Hi all,
I have been a little away from Leo since the forum moved to Google
Groups (I
don't share the idea of being forced to have a google account as a
prerequisite
for being part of an open community and following the list is not as
easy by
other means as using a mail client). Anyway I think that Leo is a
self-sustaining system. I not only share the reasons of Edward about
it, but
also would like to elaborate a little more about why I think so, and
show some
balance between technical details like DOM, directives, clones and the
dialog
that this made with the fact that Leo is made in itself, which, for
me, is the
natural consequence of the Leo history.
When I was making the translation to the Spanish of the Leo docs I
started to
realize the "cognitive bootstrapping" in the process of creation of
Leo. This is
rooted with the fact that Leo was a literate programming tool, and
literate
programming is a way to think by reading, writing and deconstructing
about
programs (in fact, some people say that programming is a way to think
about how
you think about something else, for example word processing). So, if
you're
creating a program to think about programs, is natural in some place,
that the
program let you to think about the program itself, and that's what
happened when
Leo was made in itself. Of course, at the beginning this was not
possible
because there was no Leo, but after a while a little component (the
Leo
precursors) bootstrapped another component which replaced the previous
one and
let the system to be described it itself. You will see that this
bootstrapping
and replace is common in the examples given in the web page like COLA
or Squeak,
in fact Squeak follow a similar path to be made in itself before
Squeak was done
(Squeak precursors bring Squeak and then using Squeak to describe
itself and
even the Virtual Machine let the precursors behind).
Why I'm making so emphasis in the system described in itself? Because
any self
sustainable system needs to have an accessible discourse about itself,
a
knowledge declaration on how it works, how is made, an this knowledge
declaration (ontology) needs to be readable and writable within the
system. And
here Leo fits as a charm. This fitness is not a coincidence, is part
of the
literate programming inspired history of Leo, but also of the design
decisions
behind that take corpus in things like directives (@something),
outlines and
clones.
For me Squeak and Leo have been two of the most significant
technologies to
redefine my personal computer experience and the ideas behind
computing. Go on
Edward, Leo needs to be in that event and be known. May be some people
don't
catch the idea because they're thinking in VM, compilers and so on,
but if you
can make one important link with the people who understand the
principles behind
Leo, Squeak, Cola, Steps, and generate dialog between Leo and these
projects, a
lot of interesting things are going to happen. In fact in a different
but
related matter, I'm thinking in making a "ideas metamedia processor"
with
Squeak front end and a Leo back end... my problem is that I have
little idea
about programming
Cheers,
Offray
Ps. In the last version of the install Linux/Unix script the line
which says:
echo "python ${LEO_PREFIX}/lib/leo/src/leo.py \"\$1\"" >
$LEO_RUN_SCRIPT_OUTPUT
should be:
echo "python ${LEO_PREFIX}/lib/leo/leo/src/leo.py \"\$1\"" >
$LEO_RUN_...
(notice the repeated "leo")
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