were, but we seemed to part views on the
best practical demonstrations for his work.

For example, Sameer is now a founder at Djangy which provides cloud hosting
for Django apps.  He thought that the ideas in his thesis we good building
blocks for automatically sandboxing system resources, such as in a
multi-tenancy cloud app.  I disagreed, since I would prefer a system built
from first principles using an ocaps system.  What I meant was that his
"good example" would become obsolete in 50 years, and so I was pushing for
examples that I thought would be timeless.  I suggested an Object-Relational
Mapper architecture built using this sort of recursive negotiation, since it
doesn't work that way today in any ORM implementation and would emphasize
the biggest feature of his thesis: Giving the power to the programmer,
rather than the language's interpreter.

But a big challenge is figuring out how to verify this sort of
call-by-intention is correct.

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3846#comment-57350
[2] http://wadler.blogspot.com/2008/02/data-types-la-carte.html
[3]
http://www-osl.cs.uiuc.edu/docs/sundresh-dissertation-2009/sundresh-dissertation-2009.pdf
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