I realize our recent discussions have been away from tech, but this is an
interesting blend, so its here rather than wedtech.
First of all, I decided that the bloat of current CMSs was ugly so wanted a
clean, easily programmable blog engine. Jeremy Ashkenas was of like mind
and being one of the JS heros, he decided to write a blog engine, Journo,
in <500 lines of coffeescript.
https://github.com/jashkenas/journo
Why is this interesting?
- Culturally, he has so embraced Don Knuth's Literate Programming idea,
that I bet most folks looking at the url above didn't notice that it is the
actual program for Journo. Seriously, it reads like a "readme" for a
project. Nope. It IS the project!
- Jeremy is serious about a whole new way of programming. And even in the
open source world, he's found a way to monazite his work: he does code
reading for a fee. We've made contact with him and are going to have
AgentScript reviewed by him for $2.5K.
- Most blogs/CMSs have become such bloatware that even the sophisticated
user/programmer cannot manage it or modify it. It is not "theirs".
Indeed, the configuration tasks overwhelm the actual program.
- 500 lines of code. And the assumption you can read it, understand it,
and modify it.
- BTW: the 1.0 release of agentscript is coming in at just a bit over 900
lines of code and it really does provide a NetLogo equivalent system.
- This is a, dare I say it, paradigm shift. Woo Woo! But really, Jeremy
has entered a new era where you can code anything from your mainframe to
your watch with the same infrastructure.
So when you can't really distinguish between your documentation and your
code .. maybe this is a Good Thing?
Anyway, Back to our regularly scheduled programming. Hmmm...
-- Owen
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