On 27 February 2012 15:09, Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Yes, I've seen it. As Gerry says, it is an extension of Guy Steele's > thesis. When I read this, I wished for a more interesting, comprehensive > and wider-ranging and -scaling example to help think with. >
For me, the moment of enlightenment was when I realized that by using a lattice at each node, they'd abstracted out the essence of "iterate-to-fixpoint" that's *disguised within* a number of the examples I mentioned in my previous message. (Particularly the frameworks of abstract interpretation.) I'm also really keen to try to relate propagators to Joe Hellerstein's recent work on BOOM/BLOOM. That team has been able to implement the Chord DHT in fewer than 50 lines of code. The underlying fact-propagation system of their language integrates with a Datalog-based reasoner to permit terse, dense reasoning about distributed state. > One reason to put up with some of the problems of defining things using > constraints is that if you can organize things well enough, you get super > clarity and simplicity and power. > Absolutely. I think Hellerstein's Chord example shows that very well. So I wish it had been an example in Radul's thesis :-) > With regard to objects, my current prejudice is that "objects should be > able to receive messages, but should not have to send to explicit > receivers". This is a kind of multi-cast I guess (but I think of it more > like publish/subscribe). > I'm nearing the point where I can write up the results of a chunk of my current research. We have been using a pub/sub-based virtual machine for actor-like entities, and have found a few cool uses of non-point-to-point message passing that simplify implementation of complex protocols like DNS and SSH. Regards, Tony -- Tony Garnock-Jones tonygarnockjo...@gmail.com http://homepages.kcbbs.gen.nz/tonyg/
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